God lord, how long has it been since I actually WROTE a review column? This “filming a podcast once a month” thing has made me actually LAZIER than before. Shit, better get crackin’, I suppose…

Okay…let’s see…whadda we got this time around…

OH! New downloads on both Wii Virtual Console and Xbox Live Arcade!

On Monday, for the VC, three new (old) games went up. MIGHTY BOMB JACK for the original NES, FINAL FIGHT for SNES, and ORDYNE, a side scrolling shooter for the Turbografix 16. Out of the three, my favorite is probably FINAL FIGHT, though this is a port of the SNES version, remember. If you’re looking for the full (i.e. arcade accurate) version of the game (which includes female enemy characters taken out of the SNES version as being “sexist”, as well as a third selectable playable character, “Guy”) check out CAPCOM’S CLASSICS COLLECTION Vol. 1 on Ps2 and Xbox.

As for XBLA, we got DOUBLE DRAGON today. This version features 2-player co-op over Xbox Live, original and “updated” graphics, a newly mastered (and somewhat re-recorded) soundtrack, and best of all, it’s only five bucks! It’s money better spent than on, say, the feature film of the game starring Robert Patrick and Alyssa Milano.

Also released today was Xbox Live’s spring update for the 360. New features for the update include, most notably, a separate blade in the dashboard specifically for marketplace, as well as smaller features such as specific achievement updates and game recognition. For example, if you have a copy of CRACKDOWN in your system (and you don’t have it set to “auto play”) instead of it saying “play disc” on the tray icon, it will now display the name of the game. Highlight the icon, and it will give you a list of stats for that game, such as how many achievements you have for it. Also, as I mentioned before, the update includes specific achievement details, so now when you get an achievement in a game, you won’t have to pause the action and slide the guide bar over in mid play. You can see just what that achievement is now, as the little blip icon spells out what it was and how many gamer score points you got…not just “Achievement Unlocked” anymore. Finally, the system update also allows for text messaging for both Xbox Live users and Windows Messager users as well. Both can now communicate with each other over either IP, either using the Xbox’s clunky dashboard keyboard, or the new QWERTY keyboard controller attachment to be released latter this month.

Now…as for actual reviews…well, that’s for another time, perhaps. There’s some PSP and Xbox 360 titles you should know about…plus, there’s the new SPIDER-MAN 3 games…but we’ll get to those later in the week.

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