And that doesn’t stop here…not only can you pay the price you want, you also get to choose how to split your money between the developers of the games and charity (the eff or Child’s play).

The games in this Android Bundle are Anomaly, Osmos, Edge, and World of Goo (World of Goo only available if you pay more than the average).

So hurry up and get yours!

Note: Osmos was marked as incompatible with my phone (Desire HD) but seems to work fine so far.

Thanks to the work of Xaw Otihs, this new version of Wagic is now also available for the Nokia Platforms Maemo and Meego (respectively, the N900 and the N9/N950). That release of course gets all the bug fixes and improvements that we described in the 0.17.1 release.

Download

You can download Wagic 0.17 for all supported platforms on the download page here

Often compared to commercial games for its replay value and quality, Wagic is a heroic fantasy card game, in which you fight as a wizard against the computer. As you win battles, you unlock new game modes and earn credits that allow you to improve your army. Wagic is community driven and entirely customizable: you can create themes, mods, new rules, or even new games (check for example Knights VS Dagons on our forums, a game strongly inspired by strategy games such as warcraft). Wagic is available in several languages (English, French, German, spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Serbian), and open source. It currently runs on the Sony PSP, Windows, Linux, maemo, meego, Android, and iOS (iPhone, iPad).

Note: The Linux binary on our download page is still 0.16.0 and we are doing our best to provide a binary asap, but in the meantime you can always compile a binary directly from the sources if you can’t wait (sorry).

Virtuous Flame was therefore able to confirm that his patches to the CMA (openCMA) allow him to keep using the CMA without having to upgrade. He noted that your console’s wifi must also be turned off, otherwise the console will ask you t update as well. If your console asks you to update to 1.52 and you don’t want to, turn its wifi off (plane mode), then reboot the console. also install openCMA on your PC. This won’t give you access to the PSN, but at least you can use the CMA.

I haven’t verified that myself yet. I also don’t know if 1.52 patches Teck4′s exploit and/or my work on HBL.

What is Wagic?

Often compared to commercial games for its replay value and quality, Wagic is a heroic fantasy card game, in which you fight as a wizard against the computer. As you win battles, you unlock new game modes and earn credits that allow you to improve your army. Wagic is community driven and entirely customizable: you can create themes, mods, new rules, or even new games (check for example Knights VS Dagons on our forums, a game strongly inspired by strategy games such as warcraft). Wagic is available in several languages (English, French, German, spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Serbian), and open source. It currently runs on the Sony PSP, Windows, Linux, maemo, meego, Android, and iOS (iPhone, iPad).

Changelog

This version of Wagic comes with more than 500 new unique cards, including some from the long awaited set Innistrad, but the main reason this release took time is that we today bring a version of Wagic available for iPhone, iPad, Android and Meego (Nokia N9) on top of the already supported platforms (Windows, Linux, Maemo, and the PSP). This required major improvements to our game, and this is the main reason this release took so long. Other platforms are however getting there share of bug fixes and improvements, see details below.

Detailed changelog:

• iOS (iPhone/iPad) version now available! (see details below)
• Android version now available! (see details below)
• Meego (Nokia N9) version now available!
• More than 500 new unique cards. Wagic now supports 15400 cards (8700 unique), including cards from Innistrad.
• New abilities for card coders. We will update the card Wiki asap with details
• A new progress bar in the main menu shows you how far you are from completing the game (unlocking all sets, mods, opponents, etc…)
• You can now easily create unlockable mods. If you’re interested, check the rules folder, in particular the file awards.dat
• A new file system supporting zip files. For users, this change will mostly be transparent, but it should make installing the game easier, as well as installing/uninstalling mods. This should also make it easier for most people to install images. See this thread in the forum for details, especially if you want to create campaigns or mods for the game.
• Many bug fixes

Special notes about the iOS and Android versions

Wagic has been around on the PSP for years. It gave us lots of time to improve it. Hopefully, these 4 years of development will be visible when you try Wagic on your touch device. Nevertheless, this is a whole new interface to handle for us, and we know it is far from perfect. But we are doing this release because many people have been waiting for it. Wagic on iOS or Android is not perfect, but we hope you’ll enjoy it anyway. We hope that this release will motivate some additional devs to come and join the fun of working on this project. We are a bunch of hobbyists creating Wagic on our free time, come and join us! The source can be downloaded here. If you have the skills to compile the game and fix a bug or improve something, send me a patch and we’ll give you write access to the SVN!

