Friday Freebie

The release of the iPhone has prompted developers to start making tailor-made browser-based games for the device. The PSP and DS have both been around for much longer than the iPhone, and both have internet browsers, so where are the web games?

Well they do exist, but for a change on the Friday Freebie this is an area in which the DS trounces the PSP, as revealed by one of our kind forum members who has steered us towards several DS web games (it appears ask and thou shall receive).

A visit to bio-gaming.com yields a decent collection of six titles including Snake, Minesweeper and the slightly more action-oriented Six Way Shooter. One of the first people to ever tailor a web page to the DS Browser, Sean McManus, also has a couple of games on his page – Hangman and Misfit – as well as links to several other games, including a DS optimized version of the classic text based adventure, Zork.

As mentioned, the PSP is less well endowed (strange considering it has a web browser out of the box) but a bit of digging turned up a decent version of Tetris courtesy of webtopsp.com. The site also includes Tic-tac-toe that, while far too easy for seasoned gamers, is cute to look at with images of the PSP's X and O buttons used as the board markers.

Another of our forum members has sniffed out a web-based mobile game for us and one that you can win real money in, no less. The game is a mass stock exchange simulator called SIMSTEX and you can win anything from $20 up to $10,000.

So there you go. Not only are all of these games free, if you already own a DS, PSP or a mobile with a web browser then you have everything you need to get playing, no downloading required.

We're always looking to share new and exciting freebies with our readers so if any of you find anything cool, be sure to write about it on our forum.

And if you're going to be out of range of a wi-fi network this weekend, why not check out our freebie archive, crack out that USB cable, and get downloading some of the treasures we've featured in the weeks gone by.

Click 'Track It!' to get another dose of gratis gaming goodness, same time, same place. Catch you next week.