[Every week we round up the top news and interviews of the last week from console digital download site GamerBytes, featuring new information about Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, WiiWare, DSiWare and PSN Minis.]

This week was a bit quiet in regards to actual console downloadable game news, but fear not - we've kept ourselves busy by revealing new information regarding the Xbox Live Indie Games and the Game Room.

In some of our featured posts for the week, we take a look at the Xbox Live Indies games of 2009 and the sales they've garnered over the year, discovering that things aren't as dire as some sites may make you believe. We also discover some secrets of the Game Room project -- it's quite a fascinating way of dealing with classic games.

We are also near the end of our Developer Reflections series. This time, we speak to Ronimo Games, Barker's Crest Studio and Creat Studios and look at their year in making downloadable console video games, and what their plans are for 2010.

Top Stories

Microsoft's Genius - Rate The Room, Rate Every Game - But Those Rated Teen And Up Left Out?
In-Depth: Xbox Live Indie Games Sales For 2009, Plus Some Perspective

Originals

Developer Reflections 2009 - Ronimo Games
Developer Reflections 2009: Barkers Crest Studio
Developer Reflections 2009: Creat Studios (Part 1)

Store Updates

XBLA Update - KrissX, New Pinball FX Table, Cheap Portal
NA PSN Store Update - Thexder Neo PS3, Hustle Kings And More
EU PSN Store Update - Thexder Neo PS3, Polar Panic
NA Nintendo Update - Bittos, Uno, Ghoul Patrol And More
EU Nintendo Update - Legends Of Exidia, Eco Shooter, Street Fighter Alpha 2 And More

This week's Xbox Live Arcade release is Chime - a musical puzzle game that will be sending 60% of the price to charity. The game only costs 400MSP, so you might want to give it a quick look.

Also we get another XBLA Deal Of The Week - Splosion Man is half price for Xbox Live Gold users for just this week. You can grab it for 400MSP here.

Big update this week on all fronts with a whole lot of content for WiiWare and DSiWare.

DSiWare's update includes True Swing Golf Express for 800 Points, Legends of Exidia for 800 Points, Downtown Texas Hold'em for 500, Move your Brain Rollway Puzzle for 500, and 5 in 1 Solitaire for 200 Points.

On WiiWare we finally have the last episode of the Tales Of Monkey Island series for 1,000 Points, Tumblebugs 2 for 800 Points, and the WiiWare version of 5 in 1 Solitaire for 500 Points.

Finally, the Virtual Console this week is Alex Kidd In Shinobi World for 500 Points.

After Burner Climax has officially been announced, and with it comes the first footage of the game in action.

The game is intense and looks just like the arcade version that came out a few years ago. It's a thrill just watching it - hopefully it plays just as well.

It's strange to see what looks to be a lot of care being put into this game, while the leaked images of Sonic Adventure DX looks very quick-and-dirty. Hopefully we'll get some answer about that soon.

Alongside Ancients Of Ooga, NinjaBee are also working on a second title for the Xbox Live Arcade - a sequel to Keflings.

A Kingdom For Keflings was a fascinating project for NinjaBee - the first true game developed with Avatar support which worked out incredibly well for the developer - but it didn't come easy. The game has a difficult time running itself, and being from a small developer they weren't able to get it to a point that they wanted. The postmortem for the original Keflings goes through a lot of the problems they had, but now they get a second chance.

A World Of Keflings will involve new scenarios to play through as well as local multiplayer. We should start seeing more of it soon enough.

Source: IGN.com - A World Of Keflings Announced

While our Developer Reflection series has been quite popular since its inseption, Creat Studios decided to go a step further - three separate reflections for three of their titles.

In our second episode we speak to Nastya Barmina, the Producer of Mushroom Wars about developing the neat strategy title and what she'll be bringing into 2010.

What were you most happy with during the game's development?

Nastya Barmina: The most exciting thing was creating the kind of unique game which brings fast-paced strategy gameplay to the forefront. Another one thing we did like was designing game maps and AI to provide enough challenge to players and encourage them to compete with each other in scoreboards. Play testing all through the development course was very satisfying and supporting, because we saw what real players like or dislike in the game what we should tune to make it better where are our strong and weak sides.

What were you least happy with, in retrospect?

NB: Being overwhelmed by bug fixing before release. Feature cut which decrease game value.

What is the biggest lesson you're going to apply to the next game you make?

