Saturday, May 2, 2009

Portable X-Com In Your Pocket: More Gamepark Wiz Goodness

Back in February, I made this post about some of the games already running on the Wiz. When I was in college, I played X-Com UFO Defense (aka Enemy Unknown) a whole lot. I played several of the sequels also, but I will always remember the first very fondly. Since then, I've often desired to have a portable version of X-Com to play on the go. Rebelstar: Tactical Command for the GameBoy Advance was made by some of the old X-Com guys. It was a good turn-based strategy title, but it lacked the geoscape, research, and squad-building of its great grandfather.

I wanted to revisit this wonder of X-Com running on a handheld now that I got my hands on the GP2X Wiz. Here's a fairly poorly shot video of me starting a new game.


I recently had a question on one of my previous posts about whether or not the Gamepark Wiz could run 16-bit games like Mortal Kombat. Here's a video showing it running a Sega Genesis (aka Sega Mega Drive) emulator and playing MKIII.


If you're really curious to see what the Wiz looks like and you need some outdoor relaxation, the following video will be great for you. There's no great reason for this video to be here. I just thought it looked cool, so maybe you will too.


As you can see, the Wiz hasn't even launched yet, and things are moving along nicely. There are some impressive and interesting looking official games in the works. People are, obviously, already writing and porting homebrew games and emulators to the Wiz. Giana is returning. I'd say this Wiz is getting off to a fast start, and it's not even out of the gates, yet. Stay tuned for more articles about the Gamepark Wiz.

11 comments:

Unknown said...

Does the Wiz have WiFi or any other form of wireless communication?

Flavor said...

Kame: Not built in, but I've seen images of a wireless attachment that is supposed to be in the works. See here http://www.gadget4linux.com/wp-content/gallery/the-wiz/Wiznetwork2.png

Crosspoint said...

It looks soooo nice outside under the sun! :) But i've got one question: The red line there, which seems to hold the whole case together, is it made out of plastic or metal?

Flavor said...

I thought it was anodized aluminum, but when I look closer it's hard to tell. It could be plastic. The more I look at it, the more I think it's plastic. Weird.

Anonymous said...

What is the status of the diagonal tearing problem? Has GPH solved that yet? I can still see it there in the Picodrive video. :-(

Crosspoint said...

If you mean these light flickering, that's just a part of the metro-level from mortal kombat I think. Anyway I'm sure GPH will fix this tearing problem soon. I heard that they want to release much more firmware updates then they did for the GP2X.

Anonymous said...

No, I mean the diagonal tearing. you can see there when the Williams logo appears.

Anonymous said...

I from what I heard from gp2xstoredotcom, it's supposed to be released on the 15

Crosspoint said...

Ah okay now I see what you mean. Let's hope that GPH will fix it!

Anonymous said...

WarmFluffy (Wiz dev from gp32x forums) claimed that GPH was working on a fix that would use the 3D hardware to render landscape in portrait mode, bypassing the display control bug that causes the tearing.

Supposedly this would be very fast. But how well this works, and how well devs can employ it remains to be seen.

Tearing can be very annoying, especially in scrolling games. If GPH can address this issue then the Wiz will be near perfect. If they can't, then IMO it's a major shortcoming.

Flavor said...

The tearing issue is weird. I see it sometimes when scenes change (or big chunks of the screen change), but I don't see it when things are scrolling. Maybe that's just how our eyes pick things up. I don't know.