Okay, so you say you don't like numbers except for money and phone numbers, eh? Well then, maybe this application from MrMr[iCE] can change your mind. Yep, that's right. He has just released his VFPU Math lib brew over at our forums.

This app is basically a general purpose math lib for the PSP, which, as can be deduced from the name of the application itself, uses almost nothing but pure vfpu instructions. What can this do for you? High speed math lib, a few extra functions that perform quaternion math, a few matrix and vector functions, that's what. (Un)fortunately for this writer, I didn't get a single thing out of that enumeration. But here's hoping that you guys do.

By the way, he'd like to give the caveat that this is not a complete lib, so you can definitely expect more functions. As for the installation and declaring functions that require a quaternion or matrix for in/outputs, just head on over to our forum for more details. You definitely would need the stuff there.

Download: [VFPU Math lib]
Discuss: [Forum Release Thread]

MrMr[iCE] has released the newest version of his cool homebrew game. SnakeSP v7.1 mostly is a tweak and bug fix release. Before we give you the full changelog for this version, though, he's mentioned that he'd try making a theme system for the game. Well, according to him, it is already in progress and it'll most probably be in-game.

So, once it's in place, you can tweak the snake and food shapes, colors, and whatever else you feel like tweaking that's game-related. But you'll have to be patient, cos this will be taking a while. Also, MrMr[iCE] has downgraded back to 1.5 (whopee!). He says he just didn't like the sluggishness of the vsh in 3.02. So, for those with 3.xx firmwares, you would want to test it thoroughly.

Alright, with that said, here's the changelog:

• Added proper suspend/resume code. app should behave nicely now for those who said it crashed on resume from standby mode. Please test this.
• Food spawns much faster now, almost immediately after consuming the last item.
• Tweaked the appearance rate of food items, red slowdowns should show up more now.
• Snake grows/shrinks very quickly now. Be careful where the tail is when you eat a yellow/blue item
• Added a counter to the scoreboard that shows how many segments have been accumulated over time..this is part of the scoring system.
• Enhanced the water effect, decreased the dampening some to make the waves more pronounced. The ring effects you saw before are now replaced by drops in the water field
• Replaced the default music loop with something not so fast. This is a bigger file tho, so there will be a pause at game startup
• The music loop MUST be less that 16777215 bytes. This is a limit in the playback system, the current one is just a little over 14 mb.

Thanks to thyvillageidiot for the heads up!

Download: [SnakeSP v7.1]
Discuss: [Forum Release Thread]

Man! MrMr[iCE] sure works fast! After releasing SnakeSP v6 just yesterday, he's back once again with another bumped up version for his really cool and very popular homebrew game, SnakeSP.

There have been nothing but raves for this game, although, as the saying goes, you can't please everyone. So there are still some who claim that the game is too easy and that it needs a bit more challenge. But I think we can all agree here that the raves outweigh the rants, right? And you gotta admit, SnakeSP is one of the best-looking homebrew games we've seen lately.

If this is your first time to have heard of SnakeSP (although we really doubt that given the game's popularity in the homebrew community), you can check out the video below to get a feel of the game.

Changelog:

• added music loop
• added cool water effect in the background grid
• updated menu graphics
  

MrMr[iCE] says that he's still working on revamping the interface so we can expect more updates to his future releases. So while we wait for that, why don't you update the version you have in your PSPs right now with this one? All you have to do is...

Download: [SnakeSP v7]
Discuss: [Forum Release Thread]

MrMr[iCE] bumped up SnakeSP to v6 today. While v5 was all about the sound effects, v6 throws in a music loop and added water-ripple visual effects. In case you're curious, the looping OST is a wav file in the "music" folder in the game's main folder. MrMr[iCE] hasn't said anything yet about custom soundtracks, though, for anyone out there who's asking.

Now if you're curious about the graphic effects used in this game, MrMr[iCE] says they're all vector-art. Nothing is pre-rendered or pixeled here. The Wiki definition, abridged, is that the graphics are all done by math equations rather than by "dot-matrix" pixel. MrMr[iCE] says,

... Everything is drawn using lines and filled polygons. This lets me draw the objects at any scale. position and orientation, without worrying about pixel artifacts, like rotated bitmaps. And everything in the game is rendered with hardware. All I do is tell the psp when and where to draw, it does the rest.

Let's just say it looks good. fl0wish. Every Extendish. Trigo-warrish. Ah, you get the picture. Hungry for some snake?

Download: [SnakeSP v6]
Discuss: [Forum Release Thread]

So, is this like a daily thing now or what? We're starting believe that SnakeSP is sort of like everyone's vitamins and supplements here. It's something to complete your day. So, to complete your day today, we've got another update from MrMr[iCE] himself: SnakeSP v5.

One of the bigger things he's been able to include in this version is a sound manager that loads .wav files from the memory stick that the game uses. These sounds will play when certain events are triggered, and all of them can be customized or changed. Here are the various sound files (where "#" is either 1, 2, 3, or 4):

• eat#.wav - sounds played when the snake consumes an item on the board
• die#.wav - sounds played when the snake collides with itself
• fx1.wav - played when a yellow, blue, or violet item appears
• fx2.wav - played when a new segment is added onto the snake
• fx3.wav - played when the score multiplier is increased
• fx4.wav - played when a red item appears

If you want to change these wav files, just make sure that you use the same (case-sensitive) names as those above. Missing sound files won't work in the game, and just note that the game only supports 8- or 16-bit mono and 16-bit stereo wav files.

Download: [SnakeSP v5]
Discuss: [Forum Release Thread]

A new day, a new update. And as sure as the sun would rise, today we've got yet another release from "that one guy who did a fl0w homebrew": MrMr[iCE]. In a span of - what? - three days, his homebrew has gotten very good feedback and a couple of daily updates to boot. No surprise there. Across the bar, a lot of you have agreed that this has been the best looking and best playing homebrew recently.