NB: 1. Necessity of prototyping of all game feature starting from gameplay and ending with visual features. 2. Development of the project should be even in all directions: we had formed gameplay earlier than our art style, and art had to overtake gameplay and programming. It caused issues and lot of additional work that wasn’t planned. 3. The network component should be included as the core feature in contemporary games (especially strategies J)

Behemoth have finally given Game #3 A name - Battleblock Theatre has now officially been unveiled for the Xbox Live Arcade.

The story is as follows:

"Having shipwrecked on a mysterious island you find yourself both betrayed by your best friend Hatty and captured by the locals. All of this is happening while being forced into deadly performances. This however, is just the start of your problems."

The game looks to have both online competitive multipler as well as some cooperative levels. Look out for it before the end of the year.

A week or so ago we showed off some leaked footage of NeoGeo Battle Coliseum in action. Now SNK themselves have revealed more direct feed footage - and at 720p.

Still looks like a nice update with the graphics given a bit of smoothing over. Lets hope their other titles get similar treatments.

With Paramount Entertainment's prior mining of their movie catalog with Star Trek D.A.C and The Warriors on the Xbox Live Arcade, it's no surprise they're doing it again - this time taking on 1990's Tom Cruise Vehicle Days Of Thunder.

The game is "inspired" by the original movie, featuring 4 tracks of Nascar variety where you can race against the characters from the film in single player modes, or hop online and race against 12 other players online.

The game is being developed by Piranha Games - the same fellows behind the upcoming Mechwarrior reboot, but also the guys behind Need For Speed Undercover for PSP and helped a bit with Need For Speed Shift. They do have some racing games under their belt, but the footage shown above looks very unfinished. Either they had a lot of trouble dealing with the video codecs, or that framerate is chugging like nothing else.

I'm a little worried about the project - like The Warriors it has a decent enough premise, but whether it has the budget to make it a top tier title is another question altogether.

Living in Australia, I'm usually not privy to cool little trinkets game writers get, but the nice fellows over at Introversion Software sent me an awesome package of swag I thought I'd mention.

The Darwinia+ package included a "digital dream-scape" book detailing the evolution of Darwinia from being a pit of DOOM Pinkies to what we know the game as today, a reviewer's book with details on the new title, a music soundtrack, and my very own little Darwinian to hug and kiss and call George. Props to the Introversion guys for sending it all out.

Flipping through the reviewers guide, it also reveals the game will include two Avatar Awards - A shirt for completing a mission of the single player mode, and a shirt for completing one multiplayer battle.

Darwinia+ will be hitting next week for 1200MSP. Be on the lookout for it.

Getting a bit of attention means getting through peer review super fast. Your Doodles Are Bugged! is now live for 80MSP ($1).

I've played a good chunk of it now, and I quite like it. Gets pretty damn hard by the 8th level though - but give it a go anyhow.

The charity puzzler Chime is now available on Xbox Live Arcade for 400MSP. It's a crazy 800+ meg file though, which is pretty damn crazy for such a simple looking game. Are they using uncompressed WAV files for music or something? Geez.

Also this week is a ton of downloadable content. 0 Day Attack On Earth gets a "Night Pack" for 560MSP, remixing previous levels with new enemy types in a night setting, Buku Sudoku got its twelfth Sudoku expansion for 160MSP, and 0D Beat Drop gets a musical expansion for 150MSP that's based on the fighter BlazBlue

And don't forget, 'Splosion Man is 400MSP for just this week on XBLA.

Halfbrick Studios have collaborated with news blog Destructoid to bring their happy little robot mascot into their upcoming Raskulls title.

Mr. Destructoid will be made available by unlocking him through the single-player campaign. This is not the first time the green robot has made it into a game - he was also available in Bomberman Ultra for the PlayStation Network as well as a few Xbox Indies titles.

We should hopefully see more of Raskulls soon, it's looking great so far.

Source: Destructoid

With our recent story regarding Microsoft's Game Room only allowing games that would fall under E10+, we felt that people might be a little confused on how this actually works. So we spoke to the ESRB directly, and with it some more knowledge.

In regards to downloadable content for games already rated, if the DLC contains content that is in line with the original product's rating, it will extend to it. If it does not, like in the case of GTA: The Lost And The Damned, the content is required to be submitted to the ESRB for rating.

So as the Game Room is itself been rated E10+, all games that will be released for it will have to fall under the E10+ rating in order to get a free pass onto the Game Room.

E10+ does fit a lot of games, even those that most people would not expect - Streets Of Rage, Final Fight and other brawlers fit under the E10+ banner, probably due to the lack of blood.

