Welcome to the Pearl Harbor edition of TWID. Can you believe the attack was 66 years ago? Don’t you think a great game would be to allow you to change the course of history and play in the Pacific Theatre rather than storming Normandy over and over again in Call of War 17: Those Brave Dudes? Anyway, this weekend is also the anniversary of the assassination of John Lennon, so it’s one of those weekends you’ll probably avoid the horoscope.

Now that I’ve completely bummed you out, let me give you some gaming depression. The big disappointment this week is the GameTap announcement that over 80 games will be “rotated out” of their line up on December 10th. For those of you not in PR land, “rotated out” is a unique way of saying “lost the rights to put those games on the service.” Each game to be ‘delisted’ has a warning message on the service right now and some of the games, like Wing Commander IV were just added, so this comes as a pretty big surprise. I’m still recommending the service for now, but to go from over 1,000 games to 920 in a day hurts. Still, there are 920 games to play for $60 a year, which is still about 3 games a day for a year before you’d get bored.

In other GameTap news, a new version of the software was released (version 3.5), which is a much, much better interface than before. The biggest improvement is the removal of the 4 games downloaded at a time restriction. The engine seems to load much faster as well – this is a required update for “gold” members, so you don’t have a choice, but it’s worth getting.

Three new gold games were added: Blowout, Carrier Air Wing and Perimeter. My personal favorite of these is Carrier Air Wing, basically because Capcom did no wrong in the arcades in the early 90s. Thirteen new games were “rotated in” to the free zone this week, one of which is the turd which other games are judged by: Daikatana; so if you never shot giant bugs before, now you can do it for free.

GameTap wasn’t the only place to download a system update – as every 360 owner knows; this was also the week of the “Fall Dashboard Update.” There’s lots of new stuff in this update – the parental control timer is a big thing for me, but that’s not all! First, this update allows you to download Xbox Originals which is what they are calling old Xbox games these days. There are six games available for download at 1200 MS points ($15) a piece. These new downloadable games do NOT have achievements and are pretty much the exact same game that you could go to GameStop and buy used for $1.99. However, GameStop isn’t open at 3AM and with the download, you’ll never have to worry about where that used disc has been and what exactly is that weird sticky stuff on the case. The obvious game to get is Halo if you haven’t played it already; Psychonauts is a tough game to find used and if you don’t have GameTap, you should also grab that one. The Atari game called “The Indigo Prophecy” was a game I didn’t remember coming out the first time, and rumor has it that Fuzion Frenzy was Bill Gates favorite game when the console launched, so that explains why it’s there. Seriously if you’re paying $15 for this, perhaps you’ll also pay $1,200 for a PS3.

Those of you who haven’t downloaded some of the older Live Arcade games are in luck because prices have been reduced on a few titles, including Bankshot Billiards which is now “only “ $10. Lumines LIVE also has a new price. The great thing is that these are permanent reductions; no “I better buy before Saturday” type of two day only sales here. The new dashboard update also encourages gamers to upgrade to an Xbox Live Gold account as now pretty much everything available at the marketplace will be time delayed by a week for silver subscribers. The first game-add on to use this is the new Bioshock update (Free).

A demo of the not-due-till-February RPG/Card game Culdcept Saga was released and I have to say, for a game I knew nothing about in a genre I have no interest in, it was a rather intriguing demo. Either that, or due to a dearth of download content, I’ll apparently grab anything.

Finally, this week’s Rock Band content is Black Sabbath. Here’s a thought: don’t say you’ll be able to play songs by The Who when they aren’t even available for download yet. I’m just saying.