With NFL teams getting ready for training camp, it’s time for armchair quarterbacks to get ready for what’s become the most anticipated sports release every summer—Madden.  And with the playable demo being released on the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Marketplace just this week, it’s even more reason to get excited.

As outlined in our impressions from E3, the new focus this year is in its GameFlow playcalling system.  The inclusion of this new system allows playcalling to take less time ..read more

As the hack-and-slash loot RPG genre is getting a revival on the PC with the release of Torchlight and the upcoming Diablo 3, the consoles haven’t seen much of the genre lately outside of some hybrids like Patapon and Borderlands. Hothead Games and Ron Gilbert are bringing the genre to XBLA and PSN with the kind of humorous spin that you’d expect from the creator of the Monkey Island series.

DeathSpank stars a hero named DeathSpank who is ..read more

I’ve been an editor for this publication for more than five years now, and the real joy of it (aside from offering my thoughts on the latest and greatest happenings in the gaming industry) is fielding questions.  We at SmashPad get a bunch of questions each day… some good, some stupid, and some just bizarre.  But I feel what really separates us is that we’re actually willing to take the time to answering your questions.

So I’m trying something new.  Every ..read more

Despite Comic Con being somewhat limited on game preview selection, we were able to get through a demo of the upcoming Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions on the showroom floor. Spidey games typically are hit or miss types of games: the movie tie-ins have been misses, but independent titles have garnered a bit more success. But the underlying problem with the games has been the combat. Button-mashing, button-mashing, swing, and button-mashing. After getting through the Dimensions demo, it looks like that trend ..read more

In the Gears of War series, The Locust have always seemed like such a bully. Sure, they’re trying to completely eviscerate any traces of human life, and they pop up from the ground and swallow cities, but have we really taken the time to get to know what they are really like? No, and because they’re alien bastards they can still stick it. But that’s no reason why we can’t play as them, right? So ditching any reason, Epic is ..read more

Let’s get straight to the point; Valve, makers of the Half Life series, Counterstrike, Team Fortress 2 and Portal have released a new game. The name of the game is Alien Swarm. It’s really good, and what’s more; it’s absolutely free.

Alien Swarm was originally a fan made mod for Unreal Tournament, and is now a standalone Steam-based game. It’s an almost-top-down 3D shooter with up to 4 players working in cooperation.

Each player gets to choose from 4 classes; Officer, Weapons ..read more

Just saw an advert for Knight and Day, the new Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz flick. What the hell is going on? The tone of this trailer is all over the place and leaves it feeling like an ad for a awful tv show nevermind a bad movie.

Is it meant to be funny? It’s not very funny but it seems to want to be funny. The action looks like the cheesy unnecessary overuse of cgi we’ve seen for years. It tells us ..read more

The first run of the European Console League happens next week in Liverpool.

The tournament runs from July 30th to August 1st. Games featured include COD4, Halo 3, GoW, Fifa 2010 and a little game called Super Street Fighter IV.

The Super tourney runs on the Saturday only, runs all day and now only costs £10 to enter! This is not too shabby considering that the original price for entering for SSFIV was £50.

That was dropped to £25 and then finally they ..read more

I’m writing this to you now after having lost around $15 (Ten pounds and eleven pence to be exact) to IGN.

Did you sign up for IGNs coverage of EVO 2009 last year? Did you too wait around for ages for the videos to appear, then wait in vain for all the pools videos that they promised they’d bring?

Well get on your Paypal account immediately! Go to Profile, My Pre Approved Statements under Financial Information, and then click on IGN Entertainment ..read more

The arcade version of Super Street Fighter IV was recently confirmed by SF director Yoshinori Ono.

However, it was only yesterday that the very first Japanese location test of the arcade version was held. The following screenshot was taken at the loctest yesterday, and reveals that there are two new empty character slots at either side of the screen!

Click here to see the full photo!

All the buzz right now seems to mainly center on the new characters likely including Elena, R. ..read more

With the latest news of Dragon Age II being revealed, Bioware is hard at work on the follow-up to their 2009 critically-acclaimed title.  While fans are anxiously awaiting to see what the sequel brings to the track, Bioware is not letting up on the gas as it keeps releasing a steady flow of downloadable content for Dragon Age: Origins.  The latest, Leliana’s Song, provides an exceptional back-story to one of Origins’ main characters, and although it is quite short (at ..read more

The buzz about Kinect since E3 has not been about the potential of this new technology nor the games, but the price and what it can’t do. Microsoft has confirmed today on Major Nelson’s blog that Kinect will retail for $149.99 that will include Kinect Adventures with it to confirm what many of the retailers, and even the Microsoft Store, have been saying since E3. They also formally announced the new Arcade that will retail for $199.99 and ..read more

Before the silhouette platformer becomes a crowded subgenre, it’s nice to have one game that sets the bar extremely high for the followers that are inevitably on the way. Limbo features a mix of platforming, puzzles, style, tension, and brutality that is a rare sight these days on XBLA or any platform these days. Limbo kicks off Summer of Arcade in style with a great game that manages to pack in equal parts style and substance into one ..read more

Microsoft announced last week that Destination Arcade would be released for everyone in the US to download when Summer of Arcade started next week, but Major Nelson has announced today that it would only be available to until Summer of Arcade ends on August 18. We really don’t understand this either.

Destination Arcade is the newest app for the Xbox 360 dashboard that was supposed to make the growing library of Xbox Live Arcade games a lot easier to ..read more

The conferences aren’t completely changing, at least not due to the events of this summer, but at least you can change the virtual landscape of college football. NCAA Football 11 features several upgrades and changes that improve the visual, presentation, community, and the controls quite a bit. Despite a few kinks in the armor, NCAA Football 11 offers enough improvements that it is easily worth a purchase for football fans.

The biggest additions to NCAA Football 11 are Pro-Tak, Real Assignment ..read more