Plug 'N' Repair

Plug 'N' Repair is an unique game solely played by plugging and unplugging a single controller into the four ports of a Nintendo 64.

With the advance of technology, modern laptops are now able to repair themselves... as long as they have power! And that is why they still need us: you'll have to plug them so they don't run out of battery. But the issue is that you have only 1 power plug, for a total of 4 laptops that need to be recharged at the same time.

How long can you share the power plug among all the laptops before one of them runs out of battery?

How to play

This game is experimental and uses an unique controlling scheme. To play you WILL NOT PRESS any button, but only PLUG and UNPLUG a single controller into the four N64 ports. Simply plug the controller into PORT 1 to charge laptop 1, PORT2 for laptop 2, PORT3 for laptop 3 and PORT4 for laptop 4. Don't let any of the four laptops run out of battery while they are self-repairing, or you'll lose the game!

You'll earn points each time a laptop completes a self-repair job. The more complex (and battery draining) the repair is, the more points you'll score. Can you beat the highscore?

Do I really need an Nintendo 64 to play?

Well, honestly, the "fun" part of this game lies in plugging and unplugging a controller as fast as possible and without errors on an actual console. The challenge comes from the fact that N64 controllers are not that easy to plug in and plug out, so you'll have to be fast and be careful. And sometimes you'll also plug the controller into the wrong port, because it's hard to look at the screen and at the front of the console at the same time!

However, if you really want to, you can also play the game on a N64 emulator. But you must pick an emulator supporting to plug and unplug controllers and that is accurate enough to run homebrew games. For example, you can play the game on the Ares emulator, and use the dedicated menu to plug and unplug a controller into the N64 ports.

Looking for challenge?

My current record is 116 points, Can you beat it?

About this project

This experimental Nintendo 64 game was made for the N64Brew Jam #6, under the theme "REPAIR". 

I toyed with several different ideas, but the ones I liked the most were revolving around using the 4 controller ports in a unique way. Unlike many other retro consoles, the Nintendo 64 is actually able to detect if controllers are connected or not for each port. So I decided to make a game where you are performing the simplest "repair job" there is: plugging an electric device. I mean, sometimes, a computer is "not working" simply because someone forgot to plug it in, right?

So here you are, tasked to plug self-repairing laptop computers so they don't run out of battery. I personally think that plugging a N64 controller feels quite similar to plugging a power plug. I hope you'll feel the same!

My main source of inspiration was Windows and its infamous "installing updates" screen. As installing system updates takes quite a long time, the system usually tells you to "Plug your computer and don't power it off" before the updates are finished. In real like, you won't risk letting your computer shut down during this process to avoid bricking it. But if you ever wanted to "disobey" and "shut down the computer anyway", now you can! :).

An open source game

The retro games homebrew communities are wonderful places where people create new games for old consoles for the fun of it, and love to share their work and knowledge with others. So whenever I can, I try to contribute too by documenting and sharing the source code of my games, hoping it may help others to make their own games.

In addition to the ROM, you'll find a zip file containing the fully commented source code of the game. As detailed in the README inside the zip file, the source code is released under the MIT license, and the assets (graphics and audio, with the exception of the assets listed below that were not created by me) under a Creative Commons CC-BY license. The game was programmed 100% in C using the wonderful Libdragon toolchain. Please don't hesitate to ask me if you have any questions about the source code or how the game works.

Last but not least, I'd like to address a huge thank you to Meeq, one of the lead Libdragon developers, for telling me that the joypad detection rate on the console can be increased, and explaining how to modify the Libragon library to do so. Thanks to him, the game will now instantly detect when a pad is plugged or unplugged, while by default this detection only happens one time per second.

Assets credits

Here is the list of assets used in the game that were created or derived from the work of other people:

- Music: Eric Matyas - "Ballons Forever"
https://soundimage.org/positive-upbeat/

Font: Zkhai Creative - "Lazy Repairedhos"
https://www.dafont.com/lazy-repairedhos.font

Laptop graphic based on a illustration by Catalyststuff on Freepik
https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/cute-cat-with-laptop-cartoon-vector-icon-ill...

Sound Effects sources (then edited / modified / remixed for this game - consider the modified versions I made to be released under the same license as their source):

Kagateni - "advertising futuristic.wav" (CC0)
https://freesound.org/people/Kagateni/sounds/571482/

Oganesson - "Powerup/Powerdown" (CC0)
https://freesound.org/people/oganesson/sounds/555018/

Grunz - "success.wav" (CC-BY)
https://freesound.org/people/grunz/sounds/109662/