Ah, football is in full swing, the leaves are changing colors and I had my annual sojourn to Mohegan Sun. While I didn’t come back any richer, I didn’t come back any poorer either. Thankfully all of the game companies realized I would be having a long week so they made it easier on me and didn’t put out a whole lot of new content. This week is about quality, not quantity, which isn’t a bad thing. Let’s get right to it!

Let’s talk about the PlayStation 3. We’ve had some pretty good weeks but the run always has to end – there’s slim pickings of new content this week, but the good news is that there is a sale on Calling All Cars. Until October 25, the game is only $4.99, which is 50% off the regular price. Obviously, if you haven’t picked up the game, now is the time. Two new demos were released: the PlayStation Underground version of Folklore (for those unfamiliar, PSU is the ‘fan club’ for PlayStation and they send out demo discs to you on a regular basis, but now you can download this demo) and a demo for Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights. There are a few new trailers, including one for Uncharted, but really, if you already played the Folklore demo earlier and the Juiced demo from the 360, there isn’t a whole lot to get excited about here. Sorry!

GameTap only released two new games this week: Maelstrom, a Codemasters real time strategy game released back in February of this year. It’s one to pass on, even if you like RTS games. Also out this week is Brian Lara Cricket 2007, which is one of those very popular sports everywhere else but the USA. Go figure. It looks like a pretty decent game, but honestly, not really having played any cricket myself recently, it’s tough to say if this is a good game or not. The press reviews have been rather “meh,” so you may want to just save the hard drive space for other things.

So far, it really hasn’t been a great week of downloads, but don’t worry because we still have two more platforms to go. The Wii Virtual Console put out the usual weekly allowance of three games: The NES game Ninja Gaiden 2 is first up and um…well, it’s okay but I prefer the original. (As a side note, the new Ninja Gaiden 2 for the 360 is NOT similar; at least that’s what I’ve been told). Of special note, according to our friends at Wikipedia, is the unusually graphic depictions of blood for the NES console at the time (those of you old fogeys remember that Nintendo really went out of its way to censor blood and violent images, but there’s plenty of blood in NG2. However it’s tough to call 1990 blood “realistic” in 2007).

Next up on the Wii is the SNES game Metal Marines. Strategy games and consoles from the 90s really don’t mix, and you should really save your 800 points for other things, like Gate of Thunder. Gate of Thunder was a shooting game originally released for the Turbo Grafx CD (aka the Turbo Duo). The game is pretty fun – but be forewarned, it’s a whopping 220 blocks on your Wii. I think that at this point Nintendo needs to figure out a way to let us use the SD card to run games off (currently the Wii games must be in the 512MB system memory to play, regardless of the size of the SD media). My space is now full and I have to keep transferring games back and forth in order to play. Folks this is one area Nintendo shouldn’t have cut corners. All ranting aside, Gate of Thunder is worth the download.

Now that we’re really saving the best for last, it was another fantastic week on the 360. Three new demos were released: Virtua Fighter 5, Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 (finally they’ve dropped the Winning Eleven moniker), and WWE Smackdown Vs RAW 2008. PES 2008 finally looks like a next generation title (although the demo has no play by play) and VF 5 is just as you would expect it to be – definitely worth a download.