Brew Reality
Brew Reality is a playable homebrew demo by SpookyIluha released on 25 November 2023. In it, you play as an airplane flying around in 3D space above some countryside terrain.
You can download the ROM from the download page by using the password mig29
or from the mirror and view the source code on Github.
About Brew Reality
This is one of those homebrew projects that is kind of hard to tell whether it should be considered a demo or a game. It does have gameplay in the sense that you can control a jet plane through the landscape, but it lacks any real sense of objectives or fail states so it can’t really be called a game. Plus the creator does call it a “tech demo” so I guess I’ll stick with that.
A bit of a Nintendo 64 tech demo made with Libdragon unstable, features 128×128* color textures with trilinear mipmap interpolation, fully fitting TMEM with a new IHQ texture format, and a fully dynamic sky and lighting. This demo was inspired by tech demos showed by SGI to showcase their powerful hardware. The N64 has these capabilities as well, being developed by SGI.
Graphics in this demo are fully done with the principles of a Reality Engine, meaning the display output you see:
- must not contain noise (antialiasing of polygons with N64’s hardware AA, antialiasing of textures using trilinear mipmap interpolation),
- must have no visible pixels (bilinear filtering on textures and display, high-resolution output),
- and must have no banding artifacts (HighColor framebuffer is dithered and then dedithered into a TrueColor output).
The demo itself isn’t particularly complex from a gameplay perspective. The plane is constantly moving forward and you have control over the direction its moving. The angle of rotation for the plane and the camera move independently from each other (this isn’t Starfox or Rogue Squadron) which makes it kind of difficult to get the right angle you’re looking for.
The terrain is quite simple, it is split into a grassy area and a sea divided by a beach. It is possible to fly beyond the reaches of the map, but it will cause the background to glitch out and make it hard to find your way back.
Review and conclusion
Brew Reality is reminiscent of the Top Gun demo from the N64 SDK, except that this demo is actually playable.
The controls are unintuitive since you have to control both the airplane’s direction and the camera separately so it’s very easy to miss your mark and make an awkward movement. There is also a small issue with the near end of the frustum as it clips the nose/flames when they are facing the camera.
That said, the graphics are very impressive. The demo is made with Libdragon’s OpenGL and does everything it can to make use of the tools that it has to offer, particularly in making sure that the edges of objects appear as clear as possible.
Do give Brew Reality a play through for a few minutes. It really does look like the kind of game that would appear on retail shelves, it just needs some enemies to shoot down.