The LoadDown - 11/02/2009

What's up loading down this week... more games than usual coming out, it seems, as the holidays approach.

WiiWare -- Three casual games this week:  Carnival King does the casual mini-gaming/carnival theme yet again, this time on WiiWare.  Family Card Games continues Aksys' Family series with card games Daifugo, Speed and Memory -- and this time it has online multiplayer and leaderboards, which is nice to see.  Finally, we have "Aha! I Got It!" Escape Game, bringing the popular "room escape" mini-adventure genre to WiiWare, with some use of motion controls in solving the puzzles presented to young Milo on his birthday.

Virtual Console -- Two titles -- Fighting Street, a port of Capcom's original Street Fighter game, in its TurboGrafx-16 CD-ROM incarnation.  It's not as refined or deep as Street Fighter II, and not nearly as colorful, but it's an interesting historical artifact.  And the "game over" audio is hilarious, not so much for the text as for the inflection: "YOU have a lot to learn before you BEAT me.  Try 'gain KID AH-HA-HA!"  We also get yet another incarnation of R-Type, this time for the Sega Master System; it's an impressive conversion for the platform, but better versions are already available on the Virtual Console, and at this point it wouldn't surprise me to see the coin-op version turn up on the VC Arcade.

DSiWare -- Three titles, two of which are games.  Sparkle Snapshots is a photo taking/decoration tool, taking advantage of the DSi's built-in cameras.  Viking Invasion is a tower defense game with a Nordic theme, and Battle of Giants: Dragons – Bronze Edition appears to be a Pokemon-style RPG/battle game with medieval dragons and multiplayer tournaments.  DSiWare is starting to deliver some interesting content.

XBLA -- Two releases last week -- Inferno Pool, a multiplayer billiards game that's unfortunately not much fun, and Rainbow Islands: Towering Adventure, continuing Taito's remake series for the downloadable services with the Bubble Bobble sequel-that-is-not-quite-as-fun-as.

Also, I don't normally cover the iPhone in any comprehensive way, but Antonio Antiochia's Apple II adventure Transylvania has made it to the App Store courtesy of Roe Mobile Development -- we'll have more details on that soon.