Plenty of pictures of Panel de Pon have been posted for perusal, at, um... Pgame Pwatch ... yeah, okay, we're done. We kind of like the look of the new Tetris Attack here-- the blocks are colorful and Meteos-esque, while the backgrounds are all rave-like and evoke Lumines. We could roll our eyes at the fact that Intelligent Systems is cribbing so heavily from Q? Entertainment in their visuals, but we honestly don't mind because it looks cool and because Panel de Pon couldn't not be awesome.

Please peruse the pretty panel pictures past the post partition.

The rewards for a homebrew developer's labor are few. The majority of their games and applications will never see a commercial release or any cash return. The number of people who can even appreciate their work on the DS is limited because of hardware requirements (i.e. third party storage carts). To find out why these programmers pour countless hours into projects that they won't likely profit from, Modojo interviewed the minds behind four of the homebrew scene's most visible games: Tetattds, Tower Defense, The Lemmings Project, and QWAK.

Tetattds is a polished clone of Tetris Attack/Panel de Pon for the SNES, adding online support to the puzzler. Tower Defense is an adaptation of the popular Warcraft 3 mod. The Lemmings Project jerry-rigs the PC classic to work with the DS' touchscreen and resolution limits. QWAK, a GBA puzzle platformer reminiscent of Bubble Bobble, was actually self-published with a small run of 300 carts.

So what is it that drives these homebrew developers? Several of them cite community participation or the need to fill a gap in the DS library. Others have a reason that's even more simple and obvious: They just want to make the best games they can.

We have great news for puzzle fans! Panel de Pon, aka Tetris Attack, aka Pokémon Puzzle League, aka Puzzle League is going to get a DS release in Japan in April, according to some rumor-hounds at NeoGAF. This marks the first time we can think of that the same game has appeared on both the Game Boy Advance and the DS.

We can think of one thing in particular that could elevate this new version over its predecessors: delicious online multiplayer. We're dreaming of future Game Nights already.