Welcome to This Week In Downloads. With the CES happening this week, there wasn’t a whole lot to talk about – minimal releases all around, but that’s okay – we can spend more time enjoying those tasty morsels! Speaking of CES, one of the biggest announcements was that Sony is developing a way to transfer blu ray disc movies to your PSP. Now that is cool and technically a download so it gets a mention here. What we won’t mention here is that some people actually gave the Wii Wireless Nunchuck controller a best of CES award. I mean really, that’s the best thing out there? Glad I didn’t go to Vegas…

While three may be a magic number on Schoolhouse Rock, two seemed to be the number of the week. GameTap, Xbox Live Arcade and the Virtual Console all launched two games apiece on their services. We’ll start with GameTap, because G comes before X and V in the alphabet. Pretty creative, huh?

I need to clarify that last paragraph on GameTap. While there were indeed two new games added to the service, twenty-three games that were on the service in November but got deleted in December due to contractual arrangements have been reborn. While adult gamers may not be excited about this development, anyone with young children will be thrilled that Freddi Fish, Putt-Putt and Pajama Sam are once again on GameTap. The two “new” releases were the ho-hum puzzler Jewelcraft and the much anticipated Sam & Max Season Two Episode Two game called “Moai Better Blues.” If you like the Sam & Max series, it’s definitely one to play – kudos once again to GameTap for giving gamers something new for the low price of zero while other suckers will have to drop $9 for this title.

Continuing are alphabetical theme for this week, we move along to the Virtual Console (hey even if I said Wii, it would still be next). The two games released on this console were King Of Fighters ’94 for $9 and the NES favorite “StarTropics.” I say NES favorite because that’s what the Wikipedia entry says, and I believe everything on Wikipedia. I vaguely remember the game name from back in the day, but I’m really not interested in it for $5. Meanwhile, you’ve probably heard me say this like a buhzillion times in the past but while KoF ’94 is a good game, it’s definitely not $9 good. You can also find it and every other year’s KoF game on GameTap, so save your Wii memory and Wii Points for something else, like maybe EarthBound, if it ever gets released.

There were also two new for-pay games on Live Arcade. The first game was one I was very excited about because I was a great player on the arcade machine way back when. It’s been a while but it’s wonderful to see the original Tron game back. Well, hang on…while it’s wonderful to see it back, the Xbox 360 controller is not a very good way to play this game. If you were around in the early 80s, you’d know that to play Tron, you had this very cool futuristic looking flight yoke and a rotary dial which you used to aim. The rotary dial has been replaced with the right stick. Ugh. It’s like trying to play Tempest with a d-pad (read: not fun). That combined with the not-really accurate sound (I don’t remember the sound being that bad), makes it a must-not-buy game.

The other game on Live Arcade is stunningly gorgeous. Omega Five is a beautiful looking game, but the gameplay elements are just so-so. If you’ve played Heavy Weapon, the mechanics are somewhat familiar except you’re moving all over the place instead. Hmmm..$10 for this? Well I have to spend my Marketplace points on something, so it might as well be this, but I’m buying it mostly for the visuals over the gameplay.

Last week PS3 owners were “lucky” to be the first to download, play, say “Blech” and delete NFL Tour, and now Xbox 360 owners can also take part in the “I wasted five minutes of download time for this” routine. The 360 version is very close to the PS3 version, and I mean that in a very derogatory, man this game sucks sort of way. Now I made you want to download it just to see how bad it is, didn’t I? Good – my job is done.