The LoadDown - 07/05/2010

It's still Independence Day weekend for many people here in the US, and time for gamers to celebrate consoles' growing independence from the retail chain (and on the flipside, for software publishers to celebrate the same regarding the used game market) with another week's worth of new downloadable titles.

WiiWare -- Two new games today.  Cruise Party features four simulated gambling events.  Pearl Harbor Trilogy - 1941: Red Sun Rising is the first in an episodic air-combat series, with rather nice graphics by WiiWare standards.

Wii Virtual Console -- Nothing new this week, sorry to say.

DSiWare -- Another big week, with another half-dozen titles available on the DSi.  QuickPick Farmer is an inexpensive action/defense game with a comical farming/sheep-shearing theme.  SteamWorld Tower Defense is another tower defense game, set in a cartoon cowboy/steampunk universe.  101 Shark Pets is another virtual pet/show sim for kids; Hello Flowerz does something similar with gardening.  Flips: The Folk of the Faraway Tree brings another EA interactive book to the DSi.  And Soul of Darkness is a T-rated gothic horror action game, where (counter to current trends) the vampire is the villain -- the game appears to be kind of a Castlevania Lite. 

XBox Live Arcade --  Two games released last week -- the sequel Puzzle Quest 2, returning to the series' roots after the Galactrix detour met with a mixed reception, and Ancients of Ooga, similar in style to the old Cloning Clyde XBLA platformer.

Game Room -- Regular releases continue; last week, Game Pack 006 unlocked five new titles:  Activision's Crackpots and Kaboom! (two very similar games, so this seems an odd choice) for the Atari 2600, as well as Atari's home version of Warlords; the classic Star Strike for the Intellivision; and another rareish Konami arcade game, Juno First, a grid-based pseudo-3D shooter similar to Nintendo's Radarscope or Activision's Beamrider.

PS3 on PSN -- Nothing new last week, so it's a good time to catch up with the recent Tales of Monkey Island while getting ready for something new from Ron Gilbert, the upcoming DeathSpank, as well as Lucasarts' remake of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge.