The LoadDown - 07/21/2011

More downloadable fun arrives this week, with a number of platforms shaking off the summer doldrums at last...


WiiWare -- One new title, Bobby Carrot Forever, a puzzle/adventure game with pretty 2-D artwork, which presumably took less time to develop than Duke Nukem Forever and even sight unseen is almost certainly more fun to play.

Wii Virtual Console -- Nothing here this week, though with Chrono Trigger arriving not long ago most retro gamers are satisfied for the moment.

DSiWare -- Three games this week: Antipole is a gravity-based puzzle game starring a robot in space.  Kung Fu Dragon sounds like a martial arts game but focuses on... waterfall climbing?  Trollboarder is a snowboarding-style game starring a troll.

Nintendo eShop -- The three DSi games above are also available on the 3DS, and finally we get a second 3D Classics title, Namco's Xevious with the visuals reworked to feature true 3-D, a nice idea for this high-altitude arcade shooter.  I was never a big fan of the original game, but the NES conversion was released as part of the old GBA NES Classics series so it must have been fairly popular.


XBox Live Arcade -- The XBLA Summer of Arcade begins with one major new title: Bastion is an anime-styled action/RPG with a solid combat system, beautiful and detailed artwork, and an interesting "dynamic narration" system that attempts to describe the action as if it were a story, without (I hope) repeating the narrator's phrasings too often as is historically the case with these things.

PS3 on PSN -- Quite a bit of activity here, with 5 new titles available this week.  SNK's Baseball Stars 2 and King of Fighters '95 bring the Neo-Geo arcade classics to the PS3, Dead Block is a third-person zombie-fighting action/strategy game, Fast Draw Showdown is an old laserdisc Western quick-draw contest courtesy of Digital Leisure, and Playdead Studios' Limbo is the same great, gory puzzle game seen on XBLA last year, with an evocative black-and-white, silhouetted art style.

PSOne Classics -- Hey!  After a few no-release months, there's a sign of life here with Kyuiin, a cute-'em-up 2-D shooter starring a kid (or two) on a vacuum cleaner, previously only released in Japan.