Rounding out the paid downloadable content are two new characters for Pain: there’s Ginger, the nurse who’s well endowed and Muffy the cheerleader. No, I’m not making these names up. Each character will set you back ninety-nine cents.

The MLB2K8 demo, although a week behind the 360 counterpart, makes its debut on the PlayStation 3 this week. My experience with the 360 demo wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as my time with the full game, so be careful on judging this demo to the full game – your mileage may vary, as they say. While the PC PlayStation store has a demo for Wipeout pulse and some nice new PSP themes, PS3 owners are wondering why you can’t download the Pulse demo to your PSP. Weird.

If you’ve been a loyal reader of this column (special thanks to the three of you), you know that I haven’t been too keen on GameTap recently. While I love their catalog, within the past couple of months we’ve seen many games disappear, the announcement that Myst Uru will be turned off in a few weeks and now week to week we continue to see less and less content. I wonder if the success of Virtual Console has made game publishers be a little stingier with their product?

Anyway, GameTap has two new games this week: the latest Episode of the popular Sam & Max series is released as well as “Iron Warriors,” a tank simulation. The Sam & Max game is one of the best chapters to date, but I’d really like to see more Genesis, 2600, or ColecoVision games on here on a weekly basis (yes, most CV games are old arcade games so there’s not much of a chance of that, but hey, I can dream). Hey, I don’t ask for much, right?

Speaking of dreaming, it’s another week without EarthBound on the Wii Virtual Console. After reading an article about how EarthBound combated piracy back in the day, I wonder if it can be transferred to the VC at all. (Basically the cartridge checked to see if it was on a ‘supercart’ and if so; it would run but with more in-game enemies and it would erase all your saves right before the final battle).

All is not lost in VC land as Americans are treated to two games that never made it here back in the day. First off we have Puyo Puyo 2 (Electric Bugaloo) which was originally released for the Genesis and then we have the SNES “classic” DoReMi Fantasy: Milon's DokiDoki Adventure. One huge caveat here on these games: when the Nintendo store says that “elements not essential to gameplay may be in Japanese,” they aren’t kidding. Seriously, this game has more Japanese in it than my DualShock 3 import controller. Personally I think that the in game talking is essential to understanding the gameplay, so I’d skip it. Nice of them to make it available however, but at the “import” price of 900 is a little insane considering that other imported games have more English than Japanese. Grrrr.

So, that winds down another episode of This Week In Downloads. Stay tuned for next week where I complain for the umpteenth week in a row about not seeing EarthBound on Virtual Console!

Dan’s Picks: Brain Challenge (360), Mass Effect content (360), Sam & Max (GameTap), Toy Home Update (PS3)

Wii Virtual Console

GameTap