I don't know how many times I've heard the phrase "tetris with a twist" around the PSP homebrew community before, but what I do know is this - Ville Helin's Blocks that Fall is indeed a tetris with a twist, literally. In this game you do the usual Tetris stuff - stack up bricks of different shapes. The big difference however lies on the game's rotating 3D-fied field, hence the "twist" reference.

Anyway, now that the game's been bumped up to version 1.3 we have another set of tweaks worth a peek. Most notable of course, is that the game's now in full 3D, so rotating interfaces in-game should be more addicting. Here's the complete changelog:

• The blocks drop now faster after every new gained level.
• For each full row one five intercontinental ballistic rockets are launched in the background.
• Square and circle buttons now rotate the playfield around the x axis, not around the y axis, as it was pretty useless.
• All blocks are now 3D, so rotating the playfield works better.
• Moved the preview block a little closer to the playfield.
• The game is now compiled with -O0 as -O2 can create GFX glitches.

Make sure to give this a go, you'll never know how a true tetris game should look and feel like until you've tried out Ville Helin's Blocks that Fall v1.3. Download's below, have fun!

Download: Blocks that Fall v1.3

 

Before you dismiss this as another Tetris PSP homebrew game, try it out first - this game developed by Ville Helin shows a lot of promise. Anyhow, the game is called Blocks that Fall and it is now on version 1.2. Since this is the first time we featured this game, here are the controls:

• Press start to start the game and pause it
• Press down to quick drop the block
• X rotates the block
• Press select to toggle SFX and music on and off
• The shoulder, square and circle buttons rotate the view for extra challenge. Triangle button resets the view rotation.

So if you aren't familiar with the keys, don't be surprised if the view changes from time to time. Anyhow, here's Blocks that Fall v1.2's changelog:

• Compressed the tile texture using inflateTT-MP v1.2
• The background color becomes brighter when you get a new hi score
• Added icon and background that are shown in the PSP game menu
• Added SFX (press select to toggle SFX and MP3 on and off)

Download: Blocks that Fall v1.2

Homebrew programmer Ville Helin (one of the guys behind the Wright Flight homebrew) has released a developer tool we imagine fellow coders will find to be handy. It's the sfxMixerTT-PSP, an SFX mixer that homebrew coders can simply load into their current projects to help ease up their coding process.

This current version (1.0) is capable of mixing 44100Hz raw mono 16bit samples. As for the usage instructions:

• Adjust and add SFX IDs to the ID list in sound.h
• Add the corresponding 44100Hz, raw, mono, 16bit samples to the sfxs array in sound.c.
• Remove all references to mp3player, if you are not using it.

It goes without saying that newcomers to the coding scene will hopefully find this application useful, along with some of the other devkits already in circulation. The file bundle is available for downloading, but given that it lacks a readme, we advise readers to head over to Ville Helin's site for full instructions. Enjoy.

Download: sfxMixerTT-PSP v1.0