Don't lose balance!

WiiWare this week is mostly predictable - All three games have been out in North America for some time, and two of them were even specifically announced for release today. VC and DSiWare are a bit more surprising, although neither of them has really gotten something great.

You, Me and the Cubes is Nintendo's latest. Designed by the relatively famous Kenji Eno, the concept is pretty simple - Drop little people onto cube formations without upsetting the balance, causing them to fall off. As you go on, the formations become much more complicated and you'll need to do some real thinking to figure out where to throw people. As it was released in North America last Monday, we'll have a review up very soon. It costs 1000 Wii Points.

The Siege of Spinner Cay is the second part of Telltale and LucasArts' completely new Monkey Island game. After escaping from Flotsam Island, Guybrush reunites with his beloved Elaine at the titular Spinner Cay, but of course it doesn't last long - He must find three legendary artifacts to continue his search for La Esponja Grande, hidden around a nearby island. If you liked the first chapter (Which you absolutely must have played first, otherwise you'll miss vital plot) you'll no doubt like this one too. What is disappointing, however, is that the framerate and sound issues from the WiiWare version of chapter 1 are here again - It's slightly less bad, but there are still noticeable hiccups, and it even freezes completely sometimes! If you are absolutely unable to play the PC version of the game, it's still worth it, though. It'll cost you 1000 Wii Points.

It's a bit weird of Gameloft to release Sexy Poker now - They released a different WiiWare poker game less than a month ago. As you might've already figured out from coverage of the North American release, this one is really quite dire. The only thing you do is try to get anime girls to strip down to their underwear - With minimal effort you can probably find anime girls going even further than that on the web, but let's not go there! It'd be all fine and dandy if the gameplay was any good, but with some of the most basic features of any poker game missing it's pretty much broken and a waste of 500 Wii Points.

The Virtual Console has only one new offering this time after two weeks of two games each - The Master System version of R-Type is a bit of a pointless release, considering we've already had the almost arcade-perfect Turbografx version available since 2006! Of course, you might argue that that costs 800 Wii Points while this one only costs 500, but is it really worth paying slightly less to get what is generally considered to be an inferior version of the game instead of just ponying up the cash for one of the best versions made? We'll review it in the next few days.

DSiWare's sole new release seems to be a port of a WiiWare game - Yummy Yummy Cooking Jam will likely feature the same gameplay of creating food as fast as you can before your customers get annoyed at you for taking too long. We thought the WiiWare version was fairly mediocre, but this one costs 500 points instead of 1000 - Perhaps that makes it slightly more attractive? We'll review it soon.

5 games this week, not too shabby even if we're mostly playing catch-up!