DS falls in love while PSP goes back to (old-)skool

Here I am again, doing my utmost to hold off the evil clutches of all manner of commercial games. All in the hope of shining a little spotlight on the homebrew community, I continue my one-man campaign to live by homebrew games alone.

After the productive time I had last time with Flickbook DS, I was hankering something more game centric this week. This got me digging through my homebrew folders until I turned up an excellent little French game called Everlasting Love (cute name, eh?). It's a game that defies definite categorisation. On first appearances it is clearly a platformer, but when you play it you soon realise it's more of a rhythm-action game. The game exists somewhere between these two genres and provides a compelling experience.

What do you do in it? Well, you need to get a little monkey chap through the level avoid pitfalls and spikes. But the trick is that the height of his jump is determined by the soundtrack. Press jump on the beat and you leap high, press it off beat and you leap low. This strange control mechanic soon has you bobbing along with the music as you endeavour to get through to the end. I think you'll agree it is truly inspired.

Staying in the gaming vein this week across both handhelds I pulled out Nikwi Deluxe on the PSP. This oddly named game is in fact developer Deniska's port of a classic 2D platform-style game originally released on the PC.

The recent release I picked up now features a password selection screen, new music and quicker loading. Once I had set it up by copying the nikwi_deluxe_psp folder to ms:/PSP/GAME (or ms:/PSP/GAME3XX for 3.XX firmwares) I was good to go. And it is another surprisingly high quality piece of homebrew. Needless to say a few hours were spent here reminiscing 2D days of old.

So there you have it, another week of 'homebrewing' draws to a close. I hope you get to enjoy our wares this week and come back in seven days' time for another round of homebrew tips, gossip and games.