Welcome to the leap year edition of This Week In Downloads. While there were quite a few new games at retail this week, there wasn’t a whole lot on the download front, so I’m afraid this will be a rather brief article….unless you like extra music for your Guitar Hero or Rock Band game…then you’ll have plenty to strum about.

Let’s begin with Monday’s Virtual Console releases. For months, I have been lamenting that the SNES classic EarthBound hasn’t made it to the Virtual Console. Well, this week…..is no exception; we’re still waiting.

All is not lost however, as we have a Nintendo 64 game…but it’s Kirby 64. Hey, it’s not a bad game at all – it looks great, but it is a Kirby game, which means you’ll be done with it rather quickly. You must also enjoy inhaling various enemies. It’s a little weird, but all inhaling aside I had 1,000 points lying around and I really needed to remove some of the crap VC games to my memory card, so this gave me a great reason to do so. Since there really wasn’t a lot to get this week, we’ll put this in the ‘buy’ list.

The other game is a TurboGrafx 16 classic called Psychosis. It’s one of the better shooting games on the TG16 and there are quite a few of these types of games on there, so that’s saying something. For me, having already played, I wasn’t as excited to go back and play this one, and I need to save some Wii Points for next week, when EarthBound comes out. I can dream, right?

Moving along, the Xbox 360 was the content champion this week with enough new game downloadable content to blow through a 5,000 point card and then some. If you’re an Ace Combat 6 fan, you’re in heaven as a mere nine (9!) new items are available for download. If you were crazy/excited enough to purchase every item released this week you’d have spent another $26 on this game! See how it all adds up? It’s really quite insane! The good news is that we have some actual new modes in the game instead of just additional plane skins, so there is legitimate new content here.

The Wednesday Xbox Live Arcade game was Triggerheart Exelica. Triggerheart is an unusual shooting game that uses the method of “anchoring” your shots to an enemy – anchoring is another word for “locking on.” On a side note, while the game sells on XBLA for only $10, perhaps you are a die hard freak like me , and so you’ll be springing for the just released $53 Japanese import version for the Sega Dreamcast. Yes, you heard me; this game was just released on February 20 for the Sega Dreamcast in Japan. Don’t believe me? Click here and see it for yourself. There, I just saved you $43. You’re welcome.

Those of you still enjoying Chessmaster Live will be happy to know a new board has been released, and it’s free. Those of us that don’t know much about Chess should probably move on with a guitar, shall we?

Let’s Rock – Rock Band and Guitar Hero 3(!) both have new content this week. Rock Band’s three new songs are all Nine Inch Nails classics, but I instead opted for the No Doubt track pack on Guitar Hero 3. Come on. Gwen beats Trent anyway on looks alone! The sad, depressing part of this is that I remember listening to “Sunday Morning” on my Tragic Kingdom tape (yes tape, my car didn’t have a CD player yet) and that was 13 friggin years ago. It’s official – I’m old. One warning on the No Doubt songs – they are tough, even on Medium. You’ve been warned.