The iOS version requires a jailbroken device. The android version requires you to install the apk by yourself, using for example Astro. We are aware that solutions such as cydia or the android market exist, but we are waiting for an improved version of Wagic before we go mainstream.

More Info

Remember that in addition to the news in this blog, you can find more Wagic news on twitter and facebook thanks to Leungclj

Download

If you enjoy Wagic, please consider a donation. Thanks in advance!

download here

The link above takes you to the download page where you can choose the correct archive depending on your platform
As usual, enjoy this new release of Wagic!

This update (revision 3) patches the PC side of the content manager further, preventing it from auto updating. Without this patch, Sony’s driver is silently updating itself whenever it’s connected to the internet even if you were using open CMA so far, which makes this r3 an important update.

Download here

Wagic’s support for touch screens is still experimental, and the UI is not perfect yet, but hey, once again, let me use the opportunity that we would love to get more devs, so if you’re interested, please join the fun

Own an iPad or an iPhone? You can download Wagic 0.17 beta here. Also, since I don’t own any iOS device myself, I would love to see videos of the game in action on youtube, so please post videos .

Oh, almost forgot to mention, this (of course) requires a jailbroken device.

Famous PSP Dev Virtuous Flame released today a tool called OpenCMA, which is basically a patch to the Content Manager Assistant (on the PC side) that will prevent it to connect to the internet.

I tested it myself, and it works fine, although Virtuous Flame told me it might still be unstable. It is not yet guaranteed that this tool will be enough to prevent the console from upgrading its firmware without your consent, but hopefully this should help.

Not the greatest example since I don't have any application, but trust me, it works. The normal CMA would stop me before that screen, asking me "please connect your PC to the internet"

As a reminder, if you want to keep using the CMA normally, a firmware upgrade is compulsory every time Sony says so. Since every firmware upgrade comes with a new license and a new Terms and Conditions contract, it means that Sony can progressively change the contract you agreed with when you initially bought your vita, and entirely lock you out of some core features (such as backing up the games you bought and your save data to your PC) if you refuse the new contract. The OtherOS lawsuit in the US has also shown that Sony can remove any feature they want from the system you bought, and not be afraid of any legal consequences. This patch is also useful for these kind of unfair situations.

Download

download and installation explanations here

Source Virtuous Flame, thanks J.F. for the tip!

Wagic is an heroic-fantasy card game, supporting more than 15’000 cards (more than 8’600 unique cards). The beta is currently available for the PSP, Windows, and Android. Yup, Android joins the Wagic fun. If you were one of the early testers of the Android version, you’ll probably enjoy some of the improvements of this version, although I’d like to mention that the android version is still work in progress, and not yet at the level of quality one could expect (in particular, we haven’t worked a lot on the shop and the deck editor yet).

Besides the Android compatibility (which is a major achievement!), this version brings tons of new cards (including the long awaited Innistrad), a new support for zip files (something that, as a user, you might not see, but will make updates, mods, and a pile of stuff much easier to handle), an experimental “undo” feature (ok, please don’t hurt me too much, but I think that feature doesn’t work on the PSP yet…feel free to report it as a bug), and a new “progress bar” on the main screen that will show you how much you still have to play in order to beat the game (as in “unlocking everything”).

I expect the beta to last no more than a week before a full release, unless major issues are found.

Want to test this beta? Go to the announcement thread here

Today as I was using the PS Vita “content manager” in order to copy some files to the PS Vita, the content manager refused to start until I updated my firmware to official update 1.510. (This literally happened 10 minutes ago)

What surprises me is that the vita was disconnected, so I am assuming the update order came from the client on my PC (Update: confirmed. And the Vita refuses to run the content manager if the PC is not connected to the net).

