Retro games are hot. Super Mario Bros, Tetris, Donkey Kong... they all remain popular and continue to be sold to new gamers. This DSiWare app, though, goes way, way back, before anyone ever even thought a crime-fighting plumber could become a multimillion-dollar franchise.
The app, called Petit Computer, has a few games pre-installed: a Pac-Man clone, a text-based RPG, and a shooting game, all created in BASIC.
Of course, the real treat here is the ability to create and run your own games. In this mode, the bottom screen functions as a touchscreen keyboard while the top screen displays the command prompts.
BASIC, an acronym that was probably reverse-engineered to stand for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, is credited as being the first widely accessible computer programming language, and was first introduced in 1964. The root of the language still lives on today in sophisticated Visual Basic development code.
So it's not LittleBigPlanet, but it's a neat little app for the die-hard computer junkies out there. There's no word yet on whether or not it will make its way to the US DSiWare platform.
[Source: Smileboom.com (Japanese) via Crunch Gear]
Feb 24, 2011
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