Want Geometry Wars on PSP? Try Trigonometry Wars for free instead

Welcome back to our weekly jaunt through the sometimes confusing world of handheld homebrew software. Every seven days we prove that pretty much anyone could (and should) dip their toe in the homebrew waters.

What's more, during this time I'm abstaining from any commercial games or software on my two portable machines. This week, it's the touchscreen shooter Geometry Wars: Galaxies DS that's making my mouth water. It must be time to break out some much needed homebrew games.

After a little scrabbling around, I discovered a great little shooter to keep me busy. Despite the name, MegaETk is a side-scrolling shoot-'em-up that takes more than a passing glance at Sidearms, the '90s arcade classic. This impressive piece of homebrew includes not only some great visuals but also a full soundtrack, level structure and tough bosses.

To hone my reaction times and improve my shoot-'em-up performance I mixed in the stripped-back shooter Pure. This is a great example of homebrew at its best: simple addictive and fun. It provides a reaction training game that is rendered in pixel-perfect 3D. Although at first it seems a little basic, after a couple of plays I found myself unable to put it down.

All well and good, but I had to admit it wasn't Geometry Wars. A little more rummaging however and I turned up a bona fide clone for my PSP. The imaginatively named Trigonometry Wars provided an as-near-as-dammit copy of Bizarre Creation's DS game. This worked fine in 3.XX firmware [place in Game150 folder] and 2.80 firmware [place in Game 100 folder], and kept me happily blasting for hours.

Until, once again, it was time to chill out and ready myself for next week with the help of the PSP Modo Mod player [look here for 3.XX firmware, or here for 1.5 firmware], which came to my relaxation rescue – it's now been nicely updated to play a variety of module tracker formats such as SPC, S3M, IT, XM and SID. More interestingly, it sports MP3 playback and displays any embedded song lyrics, too.

So by hook or by crook, another week is consigned to the money-saving bin. Not only did I get my shooting fill, but I managed it in a geometric fashion. It really is impressive what an amateur game-making community can produce when it puts its mind to it.

Come back next week to join us for more homebrew discoveries!