benja32 (creator of PSP Racer) over at the QJ.Net forums dropped us a line regarding a homebrew game recently released by the trio of Gibus (coding), Genevois Romuald (graphics), and Alexel (music). It's titled Panic Paradyz, where the player's goal is to guide a swarm of hearts (aka souls) through a series of obstacles. The game currently has 12 stages and 4 decorations/themes, with various power-ups to be found as you fly through each stage.

Here are the controls:

• Joystick/analog nub: Move your vessel
• R: Activate the magnet
• L: Deactivate the magnet
• START: /Menu pauses

As a further point of clarification, the magnet allows you to draw the souls to where you cursor is on the screen - we'll leave it to your creativity regarding how this can be used. As requested by the original authors, we advice readers to drop by the (French) xtreamlua forums to give their feedback for Panic Paradyz. Or, you can also opt to drop by the release thread here at QJ's PSP dev forums to check out who else picked up on the game.

Download: Panic Paradyz
Visit: QJ's PSP Development Forums

This is a day of firsts for French developer, benja32. Not only is this his first post at our forum in QJ, Lua-coded PSP Racer 0.01 Beta Version is also his first homebrew. I wrote quite a few racing homebrews like dalejrrocks' Cargame v0.2 and sousanator's Speed & Pass v.1, but this game has a bit of advantage when it comes to aesthetics. The sleek shiny car on the intro screen may not exactly be the car you're going to drive in the game, but it sure is nice to look at.

Currently, you can choose from seven lovely luxury cars to be your vehicle. The graphics on these are beautifully done. The details, highlights, even the gloss on the finish is on the right spot.

Since this is the first release for this game, it's more of a showcase than an actual playable game. What you can do starts with picking a car and ends with driving it on a long strip of road. Although, one thing that I didn't like about the directional controls is that when you'd want to switch lanes, instead of just vertically going up or down the car faces that direction and you'd have to make another press on the directional buttons to keep it on he right track. I think in the long run it would make dodging the still non-existent "enemy" cars easier.

In his to-do list, benja32 listed three things: Add "enemy" cars, add music and add different decorations. I would also like to see a scoring and high-score system in there and a difficulty levels one of these days.

Overall I think that this is a very pretty game, that has potential if coded the right way. Download the game via the link below the article and head on to the forums to give your suggestions for benja32.

Download: [PSP Racer 0.01 Beta Version]