The DS takes on Tetris while the PSP goes Japanese as we visit the land of homebrew puzzle games

Here we are again with another crop of homebrew goodness to complement your commercial wares. This week we have something of a puzzle theme, with games on the PSP and DS that should stretch the old grey matter whilst providing a little fun along the way.

First out the gate is the DS homebrew game Tettas. This title has been around for a little while now, but far from showing its age it exhibits an air of maturity with some pretty professional graphics, not to mention great sound effects. The game is based on a simple premise: place three or more matching blocks together and they disappear.

Original, eh? Still, the fun really starts when you set up complex chain reactions. As one set of blocks disappear, those above fall down and trigger the second set of disappearances. Get this right and you can almost clear the whole well in just a few moves. What's more, you get multipliers based on how many Tettas you can chain together. Those of you who have played Planet Puzzle League you will already be familiar with how it works.

Once you've downloaded Tettas and copied the appropriate .nds file to the root of your homebrew cart you should be good to go. There's even a readme included that gives a nice run down of the controls – although being as this is mostly stylus-based you should be able to just jump into the game and figure it out as you go.

Over on the PSP we have Kakuro Nichiyou. What's that, you may ask? For those not fluent in Japanese, it's based on the popular logic puzzle game kakuro. Again this has been around for a little while, and has recently had a nice little update from the developer MK2k. New in this version is a built-in solution solver, which attempts to automatically solve a puzzle if you're stuck.

Simply download the game and unzip to your desktop. Copy the Kakuro_Nichiyou_PSP directory to your PSP/GAME directory on your memory stick. Ensure that PSP/GAME is not set to 1.50 Kernel mode. For 3.xx firmware, perform the same process using the PSP/GAME3xx directory on your Memory Stick.

To play the game, you enter in a digit from 1 to 9 on open blocks, while trying to make sure that the digits add up to the sum represented to the left or above each respective block. It sounds a bit like maths homework, but in practice it's a lot of fun. And with 254 puzzles it should keep you entertained for some time. Add to that the ability to save current progress in one of twenty slots and you have a great little commuter game.

So that about wraps it up for out homebrew collection this week. With the quality of these community developed offerings ever increasing, you really can find some quite impressive games with the simple aid of a homebrew card or Memory Stick.