A friendly advice to anybody who tries to “investigate” the Vita like I do: install the content manager on a PC that has no network connection (Update: I think “bastards” is the first word that came to my mouth when I saw that the vita refuses to connect to the PC if the Pc is not connected to the internet. This is really really concerning, and I hope a few people will have a look at the code of the PC “content manager” client. I’d be extremely happy to know why Sony is spying on me through the content manager when I’m copying my porn movies to the vita…), and disconnect the Vita as well. It seems Sony has a possibility to prevent anyone from playing with the Content Manager too much. This also confirms that the PSP Exploit we’re working on is more or less moot, since as soon as it is made public, Sony will prevent people from copying the files to their Vita with an obligatory firmware update.

This is really twisted, and I could swear a compulsory update in order to use such a core feature of the console might be illegal in some countries…we’re far from the “you have a choice to stop using linux” here, it’s more of a “you have a choice to stop copying mp3 and movies from and to the console”.

I have no clue what this update is for, but I’ll have a look. I assume it patches some of the weird bugs that people reported, including (but not limited to) the weird “demo mode” glitch, and other “freeze in the xmb” type of errors…

This list, like all “best XXX of the year”, is biased. I’m only focusing on Genesis entries (but you’ll have to admit, 95% of the new homebrews submitted this year were submitted as part of this contest), and it’s my personal ranking. Your opinion might differ on the specifics, but I think overall this list of 25 homebrews is a list of great quality. The list is also not entirely the list I had initially during the vote. Some of my “favorites” were “work in progress” releases, and I was expecting those to become the next big thing, but due to lack of pursued development, these projects are much less interesting than they could have been. So I removed a few entries, to reach the much satisfying number of 25.

Action, puzzles, plugins, utils… You won’t like all of them, but there will definitely be some homebrews that you love in this list.

25. Cale

A Nice looking labyrinth game by D-T-K, with a deck editor and unlockable trophies. You play as a ball of light in a dark maze, you have to find the exit as fast as possible. Download here

24. Easy 6.20 DualBoot

Can’t decide between TN Hen and Pro CFW? Install several permanent CFW on your PSP and switch between them at startup! Download here

23. Xplora

Yet another shell? But a good one, Xplora looks simply gorgeous and is entirely written in C. It contains an mp3/ogg player, an archive manager that allows you to extract zip and 7z archives directly from your PSP, a plugin manager, a video player, a text editor. You name it, Xplora has it. Download here

22. NewSlide

PSP Go owners don’t get enough love, but Newslide is here! Customize the PSPGo clock as much as you want. A great and original concept, even if the speed could be improved. Download here

21. P0rtal 2D

Unless you’ve lived under a rock for the past 5 years, you know the concept of this puzzle game. open paths in the walls with your blue and orange beams. Nice game with editor included, great replay value thanks to the editor. Download here

20. Desert Stunts

Good original homebrews in 3D are rare. So, when on top of that, they include several missions and a trophy system, there’s no reason to not try them. Download here

19. Amoebax

When I was a kid, I was a big fan of a game called Dr. Robotnik’s mean bean machine… If you’ve played that game or Puzzle Bobble, you’ll immediately understand the concept. This is a port of a cute open source game. Download here

18. aLoader

The Iso loader for TN Hen, that allows to run homebrews directly from the XMB. This was a very essential component of the scene for a few months, and, surprinsingly enough, lots of us are still running TN Hen, so aLoader is still a very useful plugin. Download here

17. B-Gen

Clever use of some Creative Commons music by NiN here. This musical game of a new genre will remotely remind you of rhythm games like Patapon… but with a completely different atmosphere. Download Here

16. Minesweeper

Just like Tetris, Minesweeper is one of those games that you have to have on your PSP at one point or another. This version is one of the best I got to play so far. The customizable grid size allows players of all levels to have fun. Download here

The rest is coming soon

Ok, that’s it for now, it’s getting late, my personal 15 favorites homebrews for this year will come in next entry. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to play, and rate your favorite homebrews in our homebrew database

More…

Part 1/3: Entries 25 to 16

Part 2/3: Entries 15 to 6

Part3/3: Entries 5 to 1