Friday Freebie

Have you ever found a £10 note lying in the street, free for you to claim? Or perhaps you've gone over your receipt after a visit to Tesco only to find that you weren't charged for that two-for-one party size Doritos offer you went for? These sorts of little surprises, however momentary, are enough to make anybody's day, but chancing upon such fortune is completely without design.

That is why the Friday Freebie is different – it's a slice of good fortune you can depend on. This week is no different and as is typical, it's PSP owners that are the best off, freebie-wise.

The first offering is a demo of Warhammer 40,000: Squad Command (you might have caught our earlier article about it). At the time of typing, it's not available via the European PlayStation Portable Store yet, but the ever-faithful PSP Demo Centre has the American demo available to download for free now.

Strategy battle games are not something the PSP is particularly overrun with, meaning we have little choice but to pin much of our hopes on this game being good enough to make up some of the shortfall.

Thankfully, first impressions are favourable and fans of the Warhammer universe will feel right at home with the grimy metallic presentation of the title.

A little something extra for PSP this week is Google Video. We don't know if this has been right under our noses for a while or if it is a new addition but we've just noticed that when viewing videos that are actually hosted on the service (as opposed to linked to from an external source), often there is a download button on the right panel of the site.

This allows you to grab videos in MP4 format that will work with your PSP without any bothersome file conversion. All you need to do is download the video you want to your PC or Mac (making sure you have selected MP4 as the format) and then move it to the video folder of your PSP.

Obviously the sky is the limit here and the great thing is that if you choose to filter whatever type of video it is you're looking for by duration (setting it to longer than 20 minutes) you can often get full episodes of certain shows. We tried downloading an episode of The Mighty Boosh and an episode of Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends (for journalistic purposes, obviously), both of which worked perfectly.

For the DS, meanwhile, we have a slice of homebrew that is not only free but stands to save you some cash over time, too. As we've written about before, the DS is ideally equipped to run VoIP programs, given its in-built mic and wi-fi capabilities, and the latest piece of software to exploit this is SvSIP, coded by samuelv.

If you'll forgive its less than punchy name, SvSIP enables you to make VoIP calls (using the touchscreen as a number pad) provided you have a SIP account (Session Initiation Protocol) of some kind. This means that the calls are not completely free but they are cheap and the site details a few places where you can get free trials on SIP accounts. The software itself is costless, though, and available to download now.

That's it for the time being. For those of you who are new here, make sure you check out the Freebie archive, which is full of other great handheld gaming goodies. And click 'Track It!' to make sure you don't miss next week's Friday Freebie.