The LoadDown -- 09/18/2011

I haven't been keeping up with the blog very well these past few weeks, but I'm going to try get back on track now that my personal schedule is slowing down a bit.  So let me start by catching up with what should have been last Thursday's posting...


WiiWare -- One new game, MotoHeroz, a cartoonish motocross physics-based platformer with local multiplayer and online challenges and leaderboards.

Wii Virtual Console -- Nothing here this week; Nintendo's retro focus seems to be shifting to the handheld 3DS these days.

DSiWare -- Two new games this week.  Bridge, is, well, the classic card game of bridge; Defense of the Middle Kingdom is a tower-defense game with cute 16-bit-RPG-style graphics.

Nintendo 3DS eShop -- In addition to the DSiWare titles, 3DS owners get Capcom's 2-D black-and-white Game Boy classic Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge.  It's very much in the style of the 8-bit NES Mega Man games (and the recent neo-retro sequels) but only has 4 stages.

XBox Live Arcade -- Two new games last week.  Red Bull X-Fighters is a racing game based on the extreme motocross competition sponsored by the makers of the popular beverage.  And Treasure's classic, rare Saturn shooter Radiant Silvergun comes to XBLA, making this excellent game a lot easier to find and enjoy.

PS3 on PSN -- A healthy selection of four new titles.  From Dust is a recent Populous-style "god game" with powerful (if sometimes fiddly) landscape-sculpting controls and realistic simulations of water and plants.  Elemental Monster: Online Card Game is what it sounds like, a card-based battle game, new from Hudson Soft.  Renegade Ops is an overhead-perspective vehicle shooter.  And Sega's Altered Beast is an up-rezzed HD version of the classic coin-op fantasy beat-'em-up, now with trophies and leaderboards.

PSOne Classics -- This platform seems to be coming back to life, just when I was on the verge of dropping it.  Last week saw two new releases: Capcom's fighting game Cyberbots: Full Metal Madness, never originally released for the US Playstation, and Atari's reimagined Pong: The Next Level.