I know what you’re thinking – another TWID notes in the same week!! How could that possibly be? Well in previous weeks we’ve been running the column the week after the games were released – but in this world of lightning fast turnaround time, my hard ass…uh, “professional” editors have decided that I should write the column faster…so be on the lookout every Friday morning for a new article (editor's note: we're just moving the column to a new day and Dan is kind of a drama queen..).

This week there are thirteen (13) new games to spend your points/dollars/annual subscription on. There are some games worth picking up this week to enjoy for the long holiday weekend if you didn’t get into that Home or Warhawk beta or if Halo 3 is already boring.

First, let’s go to Xbox Live Arcade where it’s another Two for Wednesday. A few weeks back, gamers got Millipede and Centipede both for 400 points, but this week you’ll have to pay separately for each old school arcade game. First there’s Rush n Attack….get it…Russian Attack..Rush n….oh nevermind, it was the 80s and there was this thing called the Cold War and movies like Red Dawn (“Wolverines!”) were all the rage. It’s basically you against three billion bad guys, and you must rescue the prisoners of war! This was one of the games I dropped a lot of quarters in at the pizza place and the C64 version was pretty good, so I’ll probably grab it for the Gamerscore.

Xevious is the other game, and unlike Rush N Attack, it’s pretty much been released for every console ever made. We’re told that this is the first real arcade representation ever with all the hidden powerups (hint bomb all the water you can), but seems like a big reach to throw away my 400 points. I’ll pass. There’s also a new demo of Colin McCrae: DIRT that looks interesting and the price is right (free)!

Moving along to Wii Virtual Console, this week there are three decent games: Donkey Kong Country 2 - pretty much anyone alive in the 90s is already familiar with; and the fantastic fighting/scrolling Streets of Rage 2, which is the reason why I still have my Sega Nomad. Out of the novelty bin is Blazing Lasers which is a Turbo Grafx 16 game. I picked this one up because I had heard good things and (luckily) it doesn’t disappoint. I haven’t finished DKC yet, so I need to hold off on DKC 2, and Streets of Rage I already have, so Lasers was my top pick. It is an insanely hard linear space shooting game. Think Ikauraga circa the late 1980s.

It’s that time in the show where I dedicate a paragraph to the PlayStation store. Unfortunately there’s only one game out, and it’s Joust. Yes, Joust. The original 1982 game with online multiplayer! Wee! Joust…I have a paragraph to fill here. Oh and there are like 23 MLB The Show trailers too along with a Championship Sprint video and an Uncharted Drake’s Fortune video. Really? Championship Sprint? Was Enduro not available?

Finally, seven games were added to the GameTap subscription service. I have to admit, I had no idea that there was a Qix II: Tournament game but there you go. Apparently there were so many unanswered questions from the original Qix that they had to make a sequel, and a ‘tournament’ game at that. LEGO games seem to always be fun and this time there’s LEGO Chess…I have to try that and hope it’s more like “LEGO Battle Chess” (I can dream right?).