Flappy Bird Deleted!

flappybird_masterAround the start of the new year, a game called “Flappy Bird” became very popular to iOS and Android users. People loved it so much that they played it more and more, until it became a problem. Nguyen Ha Dong, despite making around $50,000 a day from the app, took down the app from all stores to keep from “ruining people’s lives”.

In other news, an almost exact replica of Flappy Bird called City Bird has become #2 in the iOS App Store.

Sly Cooper Gang Green Lantern Variants

Here are some pictures that I’ve made for fun. They are the Cooper gang, only as Green Lanterns. I’m going to also make a Dimitri Green Lantern, I just need to find a good quality picture. Here is a link that you can get to each of their pages. I might need to change some of the backstory, depending on how Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time ends.

Leap Motion Control

My dad found a very cool video on Mashable that he showed me. It is a preview of a product called Leap Motion. The idea is that 8 cubic feet in front of your computer will be an interactive space to use with your hands. Your hands can control your computer, just like your mouse. It’s only $70 and it is supposed to be 200 times more sensitive than Microsoft Kinect. You will be able to plug it into a USB port. It is supposed to come out in December 2012 or January 2013, so you have to pre-order. Here is a cool video:

 

How to run Gamecube and Wii games on the mac

Sonic Adventure 2: Battle
Sonic Adventure 2: Battle
Recently, I wanted to play Sonic Adventure 2: Battle on my Mac computer. Sonic Adventure 2: Battle is an old Nintendo Gamecube game that was released in 2002. If you have a Wii, you can play old Gamecube games as long as you have a Gamecube controller and memory card. I had to do some research to find out if there was a way to play the game on my Mac too.

 
I had heard of a site called Emuparadise somewhere, so that is where I looked to find the game. You can download the Sonic Adventure 2: Battle and A LOT of other games from that site. The games you can download are called ROMs and the programs you need to play them are called Emulators. Here is a link to the Emuparadise site, which has links to the ROMs and a lot of good information about emulators:

http://www.emuparadise.me

 
Once you go to Emuparadise, click on “ROMs, ISOs & Games” from the site navigation. From that page, choose the console type you want to find games for. I chose “Nintendo Gamecube ISOs”. After you choose your console, you are taken to a page where you can either pick from the top games or search for a specific game listed in alphabetical order. I clicked “S” to search for the Sonic The Hedgehog games and then I clicked on the link for the Sonic Adventure 2: Battle game. The game page gives you a description of the game and some screenshots. Scroll down on that page and click the “Direct Download Link”. This might be a little confusing because clicking that link doesn’t download the game, but it takes you to another page where you can actually find the link to the game file. The actual game file will be under the “Direct Download” section of that page. Be very patient while the ROM is downloading. Some games can actually take hours to download from that site.

 
The file you will download will be a compressed file like a .rar or .7z file. Some emulators will uncompress the game when you want to play it, but the emulator I am going to write about makes you uncompress the file first. I use The Unarchiver or UnRarX to uncompress files.

 
Once you download the file and uncompress it, you will have a .iso file. This is the file that the emulator needs to be able to play the game. All of this sounds complicated, but it really isn’t. You can delete the compressed file once you have uncompressed it and have your .iso file.

 

Dolphin
Dolphin
Now that you have the .iso file, you need to download the emulator, which is called Dolphin. As far as I can tell, this is the best Gamecube or Wii emulator for the Mac. Dolphin is also available for Windows computers too. You can download it here:

https://dolphin-emu.org/download/

 
Once you have installed Dolphin, run the program. The first time I ran it, it did not automatically find my Sonic Adventure 2: Battle .iso file. I had to click “Open” and find the .iso file. Since then though, every time I open Dolphin, my game is listed in the home screen. Here is a tip – to make your game full screen, press Command-F (Ctrl-F for PC). Otherwise your game plays in a small window. Another tip – some of the game files are very big, so you might want to only download the ones you want most. The Sonic Adventure 2: Battle file is over 1GB.

 

Sonic Wiki Logo
Sonic Wiki Logo
If you want more information about Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, you can read more on the Sonic Wiki. Here is a link to the Sonic Adventure 2 / Sonic Adventure 2: Battle page:

http://sonic.wikia.com/wiki/Sonic_Adventure_2. Spoiler alert! That page tells the story of the game if you want to play it before you read about it!