“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

It’s been a few days! It’s been Globmas on our planet which has filled up my time with various gelatinous timewastes. I gather that the situation has been similar down on Earth, with the advent of an event that I hear is called “Dark Friday.” I hope that soon you manage to unseat whatever terrible villain has been causing you so much trouble.

Because of Dark Friday filling blogs, there seems to be less good news to convey to you this time out. I only have a couple of articles to recommend.

Kyle Orland at Ars Technica tells us that Ubisoft has come crawling back to Steam, after snubbing the service for a while in favor of the Epic Game Store. Exclusivity is awful of course, although it does sometimes give us some pretty nice deals as various strategists and marketers jockey with each other in order to convince customers to join up with their places of market. In Epic’s case, these deals have sometimes been free games, although often what is given away is simply the base or least-featured version of some product. Anyway. I don’t even buy many games at the moment but I still have four game store apps on my PC: Steam, Epic, GOG and itch.io. Of them, Steam and itch are the ones that I actually like. GOG and itch’s apps are in fact optional, although convenient. I suspect that many other people and blobs have the same opinion.

Jenny List at Hack-A-Day tells us of a French hacker named Pierre Dandomont that has gotten Mac OS 9 running on an unmodified Wii! Now before you have visions of running Glider on your TV, there are a whole raft of caveats. The Wii’s hardware is unmodified, granted, but to run anything that Nintendo didn’t approve on your machine you are going to have to modify its software. Mac OS 9 is not unmodified, for while the Wii has a Power PC chip similar to that which used to run Mac computers two whole platform changes ago, the rest of its hardware is unstandard to say the least. And while they did manage to get OS 9 running (not OS X, a.k.a. macOS, or any of its more modern updates), it is not in a form that one can just easily drop into their own Wii if they want to run original iTunes for some reason. The hacker themselves tell us that it’s not really a good way to run classic Mac software, which is actually being run on an emulation layer within Linux running on the Wii. So, probably not something you’re going to do yourself, but maybe interesting to read about?

rodneylives