Surfing for new thrills for my Nintendo DS the other day I was happy to find that one of my favorite homebrew devs Collecting Smiles, Jens Andersson of Colors! fame, has a new release just out!
The wickedly named HYENA is created to usher onto the DS the genre of Interactive Fiction, but with a twist. Using the unique qualities of the hardware he has created a system for the playing of “Audio Games” which can be played only with sound (a reading of the text via voice synthesis) and one button for interaction. Though if you keep the screen up you can also read the text and view graphics.
In addition he’s put up documentation for the scripting language so that anyone can make their own Audio Games. A pretty wonderful idea! This already has me thinking of ways the system could be used to create some interesting, and simple, audio/visual games. And I hope many people do come up with games for this.
The first game released for HYENA is Lone Wolf – Flight From The Dark… I’m in!
Finally…audio games on the DS.I wonder if the dev knows that he’s just made one blind person very happy.