Introversion Software’s Darwinia was a low-key release on the PC and Mac in 2005, but steadily gained critical praise and mainstream success. The next year they released Multiwinia, a real-time strategy game based on Darwinia’s gameplay. Seeing an opportunity to bring the experience to the console market, Microsoft courted Introversion to bring their games to the XBLA. The result was Darwinia+, and it’s definitely worth the download.

Darwinia+ includes the original Darwinia campaign and story, as well as the ..read more

It’s rare that any portion of the money we spend on our games goes to anybody but the various companies involved in making and producing the game, so our interest was piqued when Zoe Mode and their non-profit publisher OneBigGame announced Chime, a non-profit game for Xbox Live Arcade. This rhythm puzzle game offers a fun experience for the 400 Microsoft points it costs with a large portion of that money going to charity.

The way Chime works is ..read more

Digital download services on each of the three consoles seem to be quite a home for old-school games such as Mega Man and Castlevania, and they’ve especially been a haven for sci-fi style shooters as well.  With this, Konami has brought back Assault Heroes for the PlayStation Network.

The game was actually released on the Xbox Live Arcade a few years ago, and the only difference is that the PSN version is five bucks more expensive at $9.99.  But if you’ve ..read more

Death by Cube is yet another in a growing genre of two-stick arcade shooters in the vein of Geometry Wars. Early sneak peeks had us excited to experience more depth and story than other titles in the category, and the fact that Square Enix was the publisher behind it just made fans’ mouths water a little more in anticipation. So, is Death by Cube a resounding success worthy of its publisher’s pedigree or simply a miscarried me-too that ..read more

Matt Hazard made his return to the gaming scene last year in the aptly titled Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard that came out on the home consoles. Unfortunately many people missed the point of the game entirely. Eat Lead was a game with a stereotypical video game action hero taking on stereotypical gaming clichés. It was done as both a satire and homage to those games. The bigger problem was that nobody ..read more

To be honest, we here at SmashPad are not big fans of the whole Game of the Year concept that every site uses when the end of the year arrives. Rather than getting together to discuss and/or argue about what games should or shouldn’t win the many categories we could come up with so we can find a way to give smaller games a shot at winning something, we decided to just highlight our favorite games of the year by ..read more

While the folks at EA have tried their hand at an arcade football game for a while now, but it has taken until now that they captured the Blitz style of simplicity. Madden NFL Arcade is a much more simple game overall than recent Maddens have been and that makes for an arcadey experience that can really be a lot of fun in multiplayer.

Madden NFL Arcade does trim down what you expect from the traditional NFL experience that football fans ..read more

With Peggle’s release on PSN recently, PopCap Games finally dropped the Peggle Nights expansion on both PSN and XBLA to let players add more levels to their games. Peggle Nights features an interesting take on the adventure mode along with more challenges to test your skills even further.

To take a quick detour, the reason this isn’t a review of the PSN version of Peggle is that it’s the same game as the XBLA version. The only new features ..read more

Getting into a groove is definitely a must for any good episodic series, especially when you’re being sold the whole season at once. Sam & Max’s first season didn’t really start getting good until the last two episodes, which seems to have to their second season, Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space, starting off with a bang. While Sam & Max is quality throughout this season, it still lacks a good control scheme that fits the Xbox 360.

Beyond Time ..read more