On Thursday, Oct. 5, the world lost a great innovator of technology.

Steven Paul Jobs will be remembered by most people as an esteemed founder CEO of Apple. His inventions, the “Mac,” iPod, iPhone, and iPad are all household names that are revolutionary because of their visual aesthetics and accessibility.

According to a release provided by the Jobs family, Jobs passed peacefully surrounded by his family.

While we don’t regularly cover happenings in the tech world, Jobs definitely did have an impact on ..read more

Fighting games are, when you get down to it, the original eSport. As such, it’s baffling to some people how the genre hasn’t taken off to the kind of mainstream success as have genres that came along later, like first-person shooters and real-time strategy. It isn’t that fighting games haven’t been represented in big-tent leagues like Major League Gaming and the World Cyber Games, but the community at large has shown a general reluctance to support them when it happens.

This ..read more

Coming right out with it, Nintendo and its fans annoyed the hell out of me in the months leading up to the Wii’s unveiling, and eventually its release. It felt like I couldn’t go on a message board or read any bit of gaming news without having this massive gaming “Revolution” shoved in my face. Nintendo was supposedly going to release a console that would completely change the way we played video games forever, make us gladly leave the past ..read more

The Shenmue fanbase can pretty well defend its status as one of the more tormented in gaming history. The original Shenmue was one of the Sega Dreamcast’s true highlights, but a sales disaster. Spending more than $60,000,000 on a development budget was an astronomical figure eleven years ago, and Sega never even came close to recovering that expense through sales of the game. Fans know how that played out all too well; Sega withdrew the Dreamcast from the North American ..read more

This was the scene at RedOctane’s funeral for the Air Guitar at the European launch of Guitar Hero II. Irony has a nasty way of coming back to at you, no?

With the Guitar Hero series being nixed by Activision, it seemed like a good time to look back at the various titles in the franchise and figure out what worked and where it started to go wrong. This is by no means a scientific study of mechanics ..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

A couple of years ago, when the original iPhone was still a week away from release, I wrote a pretty ballsy article entitled Sony, Not Nintendo, Should Be Very Afraid of the iPhone, in which I outlined a number of reasons why the iPhone could flip the mobile gaming market on its head. For the most part, I was right. It’s still a hell of a different experience than what we’re used to on the DS and PSP, but sales ..read more

Welcome to the first entry of PadSmashing, a feature on SmashPad that features our staff heading to release parties and gaming conferences across the United States for one thing and one thing only–getting down with the get down.

Our first event?  The Final Fantasy XIII Release Party at the Regency Center in San Francisco!

Just a little while ago, the highly anticipated Final Fantasy XIII arrived in western shores.  Developed and published by the RPG masters at Square Enix, the game is ..read more

We are just hours away from the release of what is probably the biggest RPG this year.  RPG enthusiasts are expecting Final Fantasy XIII to revolutionize the genre for this era.  But while reviews, including our very own, are still coming in, the fact remains that hype for this title is high.

The hype is so high that Square Enix Public Relations officials have been doing as much as they can to feed off this attention… literally.

You may have seen it ..read more

Whenever a game has to install some data to the hard drive, you usually have to sit with a blank screen as a bar fills up or stare at a few screenshots or some sort of video while you wait for the install to finish. The ideal way to deal with those kinds of situation is to switch to the TV or find something else to do for ten minutes, but Heavy Rain offers the chance to do a little ..read more