The LoadDown - 11/30/2009

Once again we survey the downloadable Wii and XBox 360 landscape for the week...

WiiWare -- 4 new titles.  Telltale's excellent episodic series continues with Tales of Monkey Island - Chapter 4:  The Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood (making me officially a full chapter behind, as I have recently been playing through Telltale's Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space and Wallace & Gromit 2: The Last Resort, both on XBLA, and have yet to tackle ToMI Chapter 3.)  Digital Leisure brings us Copter Crisis, a helicopter piloting action game, and Hudson releases My Zoo, a casual zookeeping sim; both of these games are inexpensive at 500 points, with additional downloadable content available for purchase.  Also new this week is Christmas Clix, a holiday-themed match-up puzzle game in the traditional mold with Santa, toy soldiers and other seasonal elements decorating the playfield.

Virtual Console -- Two games this week.  The SNES scrolling beat-'em-up The Combatribes apes Final Fight with more of an 80's punk aesthetic, as the player takes on the oddly named "Guilty Zero" gang.  Also, Tecmo brings the original coin-op version of Solomon's Key to the Virtual Arcade platform -- the NES port has been available on the VC for years and is a pretty spot-on conversion, but the arcade version does look and sound slightly better and it's still a fun action puzzler.

DSiWare -- 4 games.  Foto Face: The Face Stealer Strikes from EA uses the DSi camera and microphone to put the player's (and/or friends') faces and voices in the game -- it's a very neat concept, a platformer that allows the player to customize the characters.  Bookworm brings PopCap's hit casual game to the DSi; Master of Illusion Express: Mind Probe is a mind-reading illusion taken from the DS game released a few years ago; and Sudoku Challenge! presumably challenges one with Sudoku puzzles.

XBLA -- Just one game last week, Madden NFL Arcade, which is more of a pick-up-and-play experience than the traditional Madden products.  It's from EA, so it's fully licensed and features the ten best players from each of the 32 NFL teams.  But it's a streamlined, high-scoring, old-fashioned -- dare we say fun? -- approach to a football videogame.