What does October in New England bring to your mind? Fall Foliage? Barry Manilow singing “Weekend In New England”? Or does it bring to mind 90 degree heat where you are sweating like a pig? If you picked the latter, you would be correct! Nice to see that the weather we were supposed to get in August has now arrived. How am I supposed to use “it’s cold out, I will play games” as an excuse when it’s 92 out? Work with me weather!

Anyway, since this column constitutes work, I mean “nonemployee compensation,” I can justify playing games when I’m at home so that the glorious readers of TWID Nation will find out what you should and should not download this week. Of course, with a boat load of “real retail” releases coming out this week (PGR 4, Zelda DS, Power Pros Wii), it was tough to find all the time to download this stuff!

First and foremost, if you have a Wii, you should be in download heaven. You see, there’s this company called Treasure that makes some of the most amazing games (Radiant Silvergun) that you’ll never play because most of them stay in Japan. A recent exception was Ikauraga, which sold about six copies for the GameCube but zillions for the Japanese Dreamcast. Anyway, one of the best Treasure games was released for the Nintendo 64 a mere seven years ago and it was called “Sin and Punishment” (that’s the translation). The game, like many Japanese titles had a lot of English in it and for whatever reason Nintendo didn’t think it would appeal to the US market and therefore it was never released in the US – until now. That’s right – it only took seven years, but the US market can finally play this game legally! Of course Nintendo wants to make sure you pay through the nose for the privilege, so instead of the usual 1000 Wii Points for an N64 game, you have to pay 1200 points instead – for the “localization” costs, or something. The thing is, I’d have paid 1900 points for this game. It’s that good. If you have a Wii, you should download this game.

Only two games were released for Virtual Console this week (it’s tough to call the ‘import channel’ a game), but the other game is just as much of a stunner as Sin and Punishment! It’s the original Super Mario Brothers 2, now called Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels. You see, the SMB 2 released here in the USA was very different (because it wasn’t originally a SMB game) and hence you pull vegetables out of the ground. The real SMB 2 seems more like “extra levels” of the original game – but that’s okay because the original game was so good. You’ll have to pay extra – 600 points (that’s 100 points over the usual NES game) but this is well worth the download. I’ll take two great games like this every week over three games of shovelware that we’ve been getting! Kudos to Nintendo for a great Virtual console week!

Moving to the PC platform, GameTap only gave us three games this week: Clockwork Knight for the Sega Saturn and two Strategy First PC games: Emergency 3 Mission Life (strategy rescue) and Penumbra Overture (3D adventure). I just grabbed them myself and haven’t really had a whole lot of time to check them out, but that’s the beauty of GameTap – so many games, so little time. Glad to see the Saturn representing though.

It’s time to bring back Sniglets – words that should be in the dictionary but aren’t, as founded by Rich Hall on Not Necessarily The News from HBO back in the 80s. So, in that tradition, here’s a new word:

Liveitis (Live-aight-is) n. A contagious disease caused by game manufacturers releasing an Xbox Live Arcade game followed by an enormous amount of paid downloadable content for the same game which often exceeds the original retail price of the game.