Homebrew games for the Nintendo DS have always been about style rather than visuals. With a stylus and a lot of free time on your hands, you can entertain yourselves indefinitely with the stock of games they offer handheld gamers everywhere. Magic Touch, originally developed by Nitrome and ported to the DS by birslip, is an example of one of these games which can drive a person to distraction.

Magic Touch, puts you in control of a wizard trying to keep out paratrooping knights on their balloons as they sail over the walls of your castle. Similar to the old Apple II game Sabotage, an endless stream of creatures drop from the top of your screen and will try to reach the bottom unless you draw one of seven special symbols etched on their balloons with your stylus to pop them. Once three baddies litter the floor of your castle, it's game over.

Sounds simple enough, right? Well, the first few minutes of the game starts off with a slow enough pace, so as to get you used to the symbols you have to draw on the balloons. However, after a while the game just gets crazy with the amount of balloons the bad guys throw at you all of a sudden. From a leisurely pace, you immediately find yourself drawing so much gibberish on your screen that you can't help but think if the wizard might be better off just investing in a couple of anti-aircraft guns for his castle instead.

All in all, Magic Touch is a challenging game gamers can find amusing to pass the time. Feel free to download the game through the link below.

Download: Magic Touch

Been a bit of time since we saw birslip last (and that was back in November for No Place To Hide). He comes back to the DS scene with une petit projet pour DS homebrew, adapting the flash game Znax for Nintendo's handheld.

Znax is a puzzle where the objective is to clear the board of colored blocks to score points. You can only do so by enclosing them in a rectangle whose corners are formed by four colored blocks of the same color (the "lines" and the inside can be as rainbow as you want, but the four corners must be of the same color).

The pic in this article should give the idea of the objective. Included in this pack is the source code for the game. Oh, and you only have a few minutes to get cracking for points.

Download: [Znax v1.0]

In the land of the PAlib forums lives one of the most recognized coders of DS homebrew: Mollusk. He's given us all sorts of apps, games and whatnot. But the thing is, as he himself admits, he's not really that much attuned to the artist in him. Yeah, while his visuals aren't really something astounding, we're not complaining. (Support all the way, Mollusk!)

However, he's taken a step further with the updates and has now asked for someone to help on the graphics aspect of his homebrew. He called Nhut in and asked him to give his stuff a make-over. A couple of hours after sitting down, Nhut was able to release the updated version of CarreRouge.

If you haven't heard of this game, it's pretty much like Birslip's No Place to Hide. You have to guide the little red box (the "carre rouge") around without touching the blue squares. There's a timer on the top screen to keep track of your, umm, time.

If anyone's curious, my best time so far is 12.3s - sorry, I'm bad with hand-eye coordination. [goes to a corner and sulks]

Download: [CarreRouge update]

Once upon a time, Birslip had released his homebrew game No Place to Hide. He's going far and wide with this game and just recently, he submitted it as an entry to the Datel competition. Upon submitting, he's also been able to add a couple of new things:

• new item in WiFi menu -> high score for each level
• fixed small bugs -> used to break some graphics when exiting a level

We wouldn't be the least bit surprised if No Place to Hide bagged one of the top spots in the Datel competition. His game has the potential to be very addicting. It's a collection of ten games where you just have only one goal (as the tagline reads): avoid, avoid again, score! Just use the touchpad to guide your player around the screen while you avoid touching everything else. Plain and simple!

One interesting feature of the game is that it incorporates WiFi leaderboards. So, if you're the kind of person who has nothing to do the whole day but play addictive games, then you can finally get recognized for it.

More power to Birslip!

Download: [No Place to Hide (Datel competition version)]

Once again, your Nintendo DS gets another feature added to its ever-growing repertoire of talents and abilities. The DS can be a PDA, an image-viewer, a browser, an instant messaging device, a translator, and now, it's also an alarm clock. This new feature is particularly useful for DS addicts who fall asleep while playing, or those who simply want the DS to be part of their daily routine.

Made by the French coder birslip, this alarm clock application dubbed as "Reveil Humain", can be set to play an MP3 file of your choice once the time that you have set for it to alarm comes around. A rough translation of the installation process is included below.

• Download the zip file for the application
• Put at the root of your memory board the file "wake.mp3"
• Launch ReveilHumain.nds, or .ds.gba or .sc.nds, depending on what you normally use
• set the alarm while pressing on the small arrows on the touchscreen
• After setting the time, click on "Alarm". The image with "Alarm" on it will get smaller, indicating that the alarm is set.
• Close your DS and wait. At the wanted hour, the MP3 will be played!

The creator's other tips include plugging in the DS to an outlet to make sure it doesn't run out of power before or during the alarm period. He has also noted that to turn off the music, simply press B, and press Select to relight the DS screens.

Download: [Nintendo DS Alarm Clock Beta version]

Nowadays, we all want our Nintendo DS (or anything for that matter) to be set apart from everybody else's by putting our own unique stamp on it. Usually, we scour every nook and cranny just to find unique and unusual designs to accessorize our DS. And what better way to make sure that you don't have any duplicates than making your own design.

Birslip's homebrew mp3 player called lo.mp3, boasts of being skinnable. So you can change your player's look on a whim depending either on your mood or outfit, or plain just cause. To be able to run this app you need a method of running homebrew on your Nintendo DS, which is compatible with Rein FAT libraries like MK2/3, supercard, GBA MP, M3, etc.

A complete set of instructions on the player's controls and how to make a skin is available in the readme file that comes with the download.

Download: [lo.mp3 mp3 player v3.0]