The LoadDown - 07/20/2009

Rounding up the downloadables... the day is coming when ALL games will be downloadable, I can feel it in my bones.

WiiWare -- Three titles this week, biggest among them Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord, which is kind of a tower-construction-and-defense dark side counterpart to My Life as a King. I like the look of it, and it appears the gameplay offers more variety and participation than its predecessor, which got old after a while. Also we have the card-rules/matrix-based, Battle Poker, which might be fun if you have several friends handy, as there's no online play, and the spot-the-differences-between-two-similar-photos exercise, 5 Spots Party, in case you miss the Sunday paper.

DSiWare -- Another one-- Art Style: ZENGAGE, a sliding-tile logic puzzle game.

Virtual Console -- Nothing this week. Zip. Zero. Sigh. Might give me a chance to catch up on some other games, though.

XBLA -- Three games this past week, most prominently The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, about which I have already rhapsodized at length. Madballs in Babo: Invasion throws the aging ugly-bouncy-ball character license at the existing Babo series on PC, and Tour de France 2009: The Official Game lets you manage a team of bicycle racers, without really doing any racing yourself.

Also, it's an "open beta," so this is hardly news, but I re-upped for XBLA Gold membership over the weekend and have been enjoying 1 vs. 100 online. There are some server, game over and new game joining issues at present, and I have seen a few questions repeated already, but it's pretty nicely done and should be as rocking as TV-licensed trivia games can get after they get the bugs worked out.