If you don't know, SmashPad Streamkend is our live stream show that happens every Saturday at 2 PM EST as I play a new release for about two hours to let you see the game in action. This week's game is the console version of Terraria, so feel free to join me in about an hour if you're interested. Thanks.

http://www.twitch.tv/smashpad

If you've been lagging behind on entering CAG March Madness Tournament Contest, you've got less than a day left to enter for your chance to win some cool prizes. I'll be taking entries up to tipoff tomorrow at 12 PM EST, so be sure to get your entry and bracket done in time to be eligible to win. I will be going through the list tonight for the first pass of entries with the last pass happening just before the deadline tomorrow. Good luck to those that enter!

For those that might have missed it, the Ninth Annual CAG March Madness Contest is live and ready for your sign-ups today. I have quite a few prizes already and there may still be more to offer over the next week or so.

Sign-ups are open until the Noon tipoff next Thursday, March 21.

http://blog.gamer20.com/2013/01/smas...6-at-2-pm-est/

Though I haven't posted much about it, we've been doing quite a bit of streaming at SmashPad lately with our SmashPad Streamkend weekly stream of a big or small game every Saturday at 2 PM EST. Today, I will be playing some Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch in about an hour, so I wanted to let you guys know if you want to see the game in action. You can tune in from the article page itself above or visit our Twitch.tv page at http://twitch.tv/smashpad

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agdmnsZmgxM

The new SmashPad Presents covers MotorStorm Apocalypse, which is the latest of the arcade racing games in the series. This is a game that I particularly enjoyed a lot due to the multiplayer being the absolute best that the series has to offer.

You can read the supplementary article with my thoughts here at SmashPad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS4PHH3102s

I recently got an Elgato Game Capture HD, so I've been finding ways to use it for new coverage on SmashPad and I started this SmashPad Presents feature series. This is for the games that we miss reviewing the first time around, so I record some footage for Youtube and write up my thoughts on the game in a supplementary article to go with the video. The first SmashPad Presents was for MotorStorm RC, which you can watch above. You can visit SmashPad to read the supplementary article for the video.

With about 16 hours to go for sign ups to the Eighth Annual CAG March Madness Contest, there have been some new prizes added since the last time I blogged about it. I've added in a few more games like Dead Rising 2 (Xbox 360), Epic Mickey (Wii), Crush 3D (3DS), and Picross 3D (DS) that spreads the love to the other platforms and the final big piece is a donation from JP to offer a Steam gift for any game $29.99 and under. Since there isn't that much time left to enter, please go to the thread linked above to see how to sign up and make your picks ASAP so you don't end up as a loser with an incomplete bracket.

I just wanted to give you guys a heads up that this year's March Madness contest is now open in the contests forum, so you can get your entries in early before the deadline at tipoff on Thursday, March 15. You should be able to make your actual picks later tonight as Selection Sunday announcements are going on right now.

The prizes right now include MLB 12: The Show for the PS3 and Vita as highlights at the moment, though I'll be grabbing some more stuff this week to throw into the pool if you're looking for more options should you end up in the top three.

You may recall that I've had problems with iTunes not playing nice with my iPod Touch earlier this year that effectively destroyed it and required a restore to make it work again.

Well, it's done it once again. And I knew the moment that I was completely ed when I wanted to transfer Jetpack Joyride to my Touch after getting in on that free code offer on Facebook. When I tried to drag and drop the game over to the iPod to sync it, iTunes alerted me that there were purchased items on my Touch and asked if I wanted to sync them to my PC first. I said no, but it decided to do it anyway since the settings I've set on iTunes are merely a suggestion that it will ignore most of the time. I decided to let it go in the hopes that this would get iTunes to shut up and it stalled somewhere along the way, which resulted in the creation of this garbage data that killed the iPod Touch.

That's where iTunes screwed me so that I have to restore my Touch to restore it to...

First, I'd like to thank everybody that commented and offered advice/feedback on my last blog about my issues with iTunes, but things have gotten much worse as my iPod Touch is now filled with garbage data.

I was doing some maintenance on my Touch last night and cleared out some Apps and iTunes said I'd have about 2.4 GB of free space, so I told it to sync to finalize the changes. 20 minutes later, it stopped and said the Touch was completely full despite doing nothing but taking the apps I deleted out of the folders they were in. I deleted them by hand but it was still completely full according to what the About section of the settings told me.

I connected it back up to my PC and the breakdown was about 4.1 GB of apps, 2.6 GB of Other, and 0.5 GB of Audio plus the one book that came with iBooks. I decided to do the math and add up the size of the apps on the Touch and it came up to about 2200 MB. There are no videos on there, the audio is just a few podcasts...

I got an iPod Touch about 14 months ago and my experiences with the Touch and iTunes has been bad enough that I'm never buying another new Apple product again. The iPod Touch is one thing, but how clunky and confusing the iTunes interface is just blows my mind because I was expecting a lot more from Apple of all companies. So I'm wondering if I'm just completely missing some obvious options somewhere or if iTunes really is as terrible as I think it is.

The lack of simple drag-and-drop functionality to send apps, music, or videos to and from my Touch blew my mind. I should be able to right-click on any app, song, or video that is in library and have an option to transfer it straight to the device, but I instead have to go to "My iPod" under "This Device" to check or un-check various items to do a massive sync. I'd rather have the minute control to remove an item or two here or there and do a quick transfer, but that doesn't seem to be possible. I also notice...

As a courtesy reminder to those of you that have yet to sign up for The Seventh Annual CAG March Madness Contest, you have until Noon EST on Thursday, which is about 12 hours from now.

