This morning’s Nintendo Direct video featured a pleasant surprise for fans of the company’s original 3DS eShop games: Dillon’s Rolling Western is available for purchase right now.

First impressions: It looks great, controls well, and the gameplay’s fun. The terrific main character is saddled (not literally) with an incredibly annoying sidekick/helper. One concern is the lousy tutorial intro that throws you into battle with very foggy details regarding how to accomplish your goal. Overall, it shows a lot of promise; I’m looking forward to spending more time with it.

Is this action-adventure/tower-defense/western/fantasy worth $9.99? Stay tuned…

I’m rather engrossed in the puzzle creation tool in Pushmo right now. This week I have another character puzzle for you. It’s the plumber we all know and love in all his 8-bit glory: Mario!

I placed a three-star difficulty rating on this puzzle, but when you’re the creator, it’s hard to know whether your rating is accurate. So my question for those of you who download and play it: would you change the difficulty? Let me know in the comments along with any other thoughts you might have!

Metal Gear’s free demo download wasn’t the only reason to check out eShop this week: Super Mario Brothers became the first of the ambassador NES games to become available for purchase to all North American 3DS owners who bought their systems after the hardware price drop. It’s priced at $4.99.

Super Mario Brothers has been updated to include Restore Points, and will now dazzle your eyes with a wonderful rotating NES console as the new 3D screen menu icon for the game. These updates are also available to ambassadors via a free downloadable upgrade.

Most of us figured Nintendo had to make the Ambassador NES and GBA games available to all 3DS owners at some point. I’m hoping the rest of the titles get released at a steady clip!

At a time when many development studios are in danger of closing there doors, or in the case of Visceral Games and Bizarre Creations,they already have, it becomes apparent that the business of video games can be rough at times. It’s not all doom and gloom, there are actually a lot of dev houses that are making quite a bit of money such as Infinity Ward, Blizzard, and yes, even Nintendo. But those are heavy weights in the game industry. Is there any room for the little guy? Well just ask Wayforward and they will tell you they are doing just fine.

CEO John Beck recently interviewed with Gamasutra about their business practices, and as it turns out the company has been able to stay afloat mainly on the back of Nintendo platforms. When asked about their future business strategy, Beck said, “The eShop will be a major part of our strategy for handheld games going forward.” (more…)

The 25th anniversary of Zelda may have happened in 2011, but Nintendo has still given you time to download a free trip to Hyrule on your 3DS or DSi. If you own one of the two handhelds, you have until February 20 to download Four Swords on the DSiWare and the 3DS eshop. Act soon and stop procrastinating, you only have until Monday!

Four Swords was originally a free add-on the the Game Boy Advance version of Link to the Past. With three friends, the game is a blast! I actually downloaded the game on my 3DS and my DSi, just so I could loan out one of my systems when I wanted to play the game with a friend. I still think it was a missed opportunity for Nintendo to not add an online mode, but that’s another story.

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