It's one thing for a programmer to take his Lua homebrew, go back to scratch, and re-translate it into C. It's quite another thing to take that new C code and bring it a step further by adding more features and capabilities. Enter slicer4ever and you've got yet another homebrew junkie worth looking up to.

His Block Attack homebrew started out in its early Lua stages, and now it's been un-Lua'ed with his recent v0.3 release. Today, it's now pegged at Block Attack v0.4. The concept remains the same: just dodge the enemy blocks and pick up the "live" ones. Here are the new features he's added for v0.4:

• high scores
• difficulty
• customizable options

There are five difficulty levels to choose from: from easy to insane mode. Settings can also be customized to change your box's color, enemy color, or "live" box color to either red, blue, or green. He mentioned that he would have wanted to put in some music too, however, he notes that it drops the speed too much. So right now, he's planning to incorporate that feature in a future version.

Download: [Block Attack v0.4]
Discuss: [Forum Release Thread]

Despite all the block games that abound for our trusty PSP's, new (or improved) ones are nonetheless always welcomed by the community. Why? Well, basically one of the main points of having homebrew games on our handhelds is for us to have choices, right? So even if we have tons of block games already (you have Error's Block Attack and slicer4ever's Lua-coded Block Attack), we can certainly welcome another one, right?

So slicer4ever is back with his Block Attack, but this time, it's not for Lua. In fact, he says that this is his first C-written game. Here's what he had to say for Block Attack v0.3:

i rebuilt it from scratch in c it lacks some of the features of .2 and isn't as colorful but it is now in eboot form also i want to give a special thanks to head_54us for helping me debug the reason why it kept crashing my psp.

We brought you guys v0.2.1 waaay back in July, and slicer4ever says that v0.3 is really a lot like its previous version, only this time it's written in C. So if you've tried the previous version, you guys probably know the controls already: X to move object up and then release to go down, Start to exit game at any time (except in menu). Your basic objective is to dodge the blue blocks and grab the green ones to gain lives.

To do:

• icons (slicer4ever says: "i hope i can learn how to do that by next ver.")
• also i hope to have bgmusic in next ver
  

Block Attack v0.3 comes in versions for 1.5 and 1.0, and slicer4ever apologizes for the lack of images in the game. But hey, if you want it bad enough, you can always tell him to add that in the game via the forum link below.

Download: [Block Attack v0.3]
Discuss: [Forum Release Thread]

Here's a rather interesting puzzler. It's Block Attack from Error (yeah, that's his name). Now, there's been a couple of homebrew block games in the past already, but this one is different. This game plays a bit like half-Tetris and half-Bejeweled. It's LUA-coded and pretty easy enough to install. Just extract the folder and put it in your LuaPlayer.

Your goal is to eliminate the blocks by switching them left to right before they all pile up to the top. When three or more blocks of the same color line up horizontally or vertically, they disappear.

Controls:

• D-Pad: Move flipper
• X: Flip selected blocks
• Square: Force blocks from the reserve (floor)
• Triangle: Pause
• Start: Exit

Here's a little tip we found out for ourselves: you might think that you can only swap blocks on the same horizontal level, right? But if you set the flipper with a block on one side, and empty space on the other, you get to "drop" that block down to a different level. Take for example the top row in the pic above. There's three blocks: brown, brown, and yellow. if you put set the right side of the flipper on the left-most brown block and swap, the block will fall on top of the red. That opens up possibilities for more combos! Snaps for us for finding this technique!

Download: [Block Attack]