Friday Freebie: DS and PSP get Square Enix leftovers...

Happy New Year, freebie hunters. It’s officially the coldest, poorest, darkest and by all accounts most unpleasant month of the year and if you aren’t completely skint by now, you obviously didn’t try hard enough over the last few weeks.

Sadly, all we have to offer are leftovers today, and we're not talking about week old turkey and stuffing. The logistics of delivering food through an ethernet cable are hellishly complicated, not to mention messy.

With the season’s Christmas games come the obligatory accompanying promotional sites and on the promotional sites come scrawny giveaways, i.e. themes and wallpapers. See what we mean by leftovers now?

The first cold platter comes from Square Enix which recently launched both Final Fantasy: Dissidia on the PSP (in Japan) and Chrono Trigger on the DS. The site for Final Fantasy: Dissidia currently houses no fewer than five custom PSP themes which are available to download for free.

Most of the website is in English so navigating through the various menus shouldn’t be too much of a strain. Deciding on which razor-cheekboned-sword-wielding-elf-man to emblazon your PSP screen with, however…

As for the Chrono Trigger website, wallpapers are the order of the day with eight different line-ups of your favourite Chrono characters available to download freely. Not quite as good as the PSP offering, but for the DS, Rockstar is supplying heavily armed back-up with a couple of new GTA: Chinatown Wars wallpapers ready to download.

It’s chiefly a DS freebie, seeing as the game is coming out on the DS, but interestingly, the wallpapers are available in PSP, BlackBerry and iPhone flavours besides the usual compliment of PC resolutions. In other words, the handheld angle is well and truly covered.

Moving on to mobiles and we have to give a shout-out to Android. The Android Marketplace has been up and running for a good few weeks now, and currently, everything on it is completely free.

It’s a situation that won’t last long so if you are packing an Android handset (that’d be a T-Mobile G1 then) we suggest you get yourself over to the Android Marketplace (via your handset or this link) and get downloading.

Pac-Man, Bubble Bash and Bonsai Blast should be enough to get you started, be sure to let us know what you think in the comments.

And don’t forget, the weekly iPhone gaming video podcast is available on iTunes here. It’s free, and if you're a pocket gaming enthusiast with an iPod, you really owe it to yourself to subscribe.

That’s it for now, there’s a whole year’s worth of pocket gaming freebies to look forward to in the future by clicking ‘Track It!’ and if you want to trek back through the rich tapestry of freebies that we have already sewn, the Freebie Archive and the Demos section lie in wait.

Until next week…