The LoadDown -- 11/17/2011

The snow is starting to fall here in Michigan, which means the holiday shopping season will be ramping up soon.  Lots of big console titles are showing up on store shelves, but lots of little titles are turning up too...

WiiWare -- One new title, Pinocchio's Puzzle, which retells Carlo Collodi's classic tale one jigsaw puzzle at a time.  Up to 4 local players can participate in assembling the puzzles, but there's not a lot of entertainment value on offer.


DSiWare -- Two new titles this week.  Escape Trick - Convenience Store is a mini-adventure game, in which the player must solve puzzles to escape his own workplace.  Rated E with "mild language," so Clerks this is not.  Play & Learn Chinese is a language-education game, with vocabulary drills and other exercises.


3DS eShop -- The DSiWare titles are also on the 3DS, as always, along with the oddly-titled 3D Classics: Kirby's Adventure, which as far as I can see is just the 8-bit NES Classic running on the 3DS.  No three-dimensional effects are in evidence in Nintendo's publicity materials.  It's a great and underappreciated game that came out in 1993, late in the NES' life cycle -- I've played through it on the Wii Virtual Console, and it's a fine choice for portable play.  I just don't see what qualifies it as a 3-D Classic.


XBox Live Arcade -- One new game this week, Xotic, a colorful first-person shooter with some RPG elements.  One of those games that, at first glance, would have been a retail title once upon a time, but now qualifies only as a digital release.


PS3 on PSN -- Three new titles this week.  Telltale Games'  Jurassic Park: The Game, an adventure game heavy on the Quicktime Events (i.e. Dragon's Lair-style button-pressing challenges) is the big one -- it tells a new story set around the events of the first movie.  I am anxiously awaiting some free time to play the PC version, hopefully this weekend.  If dinosaurs don't appeal, PS3 owners also have Hollywood Squares, based on the long-popular TV game show, and Burgertime World Tour, updating the classic Data East arcade game.


PSOne Classics -- A new game this week, Human Entertainment's 1998 strategy-RPG Vanguard Bandits; I believe this is the US version, localized by Working Designs in 2000.