Welcome to the first TWID column of 2008. Since things are still a little light on the download side (don’t buy the Wii games this week, they are all on GameTap, so is the Live game, and the PSN gets Rock Band content from last week as well as a bad NFL Tour demo), we figured we’d pause and recap 2007 on all of the consoles and GameTap on the PC.

Come on, a column wouldn’t be great without a horrible Nintendo pun, would it? One thing I’ll say about the Virtual Console is that the quantity outweighed the quality. Nintendo did stick to a great program of releasing at least two games every Monday – sometimes three, sometimes four.. but in order to do so they’ve raided the bargain bin game closet. I mean we all know that VC games were already released before, but we expected to see a lot more first party games that are unavailable anywhere else. Sure we did get a plethora of Mario and Zelda…but we also got some Turbo Grafx 16 games that should be avoided at all cost. Seriously, I don’t think anyone was begging to try those games in the first place.

In 2007 Nintendo added the Neo Geo and Turbo Grafx CD to the console lineup of the NES, SNES, N64, Sega Genesis and Turbo Grafx 16. Neo Geo games went for the rather steep price of 900 Wii Points or $9. The TGCD games went for 200 more points ($2) than the regular TG16 price of $6. Nintendo also brought Japanese imports to the Virtual Console, including the never before released in the US Sin and Punishment at a higher price point.

The biggest issue for the Wii is the limited memory which makes a gamer have to delete and re-download games once they’ve filled up the paltry 512MB of space. Nintendo really need s to work on making an SD memory card compatible for loading and playing Virtual Console games.

Overall, I found enough games to play to max out my Wii memory, and I look forward to every Monday morning like it’s Christmas, hoping that I will finally get to play Earthbound, which I’ve heard so much about but never got the chance to play. Another title missing is the original NES Pro Wrestling which I have fond memories of.

Best Games: anything Mario , Sin & Punishment, anything Zelda, Tecmo Bowl, Blades of Steel, Axelay, Punch Out!

Worst Games: Pretty much anything TG16 that’s not Devils Crush.

Most Anticipated Game that didn’t show up: EarthBound.

2008 Wish aside from Earthbound: Get memory cards to let us play games without copying and deleting from the main console memory.

It’s a good thing that Sony had some great releases in the last few months of the year, otherwise it would have been very easy to call the first year of PSN a disaster. Fifty four games are now available for purchase on the PSN, and some are actually worth downloading. By far the last six weeks of the PSN made up for the other 46. High Velocity Bowling and PAIN really ended the year on a very positive note. Sony doesn’t seem to have a handle on a sort of strategy for the PSN, save for the fact that updates are on Thursday…at some point. That’s right, they don’t even have a specified release time other than “Thursday;” sometimes it’s there at noon, other times, 8PM eastern. It is rather frustrating!

From the launch of the console, Sony allowed you to purchase games off the PS3 for transfer to the PSP, but you were unable to play the games right on the PS3. Then it was decided that maybe people would want to play those games on their PS3 as well…so they fixed that. Then the PSOne releases for the entire year were barely a drip. With an enormous library of PSone games, it’s a shame that it’s been so difficult to figure out a way to get them working on the PS3 (especially since backward compatibility was removed in newer versions of the Console).