Friday Freebie

Okay, it's time to give up. Christmas is a little over a week away and if you haven't accepted this yet our advice is to sit down, place your head in your hands and start panicking.

But before you do that, let us give you a sweet shot of freebie delight to delay the inevitable for just another ten minutes; you've procrastinated this long and if free stuff isn't a good reason to do so for a little longer, then you clearly need to rethink your priorities.

We only have two this week but they are biggies. The first is a revisit to the fantastic world of NextGenBooks, which might seem like a cop-out but since we last went sniffing round that way for freebies, Darren Reid and his rag tag band of fantasy scribes have clearly been very busy.

To celebrate the site's first birthday, a compendium of the best free ebooks has been assembled on the front page, including titles such as The Loss and the Bluff, Phoenix Ashes and Slither on Frosty Tracks. All are free and available in PSP or DS form to read online.

The second freebie we have today is another read fest. If you're a fan of point-happy Phoenix Wright then you probably already know that in Japan the character is known as Gyakuten Saiban. If you're an even bigger fan, you might even know that there is a popular Japanese manga about the character and his various courtroom exploits.

If you are one of these aficionados, then you certainly won't object to hear that the tireless chaps over at Court Records have sourced fan-translated versions of the first three chapters and made them available for free download as jpeg files. Each one weighs in at about 50-plus pages so plenty to be going on with while you're waiting for translations of the other chapters to turn up.

That's it for this week, then. You know officially have a (reasonably) good excuse to spend the rest of the day reading cool free books and comics instead of contemplating your impending Christmas shopping personal hell over the weekend. No need to thank us.

(Remember to have a gander at the Freebie archive if you haven't already and if you want to be alerted when next week's Friday Freebie is ready, just click 'Track It!'.)