I am about to comb through the list of entries and kick those that I cannot link to CAG accounts, so I'm taking a second to post a reminder that there's not much more time left before the games start in the morning and your chances of winning some neat prizes drops to zero.

The March Madness tournament begins on Thursday, March 17, so I wanted to remind anybody that hasn't seen it yet that the Seventh Annual CAG March Madness Contest is live and ready for sign-ups.

I'm back once again with a new review for the latest game out of Q-Games' PixelJunk series, which is a full-blown sequel to PixelJunk Shooter. They've added two new fluids, light/dark mechanics, and even an online multiplayer mode for one-on-one battles.




"PixelJunk Shooter 2 is a blast to play and is an overall improvement over its predecessor in every aspect. The controls have been improved by quite a bit in a way that may not be noticeable unless you go back to the original game and see how sluggish some moves can get. The campaign is similarly split up into three episodes with five levels each, which definitely provides much more of a challenge than the first game offered.

Despite the fact that PixelJunk Shooter 2 was originally just an add-on for the original at first, Q-Games has done a great job of expanding some extra levels into a full-blown game that improves on every aspect of...

After a busy holiday season, I'm back with a new review for Breach, a new multiplayer FPS on XBLA. With a focus on destructibility and more realistic gameplay, Breach tries to carve out a niche of its own amongst the heavy hitters on the Xbox 360. There is a leveling system that is very comparable to the typical Call of Duty system that also rewards you with credits that you can spend on the actual upgrades for your character's weapon mods, perks, and gadgets to best compliment your play style. There are five multiplayer modes that include most of the familiar types of modes that you'd expect along with hardcore versions of each mode that limit the HUD and your health to offer a more challenging experience.

Breach

"Breach is an enjoyable online multiplayer FPS for XBLA with all of the bells and whistles that you’d expect, but it will have to gain an audience quickly to make it worth a purchase for $15. It can’t compare to the retail...

So I've finally finished the first part of the space epic known as Mass Effect and it was a very flawed experience that still ended well as a pretty good game. This is a tale of playing the Bioware "masterpiece" and what a two year break can do to one's perception of a game.

My time with Mass Effect began in April of 2008, shortly after getting my Xbox 360. I played the hell out of the game up to the point where I picked up Liara and promptly just moved on and ignored the game for about two and a half years. I suppose it was the series of marathon sessions that made me uneasy about going back until I was ready to sink that much more time with the game, so it would sit on my shelf until September of this year when I played the Mass Effect 2 demo and decided to finally go back to finish the first game.

I remembered Mass Effect being a beautiful game and what I saw two years later was a blurry mess that is the buggiest game I've played...

Twisted Pixel has been one of the premiere developers for XBLA exclusive games as The Maw and 'Splosion Man have put them on the map in the past year or two. They're back with a new game starring a failed comic book hero who must earn enough money to restart his series by jumping into other comics for guest appearances. This side-scrolling shooter with on-rail segments is influenced by games like Gunstar Heroes and Sin & Punishment, so expect a more challenging shooter that likes to change up the perspective at times.




"Comic Jumper is another great game from Twisted Pixel that may not have as much value as ‘Splosion Man, but it makes up for it in bonuses and overall quality of the game to be worth 1200 points ($15 in the real world. The bonus content includes a lot of info on the game’s development and various aspects of the game, interviews with voice actors, early footage of the game, and even tangible items like...

With Dead Rising 2 coming in just under a month now, this XBLA prologue offers a good way to see if Blue Castle Games has an idea of what they're doing with the sequel to one of the more popular Capcom games of this generation. The biggest additions you'll notice in the demo are the combo items that can be combined to make new weapons, both useful and humorous, and a revamped save system that allows for three save slots and the option to save when you complete cases. Add in a ton of zombies and you have a good idea of what to expect from Dead Rising 2: Case Zero.




"Dead Rising 2: Case Zero is a very fun taste of what you can expect from Dead Rising 2 with a unique setting and scenario for 400 Microsoft Points ($5 in real money). The cheap cost for a lot of replayability, achievements, and the ability to get a head start on Dead Rising 2 with your save is worth the price. If you’re the kind of person that calls...

You may have heard a few months ago that GameStop had launched a beta for their upcoming PowerUp Rewards program that essentially replaces the Edge Card with something that's more about earning points for purchases until you can redeem them for some prize. With the Madden NFL 11 launch happening last night, my local store took advantage of the huge football crowd here with their launch of PowerUp Rewards as they allowed anyone that pre-ordered the game to rollover their Edge card into the new card to activate it and start earning points. I made some trade-ins a few hours before their midnight launch was to begin so they let me do the activation right there and I wrote up a story on SmashPad to explain the process along with speculating if the Madden launch was the grounds for a bigger launch across the country, which my research turned up as a likely negative due to almost no mention of this anywhere on the internet.

I've included a few bits of the story to let you guys know...

This week's Summer of Arcade game for XBLA is Castlevania: Harmony of Despair, a new entry in the series that is more of a mash-up of the previous games with more of a focus on multiplayer and co-op.




"If you have been waiting for another 2D Castlevania game with an epic quest to complete, sadly Castlevania: Harmony of Despair isn’t the game for you. If, on the other hand, you’ve wanted a multiplayer cooperative action adventure game to play with your friends, then this one has quite a bit to offer. The Survival mode may not be the game’s strongest point, but co-op mode makes up for it. Castlevania HD is essentially the gameplay you know and love, without any of the back story. Hopefully Konami will consider doing a full 2D single player Castlevania game in the future."

Castlevania: Harmony of Despair for Xbox Live Arcade received a Demo It recommendation. You can read the full...