The LoadDown -- 04/05/2012

April showers bring... well, May's not quite here yet, so it's hard to say.  Here are some games, though.

WiiWare -- One new game this week, TNT Racers, a multiplayer racing game that seems like it was announced ages and ages ago; it features colorful tracks, a variety of racers to choose from, and online multiplayer (up to 4 players.)

DSiWare -- One new title up: Penguin Patrol, which at first glance resembles the 80s arcade game Pengo but is actually more like Skweek.  As a heroic Inuit, the player must rescue baby penguins stranded on the ice by traversing the tiles, which break up as they are walked on.

3DS eShop --  No games this week as such, but Colors! 3D arrives.  It's an art application that supports creation of layered 3-D drawings, posting drawings online, and collaborative creation with another local 3DS user.  Some impressive results have been posted by the app's creators, and the 3DS stylus is fine-grained enough that this might actually be a neat little art tool.  It also features coloring pages for those who would rather not be creative.


XBox Live Arcade -- Three new games since our last update.  Licensed platformer South Park: Tenorman's Revenge arrived late last week, to mixed reviews.  Farsight Studios' The Pinball Arcade is intriguing -- the developer did a fine job with past Gottlieb and Williams collections, and this online venue also features classic licensed pinball machines, launching with Black Hole, Ripley's Believe It or Not, Tales of the Arabian Nights, and Theatre of Magic.  And there's also Grasshopper Manufacture's Diabolical Pitch, a looney Kinect game created by the always-quirky Suda 51, pitting the player's baseball hero against an array of animal-headed foes.

PS3 on PSN --  Just one new titles, but's something we haven't quite seen before -- Sega's The House of the Dead 4, an arcade sequel coming straight to PSN without a disc-based release.  The coin-op barely surfaced in the US, so this console port will be the way most American gamers experience the game, using the Playstation Move controller as a light gun.

PSOne Classics -- Going three times... not that it won't bob up again whenever something is going on, so fret not.