Blog Posts by Mike Smith

FIFA 2011: bestsellerEA's hit football game Madden 11 posted good sales this year, up 12%
year-on-year with last season's release. But it wasn't the best-selling
sports game of the year. In fact, it wasn't even the best-selling football game of the year.

Nope, that honor belongs to another EA game, FIFA 11, which released
last week to widespread acclaim from critics -- and widespread
wallet-opening by consumers. (And yes, in case you hadn't figured it
out, it involves the other kind of football.)

In fact, FIFA shifted a stunning 2.6 million copies across North
America and Europe in its first five days of availability, smashing last
year's performance by 29%.

EA Sports president Peter Moore described its success

Monopoly Streets"Everybody's played Monopoly on the board. But nobody's ever visited Monopoly...that's what we're trying to do here."

So says Jeff Peters, Senior Producer for Monopoly Streets, EA's
upcoming new take on the classic board game. Rather than a staid old
flat board, Peters says, Streets takes place in a "living, breathing
Monopoly city." Streets and avenues become city blocks. Railroads
spring to life. And Free Parking becomes (what else?) a multi-storey
parking garage.

Peters also dives into some of the Xbox 360-exclusive features of
Streets. Specifically, it'll include online matches -- a series first,
hard though that is to believe -- and Avatar support. In fact, not only
can you play as your

OnLiveOffering a way to play modern, triple-A PC games on even the most out-of-date of computers, innovative "cloud computing" service OnLive caught the eyes of thrifty gamers at its June launch. However, the prospect of a planned $4.95 monthly fee for the service put many of them off.

Not any more.

OnLive has dropped its plans to introduce the fee, it announced this week - - and it's debuting a new trial option that'll let gamers try it out without even coughing up their credit card details.

"There is no precedent for OnLive, so we had to grow to a large number of active users in order to assess usage patterns and operating costs," said OnLive CEO Steve Perlman. "We've arrived at that stage, and

MinecraftForget Halo: Reach. The latest and greatest sales success in the
video games world, unlikely as it seems, is an indie-developed
collaborative building game in the vein of fellow indie hit Dwarf
Fortress -- Minecraft.

Over the last week, Minecraft sales have totalled about 115,000,
which (at its selling price of about $13 a copy) amounts to over $1.5m
in revenue. Not bad -- when you consider that Minecraft is being
developed by a team of just four people, with no big-name publisher
bankrolling them.

The impressive uptick in sales seems to have been prompted, oddly, by
technical issues it suffered over the weekend. Faced with the prospect
of his payment processor being out of action for a few

Wii: new toys Are you fed up with having a MotionPlus adapter hanging off the bottom of your Wii remote?

Released last year alongside best-seller Wii Sports Resort, the
MotionPlus improves the accuracy of the remote’s motion-detecting
sensors -- but it was never the most elegant of controller attachments.
But now, according to multiple reports, Nintendo’s about to fix all
that.

How? By releasing a version of the remote that integrates the
MotionPlus hardware, that’s how. News of the new controller leaked when Nintendo Life spotted a box shot of FlingSmash, a game that’ll apparently be bundled with the controller when it launches on November 7.

Named the “Wii Remote Plus,” the new controller is pictured

Splashtop RemoteApple's iOS devices -- like the iPhone and iPad -- have been
breakout hits in the games world, but without the Flash technology that
powers popular Facebook games like Mafia Wars and Frontierville, many
people can't play their favorite social titles on their portable
devices.

A handful of big-budget Facebook games (like Farmville, Bejeweled
Blitz, and EA's Scrabble) offer iPhone- or iPad-native apps that
connect to Facebook's servers to retrieve your game info, but the
overwhelming majority don't. If you want to play Flash-based games,
you've got to be sitting in front of your PC -- and in 2010, that just
won't do.

That's where new App Store release Splashtop Remote
comes in. After

Civilization V - Firaxis What’s the most addictive game in the world?

To some, it’s card classic Solitaire. To others, it’s the social, quick-hit lures of Farmville. To others, it’s the intricate, multi-layered delights of online universes like World of Warcraft.

But to gaming purists, the most addictive game in the world is a
twenty year-old turn-based strategy game called Civilization. Giving
players the chance to oversee the development of a nation from Bronze
Age roots to the dawn of the interstellar age, its gripping,
one-more-turn gameplay has hooked millions.

Among them, famously, is top sci-fi author Iain M. Banks, creator of
the Culture series of novels. Back in 2006, Banks was working to finish
what

HALO: REACH

Platforms: X360

Halo Reach - Microsoft Hitting streets at midnight tonight, Halo: Reach is developer
Bungie's last ever Halo title -- but will they go out with a bang or a
whimper?

It might lack an appearance from traditional Halo lead
Master Chief, but according to most critics, the game's a stunner. Some
even label it the best Halo title to date in a near-uniform thumbs-up
that's pushing the game to the 93% mark on review aggregation site Metacritic.com.

Case in point: Gamepro's Matt Cabral.

"Bungie [has] injected their tried-and-true formula with enough fresh ideas and
refinements to make this the best Halo entry yet," he writes, "and
that's saying a hell of a lot given the absence of Master