There are very few games that fall within the Teen or Mature rating. On the Genesis there are a total of 18 games that were ever rated Teen or Mature including the Mortal Kombats and Golden Axe games.

However we may have been mistaken regarding one thing - games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat could make it to the Game Room, it's just that they would have to be rated outside of the Game Room for it to work. As we mentioned before - any DLC that fits outside the original guideline can still be a part of the game, but they'd have to be rated separately. A good example of this would be Lumines Live for the Xbox Live Arcade - the standard game is rated a standard E, but the Tokyo Club Mix Pack DLC had to be rated separately thanks to "Mild Suggestive Themes", and got an E10+.

BUt while it technically could happen, Microsoft are not interested in it at this moment. "We currently have no plans to feature titles of those [higher Teen and Mature] ratings", as per the previous article. But if we're going up the gaming evolutionary ladder with Game Room, we've got a long time before they even start thinking of emulating the Arcade boards those games titles work on, so don't worry about it.

As an added bonus, we also got the skinny on how music games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero work with their DLC. The way it officially works is that music DLC isn't rated either, but is requires to display the song's RIAA warning should it have one. Fascinating!

Hope that clears everything up.

And so we're on our final piece for the Developer's Reflection series of articles. We've been running this for some 3 weeks now, I hope you all enjoyed reading it.

Today we have our final talk with Creat Studios - this time with the Olga Sokolova, Producer of Magic Orbz / Magic Ball and Cuboid for the PlayStation Network. We also have a Word From Scott Hyman, Director of Business Development at Creat Studios about his thoughts going forward on the PlayStation Network.

We should hope 2010 is great for all the developers we've spoken too - hopefully we'll do it again next year! And now onto the questions:

What were you most happy with during the game's development?

Olga Sokolova: To see new features appearing in the game and working as we wanted them to work. In the early stages, the game is like an embryo looking like fish or frog or something – but nothing like the game you’re imagining and want to see. And then, one fine day, you see that it transformed into something looking really like a game. It’s a great, mysterious thrill of making games that you never get used to.

Closer to the projects we made – in Cuboid it was sound. When I heard it all together for the first time, it was really exciting. And the little cut-scenes, when the player passes the episode and everything changes around – it’s so touching. In Magic Ball, it was… testing! I liked playing that game so much that it was really cool to play it while pretending to help QA guys. And in Digger, I liked those little things that were made by our artists or programmers on their own initiative – some visual effects that were really like a surprise and a little present for me.

What were you least happy with, in retrospect?

OS: I hate that days right before milestones or submission when everything goes wrong – even the things that could never go wrong in the theory. And in Magic Ball, for example, there are still some things not as polished as we would like, and that we could probably make better. When I see them I still get upset. While making Cuboid, I was sad that I was not able to pass difficult levels myself. As for Digger, it was the most happy game I’ve ever done and I really have nothing to remember as negative– only small complaints that are not interesting, even for me.

What is the biggest lesson you're going to apply to the next game you make?

OS: It’s not a real revelation, but what we should always remember – it’s people who make the game; not technologies, not production plans, not computers. Although everything is important, of course, but people and their creativity and their willingness to create the game are the most valuable.

And one more thing that we always want to have but usually can’t afford: more time for polishing. When you think the project is finished, having 2-3 more weeks to make something – the small improvements that, of course, are NOT necessary – will give you something you’ll be proud of.

And Now, A Word From Scott Hyman, Director of Business Development at Creat Studios

What is the biggest lesson you're going to apply to the next game you make?

Scott Hyman: Multiplayer and demos. Demos and multiplayer. The great majority of feature requests and feedback we have received are for online and local multiplayer, and demo versions to try our games. We’ve listened and responded.

[Cuboid, Digger and Magic Orbz are all now available on the PlayStation Network. We hope you enjoyed our series of developer chats, hopefully we can expand on it next year!]

Organizers of GDC 2010 are reminding that today is the last day to register for up to 35% off pass prices for the March 9th-13th event, with the free Android phone offer also expiring today.

The Moscone Center, San Francisco-based event has just announced a raft of new lectures, including highlighted talks from Pixar notables, Lionhead's Peter Molyneux, Double Fine's Tim Schafer, and Final Fantasy XIII's director Motomu Toriyama, and a surprise lecture from Metroid co-creator Yoshio Sakamoto.

