There’s no doubt about it – the holidays are in the air! There’s nothing that says “Christmas” more than the 3rd snowstorm in a week, with a Storm of The Century coming over the weekend. I’ve used my snow blower more in a week than I did all of last year. Snow is great right up until December 25th, and then it becomes a big nuisance. Luckily we have plenty of games to keep me busy inside, and we’ll talk about what you can download this week.

First we’ll start with GameTap. As we mentioned last week, many games were removed from the library on December 10th, but GameTap tried to make up for it by releasing yet another new version of their core software. The 3.5 edition of the software has a cleaner interface and now allows Mac gamers to play Dreamcast games. One other note about the software: they’ve now taken down the game ‘counter’ showing how many games are available on the service. My guess is that you won’t sell a lot of subscriptions going from 1004 to 924 in a day.

Anyway, GameTap has released three new games on the service, and I have to say, I’m Strategy First-ed out. For the past few weeks it seems as though we are getting a constant supply of Strategy First games. Meanwhile “DiRT” has been on the coming soon tab for 2 months without a real release date. What’s up with that? The three games released for the service are Seal of Evil, Brigade E5 New Jagged Union and Texas Hold ‘Em Poker. Now just for the record, this is NOT the same Texas Hold ‘em that was on the Xbox 360. This version is a tad bit worse. Honestly, I’d rather see more Atari 2600 content than this.

Moving along to the Nintendo Wii’s Virtual Console, Pokémon fans will be pumped because the Nintendo 64 game Pokémon Snap was released for 1,000 Points. While I am not a Pokémon fan, you should note that you are able to take pictures and upload them on your message board, which in turns allows you to send your pictures to your friends. Thrilling, isn’t it. Oh look, I have mail. Aww, what a cute Pokémon. Now I will stick this fork in my eye.

Two other games were released for the VC: One was Baseball Stars 2, the Neo Geo classic, and the other was Ghosts N Goblins for the original NES. Paying $9 for Baseball Stars 2 seems rather silly to me, especially since you can get it and the arcade Ghosts n Goblins on GameTap, but hey, someone out there might be interested.

One new feature released this week on the VC – game gifting. You can now purchase a game for a friend and send it to them via a friend code. If the game was already purchased, you’ll receive a notice before you make the purchase. There are a few caveats here: first you can only send games to friends within your region, so if you are in the US, you can’t send a game to your friend in Japan (I’m guessing this is because the stores have different game libraries). The other thing is that you can’t gift a game you already own – you must purchase a new game. What this means is that if you already purchased Mario Kart 64, you can’t give your copy of the game – you have to buy a new copy of the game to send to your friend. It’s a shame because I have about 50 games I’d love to gift…or if I already own it, is that re-gifting? Oh well, whatever, nevermind.

Let’s move on to the PlayStation Network. This week’s offerings are not as good as I had hoped, but there may be something you’ll like in here. First is the demo for Burnout Paradise, which is definitely worth picking up. That’s it for new games; the rest of the items are add ons for existing games. First there are two new bowlers for High Velocity Bowling. If you missed last week’s article, you should definitely buy this game. Now, as far as the add on bowlers go, I’m not as excited. The pricing isn’t bad at $0.99 per bowler, but still here we go with Lumines-LIVEitis on the PS3.