A few days after the highly successful native PlayStation Vita hack HENkaku was released for the 3.60 firmware, Rinnegatamante released Vita Quake 1.3, bringing HENkaku support. For those who don’t know, Quake was a highly popular first-person shooter released in 1996 for the PC. Since then, it has seen a large number of ports to other platforms, like the PlayStation Portable, the Nintendo DS, the 3DS, and, of course, the Vita.

Ever since the HENkaku version of the port was released, it has received several updates, and now, a particularly important feature is here, along with other changes (like rumble support for the PlayStation TV).

The video above is from the original v1.3 release, and the latest build brings many improvements. Anyway, about the new features….

Aaand, you probably guessed it from the title. This update to Vita Quake brings multiplayer support, both local and online. More than that, Vita Quake is able to connect to any native Quake or ProQuake server, of which there are multiple ones online.

VitaQuake

Cross-play between platforms also works, because of this. Remember the platforms I stated back in the first paragraph? CtrQuake (the 3DS port), for example, can play with WinQuake (for, duh, Windows) and Vita Quake. Those are the three platforms I’ve tried using to connect to a server. Multiplayer works fine, and, because Rinnegatamante figured it’d be nice, he’s hosting an official server for Vita Quake. Even better, you won’t need to type the IP of the server to connect to it, as the Italian developer added an option to connect to the official server.

About the other features – well, they’re also important, I suppose. We have performance improvements (which should be very noticeable, especially if you plan on playing online. Apparently, these improvements allow you to play online multiplayer at 60FPS with the PSP resolution), rumble support, and mod support. Of course, rumble will only work for the PS TV, and only if you have a compatible controller (duh, obviously Sixaxis users can’t have rumble, but I’m pretty sure most PSTV users have either a DualShock 3 or 4). At the moment, rumble is used when you get hit by an enemy.

About mod support, you can now expect to be playing Quake 1 mods on your PS Vita or PS TV. Mods are listed in a file (mods.txt), and an external application (Vita Quake Mod Selector) allows you to choose which game to launch.

Download VitaQuake 2.0

You can download VitaQuake 2.0 from the developer’s site here.

This is impressive. The Vita homebrew scene, although quite… late, is definitely growing quickly, with high-quality homebrew already out, due to developers, but also because of the friendly community which encourages developers to continue working hard, instead of looking down on developers and demanding features as if the developers owed them something as other scenes often do.

Well done, Vita homebrew developers. Well done, all of you. This is certainly how you revive a console.

~ gnmmarechal/gnmpolicemata (http://gs2012.xyz)

Source: Rinnegatamante on /talk