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Friday Freebie

If you're feeling frugal...

Friday Freebie
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DS + PSP + Java ...
| Friday Freebie

While the majority of the nation are out to town, fainting in the queue at Marks & Spencer's while trying to save a few quid in the January sales, we are forgoing the nation's favourite consumer feeding frenzy in favour of a freebie frenzy. Everyone has a weakness.

So kicking things off as usual is the PSP which has coughed up yet another demo. This time it's the die-hard Unofficial PSP Demo Centre we have to thank rather than the official PSP store and as such the fresh demo of Monster Hunter 2nd G is in Japanese. Not the easiest language to navigate an RPG in if you don't speak the lingo but worth a look to ogle the lush visuals if nothing else.

The DS, as usual, is reliant upon homebrew for its freebie fix, but that doesn't bother us in the least when the games are as intriguing as this week's offering. The title called Wardive is a location-based shooter where the DS converts the information from WLAN signals in its vicinity to game objects that try to attack you onscreen. A bit of skilful stylus-swishing is required to defend yourself against the enemies and the highly stylised visuals look very nice in a retro sort of a way.

The beauty of this is that when you have vanquished all of the foes in your vicinity, you just need to walk a bit until you come within range of a fresh batch of WLAN signals. The game is free and in need of players to map out the best routes to play the game on, so grab your DS homebrew set-up, your coat (it is January after all) and step to it.

For mobiles we have come across yet another site that offers free Java games for a selection of handsets. The site, which is called eMobilez, offers games that are not ad-funded but are often pretty old. Still, it would be foolish to look even an aging gift horse in the mouth as they say, so if you are feeling a bit strapped and your thumbs are a bit restless, you know what to do.

Lastly a little something for the iPod. We have come across a handy little bit of freeware (Mac OS only folks) that makes converting videos you have saved on your hard drive into MP4 iPod-optimised format a cinch. It is called iSquint and can be found here, enjoy.

That's it for this week, as ever make sure you give our Freebie Archive a poke to check you didn't miss anything over the busy festive period and click 'Track It!" to be sure to catch next week's batch.