The LoadDown - 06/21/2010

What's up loading down this week... there seems to be a new trend toward releasing multiple titles in a new franchise at the same time, instead of spacing them out over multiple weeks; perhaps the goal is to make a bigger initial splash in hopes of gaining some traction:

WiiWare -- Three new titles.  Art Style: Rotozoa continues the series with a microscopic action-puzzler.  And two games support The Tales of Bearsworth Manor debut -- Chaotic Conflicts and Puzzling Pages.  Both revolve around placing animated paper bears into puzzle-picture environments, with one story about a boy named Pina and the other about a girl named Kina.

Wii Virtual Console -- Nothing new on the VC this week.

DSiWare -- Five new games again this week.  Spin Six is a puzzle game with numbers instead of colored gewgaws.  Puffins: Lets Fish! is an action game set in the natural world.  Mega Words features a word scramble game, an anagram contest, and hangman.  Super Swap is yet another puzzle game, clearly a popular genre on the handheld.  And Legendary Wars: T-Rex Rumble is a RTS/tower defense hybrid challenging the player to lead a tribe of early humans (with magical shaman powers and dinosaurs, so it's not exactly a realistic simulation.)

XBox Live Arcade --  Just one new XBLA game last week, Space Ark, a family-friendly collect-'em-up.

Game Room -- A third week of games unlocks within Game Pack 005, including Atari's Air-Sea Battle and Activision's Chopper Command for the Atari 2600; Motocross, a rareish late-release title for the Intellivision; and coin-op arcade titles Konami's Ping Pong (not to be confused with generic Ping Pong), and the only game to feature the Atari Force from the DC comics, Liberator.

PS3 on PSN -- Lots of activity last week.  Telltale Games' excellent Tales of Monkey Island arrived on the Playstation 3 as a full-season set.  Catan also arrived, adapted from the popular tabletop strategy game and long popular on the XBox 360.  And Rockin' Android debuted three indie Japanese twitch titles -- all bullet-hell shooters, entitled GundeadliGne, Gundemonium Recollection and Hitogata Happa.