Hello and welcome to another enthralling episode of This Week In Downloads. Love was in the air this week and I’m not talking about Valentine’s Day: instead I’m talking about the surprise release of a game that I can’t wait to see on the PlayStation 3. Of course, I’m not going to tell you what it is in the first paragraph so you’ll have to read on.

If you owned any console you’re probably pretty happy with this week’s releases – even the Nintendo Wii, which is where we’ll start first. Two games were released on the Wii this week and the first one is worth noting. If you look over on eBay, one of the most expensive SNES games aside from EarthBound (still waiting for that one on Virtual Console, by the way) is Harvest Moon. This game has even been on the GameCube but for some reason, collectors prize the SNES version. As soon as I saw that I could purchase a game that sells on eBay for $70 for only $8 in Wii Points I picked it up immediately. I wish I didn’t. Not to say that it’s a bad game – in fact it’s a pretty good game for its time but it just seems so ho-hum in 2008. Harvest Moon is a farming simulation with some RPG elements. Excited yet? I was bored. But the series certainly has its fans.

Want a quick way to waste 800 Wii Points? Look no further than Lords of Thunder. Harvest Moon is very easily the better of the two choices this week on Virtual Console. Let’s just put the nail in the coffin on Turbo Grafix 16 games, shall we?

I guess because Valentine’s Day is technically a holiday, GameTap was kind enough to move their release date this week only from Thursday to Tuesday. Sam & Max fans will be happy to learn that the latest chapter of the game called “Night of the Raving Dead” was released this week. If you’re not a Sam & Max fan, you’ll have to make do with an old arcade game called “Gondomania.” Unfortunately, GameTap doesn’t provide a pronunciation key with their games but I think it’s supposed to be called “Gondo-mania.” The other pronunciation makes me think of visiting a new store at the mall dedicated to Men’s Health. If only the game was worth the number of words I’ve dedicated to how to say the name of the game. It’s bad – we’re talking Go Sports Skydiving bad.

If you are giving out awards to the console that produces the most content, this week’s winner is the Xbox 360. First off, there are two Live Arcade games. The first one is Discs of Tron, which I recall fondly from my time at DG’s Arcade in Warwick, RI. They had the full enclosed game where you had to literally step into the machine to play. It really enhanced the 3D effect. Of course what was cool in 1982 isn’t as great today but I will say that the controls and game play in Discs came over much better than the original Tron arcade game which was released a few weeks ago on Live. It’s still tough to recommend for $5 though as there’s not a whole lot of depth to the game. Multiplayer can be fun though.

The next game available for purchase this week is well known to Board Game fans, but alas, I am not one, so it’s completely new to me. The game is Commanders: Attack of The Genos and while it may be a very fun board game, it feels more like I’m playing Advance Wars on my Xbox 360. Luckily, Advance Wars is a good game, so if you like turn based combat you’ll definitely want to check this one out.