Do I talk about WiiWare too much? Well, here I go again

It's arguable that Sony and Microsoft pay little to no mind to their downloadable offerings. Microsoft has definetly  changed their tune this past summer, building up the month of August as one belonging to XBLA, your one stop shop for downloadable content (both Braid and Castle Crashers were released that month). Sony's efforts have been pretty poor, as they rarely try to make a big deal out of their own products. Thursday's come with great content sold over their PSN service, and yet unless you scoured Neogaf or Kotaku, you'd have no real idea of what to look out for.

But hell, at least there's some effort behind their services. Every now and then some elbow grease shows through.

Nintendo on the other hand really needs to toot the horn myself and many others have to constantly commandeer.

I'm being so cynical because I think that over the last few weeks, there's been plenty to talk about on the Wii. While I could go on yet again about how the Wii landed a major coup with Telltale Game's Strong Bad series, I'll spare you....EPISODE TWO HURTS ME SO GOOD.

No. Instead I think it's important to spread the word on Nintendo's Art Style games. When the first Art Style game was released, the first thing to assume was that it was another throwaway WiiWare game. But after some detective work, I found out that Art Style: Orbient was a remake of Orbital, a Game Boy Advance game from Japan. Late in the GBA's life, Nintendo published these games under the Bit Generation name, a label of sorts for games that presented themselves in the simplest of ways. I believe the goal was to show that no matter the appearance, fun is fun. And now with the Art Style line, Nintendo is hoping to do it all over again. And so far so good. Orbient is a lot of fun, and can become a real challenge. As a planet of sorts, you hold down A to draw yourself closer to oncoming planets, while B pushes you away. But due to the pull of these planets, you're always being drawn into their orbits, which can be bad if your planet is much smaller. Simply enough, you want to absorb smaller planets into your own orbit, eventually growing big enough to move onto the next zone. You can see a visual example of whatever the hell I'm talking about, here. The difficulty comes in the layout of the planets within each stage. Developer Skip came up with some devlish stages, but because of the game's simplicity, you always feel that a victory is close by.

Cubello is the more recent of the two, and it's even more interesting. A grid of blocks form around a core, and your goal is to get rid of the excess weight and leave the big cheese (the core) standing alone. By connecting four like coloured blocks together, they fall off and you continue to widdle your way down to the core. There's something about the game's minimalist design that makes it so beautiful. You really feel as if the game was really well thought out. You're only provided with a few blocks when you begin, but as you knock others off, you earn more. Your turn ends when you run out of blocks. I'm probably making it sound really awful, so watch this video and see its splendor, you may even see a condom commercial like I did. As you play, the collection of blocks slowly spins round and round, so sometimes that sweet spot you saw isn't readily available. But you can't sit around waiting either as the grid will make its way closer and closer to the foreground, and then it becomes almost impossible to see anything. Of the two, I highly recommend Cubello. It's just a lot of fun, and I honestly believed the last truly fun matching block game was Meteos. I'm glad I was wrong.

With another Art Style game coming this month, I can only hope this little experiment turns into a success. As much as I love the large adventures we're seeing with titles like Braid and Quest for Booty, I love these tiny experimental games just as much. It's what I hoped for when these three services were launched. All three companies need to promote these titles more, and not count on an internet savvy group of gamers to save the day. There's only so many people that I know. And half of those will even listen to me.