For those wondering, SnakeSP v4 runs on 1.5 FW, 2.8 with eloader 0995, and 2.71 SE-C. So what else is new?

• 1up system is in place - You start with 3 lives, and will get additional lives if you get up to the next life score posted next to the life indicators. First 1 up is at 1 million, after that it will depend on how well you are doing. The higher the score multiplier, the higher the next life score will be
• added some sounds when snake eats or hits itself

The more praise from the homebrew community, the more support from the homebrew developer. Keep those constructive criticisms going guys. At the rate that MrMr[iCE] is updating his game, you're sure to be heard and have your suggestions integrated into future versions.

Download: [SnakeSP v4]
Discuss: [Forum Release Thread]

---

UPDATE: Our bad, we followed the download link on MrMr[iCE]'s first post on the SnakeSP thread not knowing that this link was not updated. He dropped us a word though so that you guys can have your fill on the real v4 of this great 'brew. File has been updated guys, the download link's up there, you know the drill. And oh, enjoy!

No, that's not me mocking MrMr[iCE]'s release, that's what he actually calls this quick update to his homebrew game SnakeSP. If you haven't heard of this flOw-ish Snake game yet, you might wanna check out this video -- it'll put you up to speed in no time.

Now, for those who have been following the game since its original release, I think we can all say that this is one of the best looking homebrew games we've seen lately. And based on the jumps and comments you've given, I'd say this really encouraged MrMr[iCE] to continue improving SnakeSP.

SnakeSP YAR may not have major changes in it, but it does include some of the stuff you suggested to MrMr[iCE] to improve the game further.

So with that, let's move on to the stuff that's changed for this release:

• You can use the headphone remote to steer the snake, as well as the analog (dont use both though as the headphone remote is rigged to act like the analog stick).
• Modified Controls: Rewind steers left, Forward steers right. Play/Pause will *exit* the game, so be careful pressing down on the remote (I did that intentionally for debugging)
• You all asked for it and you got it: the snake will wrap around the screen edges now. If it leaves left edge, it reappears on right side..rinse and repeat for the other edges. Kudos to Shine in #pspdev for code to do this.
• New pickup item: The Booster. It'll show up as a blue item with 1-8 circles on it. This will add +1 to +8 on the score multiplier, but will also increase the speed of the snake per each +.
  

Not to worry, MrMr[iCE] assures us that the game menu that you're all asking for will be available in his next release. Some of you might have been able to catch this update already (MrMr[iCE] told us via a comment in a previous SnakeSP post), but for those who haven't, why don't you bump up the SnakeSP you already have installed in your PSP's with this one, eh?

Download: [SnakeSP-YAR]
Discuss: [Forum Release Thread]

Wow, based on the jumps and comments it seems you guys really liked MrMr[iCE]'s SnakeSP, huh? Well, a lot of you must have pitched in really good ideas and constructive criticisms because MrMr[iCE] is back with the second release for his Snake game.

A lot of the comments in the earlier post also said that the "snake" looks a lot like the wormy creature in flOw, and we must say, SnakeSP does look a lot like it, don't ya think? (See fl0w image on the right) So anyhoo, regardless of whether SnakeSP should be referred to as a flOw port (as some of you pointed out in your comments), bottomline is, SnakeSP dons amazing graphics that are rarely seen in homebrew games.

Changelog:

• Sounds added for when snake eats, and when it bumps into itself
• 3 lives, with life indicator. If you bump into yourself, you lose your tail, and a life.
• On last life the game will exit
• start button will pause the game
  

MrMr[iCE] says that he's still working on providing a proper menu interface for the game, which we could expect to be integrated into the game with his next release. Here are a few more notes from MrMr[iCE]:

Some of you may recognize the sounds from chaos UT proxy mines. Im using them for now to test the audio, I'll replace with something else later, but for now enjoy the hilarity of their cute little chipmunk voices. I can switch to kernel mode and use the psp's built in gzip decompression, but thats a kmode only function, unless someone here knows how to call sceKernelGzipDecompress from a user space app..

Also, MrMr[iCE] says that he's noticed that there are times when a food item appears, the rendering stops and the screen goes blank. So if ever you guys encounter this, inform him about it via our forums (just click on the link below) because he's not sure if he was already able to fix that properly.

Download: [SnakeSP Release 2]
Discuss: [Forum Release Thread]

You know that reaaally addictive classic game Snake where you basically just have to eat the food items and avoid hitting the walls? Yeah, we know we've already featured tons of homebrew games that builds on that concept (there's Gambiting's PSPSnake and also Shine's PSPSnake, which Youresam ported to FW2.8), but before you knock this one down, you might wanna check out the stunning visual work that MrMr[iCE] did with his SnakeSP.

But before we get into that, you guys should probably know that SnakeSP only works on FW1.5, and hasn't been tested on other versions so MrMr[iCE] is asking if any of you guys would like to help him out or port the game to other FW's. As for the controls, you use the analog stick to steer the snake towards the food bits. Now, the game has two kinds of food: the normal yellow one that'll add one to eight segments to your snake, and the slowdown (red) one that'll (as the name states) slow down the snake.

The snake gets longer and faster as you make it eat more food, and for now, you can indulge in the benefits of immortality 'cuz there's no way to die in the game. What you can do though is to ram the snake's head into its own body, thereby cutting off the part you hit and making your tail length shorter. Here's a vid of the game (maudib2222 on YouTube), so you can check out the SnakeSP's bumped up graphics.

Download: [SnakeSP]

Discuss: [Forum Release Thread]