DS dungeons and PSP spaceships in our new, weekly homebrew roundup

This is the first of a new weekly column that aims to give you the pick of the homebrew scene on the DS and PSP. We hope to lift the lid on this sometimes confusing world and prove that pretty much anyone could (and should) dip their toe in the homebrew waters.

To focus my mind and add a little bite to proceedings I'm also abstaining from any commercial games or software on my two portable machines. These weeks will be my cold turkey, where I hope to prove there is more than enough homebrew fun to keep the average gamer gainfully employed.

So let's get to it.

On the DS this week I have been tinkering with a brand spanking new build of NetHack. This dungeon crawler will entertain you for literally hours as you work your way through its compelling character classes and plunder its depths for untold loot. The sheer number of monsters and items is quite staggering.

Unfortunately though, while playing Nethack my DS had something of a hiccup and the touchscreen seemed to lose orientation with the stylus. With my hands tied from using the commercial screen setup program, I finally stumbled across a neat freeware utility called DS Calibrate. In just a few minutes I had everything back in sync and could carry on with the monster slaying.

After all this fantasy role play action, I was in need of something more immediate and preferably more futuristic. After some hunting, I settled on playing some Kosmodrones on my PSP. Not only was I a big fan of Gravity Force back in the days of the Amiga, but now the game is compatible with my nice shiny PSP Slim & Lite. A result in anyone's book, I think you'll agree.

Overall then, not a bad week for the good ship homebrew. So far I haven't missed too many of my commercial games, although I do have a hankering for some Picross DS. Maybe by this time next week I'll have found a homebrew version of that as well.

Check back for the latest homebrew news as we get it by hitting the 'Click It' button.