However, Thursday, February 4th is the final day that GDC is accepting registrations at the early rate, which includes up to 35% discount from final pass prices. The early reg rate will be open until 11.50pm ET this evening.

In addition, today is the final day to register for free Nexus One and Verizon Droid by Motorola phones with GDC 2010 attendance, as part of a promotion between Google and Game Developers Conference. Select All-Access Pass and Summits & Tutorials Pass attendees will receive the phone, and more information is available on a GDC website page.

As well as the nine major Summits, from iPhone to indie and social games -- and notable tutorials on the first two days of the show, there are six main Tracks - programming, art, production, business, audio, and design - for GDC 2010. These include lectures from the creators of Assassin's Creed II, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Uncharted 2, Braid, God Of War III, Dante's Inferno, APB, and a host of other acclaimed games.

Game Developers Conference 2010 -- part of Think Services, as is this website -- will also play host to the GDC Expo Floor, including a host of notable tool companies, the recruitment-specific GDC Career Pavilion, the 12th Annual Independent Games Festival plus Awards and the 10th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards, open to all pass holders.

More information on many of the highlighted areas of GDC 2010 is available on the official Game Developers Conference weblog, and the GDC 2010 website has a full list of lectures, passes, and opportunities at this year's event, as well as specific on registration pricing and options.

Attendees are also reminded that they can email GDC 2010's registration staff -- or call them at 866-535-8997 or +1 (415) 947-6926 from 9am to 4pm PT each weekday -- if they have any issues registering. (All GDC 2010 registrations commenced before the 11.50pm ET deadline will be honored, even if any technical issues occur.)

So Project Needlemouse has been unveilved - Sonic The Hedgehog 4, for Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network And WiiWare, Coming Summer 2010. Trailer above.

The game is set to be episodic, but each episode will be the equivalent of one of the standard Sonic games - think Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles. From the short bit of footage from the trailer the game looks great, and as a huge Sonic fan from back in the day, I've got some high hopes for this one. Let's hope the Sonic Cycle doesn't continue this time.

Source: Gamespot - Sonic 4 Q&A.

It took more than a month, but Final Fantasy VIII is now available in Europe! Go grab it, you know you want to.

No new games this week, but Europe has begun a "minis month" promotion, where some PSN minis are now available a little cheaper, and will also be pushing new minis on the PlayStaton Blog. FieldRunners, Kahoots, Pinball Fantasies and more are now available that little bit cheaper.

For the full list you'll have to continue reading, but give them all a look at take a punt at one or two - they all work on PSP and PS3. A new addition to the minis as well - Spaceballs Revolution, which was also released on WiiWare a few months ago.

One of Interplay's weirdest Super Nintendo games will be coming to DSiWare soon - Prehistorik Man.

Funny seeing the game get a resurgence before it makes it to Virtual Console. This version will also include some Touch Screen support and the ability to... shout at your enemies. Sure!

It's been a while since this game came out in the US, but Europe has finally nabbed Excitebike: World Challenge for WiiWare. If you're a fan of the original NES game, you can download this new one for 1,000 Points. Alongside its release is "Aha! I Found It!" Hidden Object Game for 500 Points.

For DSiWare this week there's Snakenoid from Cinemax for 500 Points - a mixture between Snake and Arkanoid, oddly enough.

And for the Virtual Console, Capcom's Final Fight 3 is now available.for 800 Points.

In our latest employment-specific round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in big sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from Black Rock Studio, Blizzard and more.

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted this week include:

Black Rock Studio: Lead Vehicle Artist
"When a company the size of Disney steps into European development, it's pretty big news. Disney employs over 100,000 staff. It’s one of the biggest Entertainment companies in the world and it's getting serious about original games. We're a strong studio of just over a hundred people, based at the heart of beautiful and cosmopolitan Brighton, UK. Just a quick train ride away from London in an office where pretty much everyone gets a sea view. The atmosphere is relaxed and friendly but focussed and our role is to create original racing game franchises."

CCP China: Senior Programmer
"CCP, makers of the largest game universe in existence, is looking for a Senior Engineer to be a part of the creative team that brought the world the groundbreaking MMO title, EVE Online. Successful applicants will join a seasoned team based in Shanghai, China where they will work on original games for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3."

One new title this week - Pieces Interactive's Fret Nice is now available for $14.99 on the PlayStation Store - along with a demo too. You can also check out a demo of Gameloft's Tank Battles. Madden NFL Arcade is also $5 off for this week.

Outside of that, nothing else. No minis despite Europe having a minis month. Where are those games?