Sony is preparing to release a PSP Entertainment Pack to cater to sport fans. The new bundle, which includes a copy of Madden NFL 12, will be released in North America this month.

In addition to Madden 12, the bundle will include a black PSP-3000, a 2GB Memory Stick PRO Duo, and a copy of Need for Speed SHIFT. The Entertainment Pack will retail for $159.99. You'll be able to find it at retailers throughout the country.

As I said when they announced that Gran Turismo/MLB 11 Entertainment Pack this Spring, I'm really glad Sony is sticking with two game bundles. It's a much better value for gamers than giving them one game and then a movie on UMD. In the age of streaming Netflix and Blu-ray discs, the UMD didn't have a chance as an enduring format.

It's a good idea for Sony to release a bundle for the PSP this holiday season, too. These next few months are really the last hurrah for the PSP. Its successor, the PlayStation Vita will be out early next year. Furthermore, the delay to the Vita means that the 3DS has less competition during the holiday season. A PSP Entertainment Pack is a way for Sony to at least make an effort to cut into the 3DS' sales.

The Entertainment Pack will arrive on August 30th. A larger picture of the collection is below.

EA always has a stealth announcement or two tucked away in their earnings reports and today's was no exception. According to their first quarter financial results, Need for Speed: Shift 2 will be released in 2011.

More specifically, Shift 2 will arrive between January and March. It wasn't a formal announcement of the game so no actual details were provided about its content. If it's being billed as a sequel to Shift, though, it's going to be another simulation racer.

The financial report states that Shift 2 is being developed for PC and consoles. The original was also released for the PSP, mobile phones, and the iPad as well. Are they still mulling over those ports for the sequel?

The first day of the Steam holiday sale concluded a short while ago. Now that the first round of deals has expired, here comes the next batch.

• iD Super Pack - 66% Off
• Serious Sam HD - 50% Off
• Left 4 Dead 2 - 33% Off
• Need for Speed: Shift - 25% Off
• Football Manager™ 2010 - 25% Off

The id Super Pack is a bundle of id Software's titles, which include the Quake and Hexen series. A number of other discounts will be active through the digital games store until January 3rd. All of Rockstar Games' titles, for example, are 33% cheaper.

EA announced today that Need for Speed: Shift's first downloadable content will be released worldwide in December for the PS3 and Xbox 360. It won't cost you a cent, either.

The Team Racing pack adds a new game mode of the same name. In Team Racing matches, two squads of up to six racers duke it out on the track. The content pack will also contains five new cars: 1967 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray 427, 1967 Shelby GT-500, 1969 Dodge Charger R/T, 1971 Dodge Challenger R/T, and 1998 Toyota Supra Mark IV.

This DLC will hit Xbox Live on December 1st in all territories. It arrives on the PSN on December 3rd in Europe and on December 10th in North America.

The holidays aren't here just yet but Blend Games is giving out presents early. We've got two free copies of the Xbox 360 version of Need for Speed: Shift for you.

The giveaway is on behalf of Coke Zero. They're also offering a free Coke Zero Dodge Viper SRT10 download code to any and all NFS: Shift owners. It's a souped-up version of the standard Dodge Viper already available through the game. A video of the car in action is posted below. You can get a download code for the Coke Zero Viper here. Note that you'll need to sign up for a My Coke Rewards account, though.

For more information on Shift, check out Blend Games' review. If you don't win a free copy, you can still get a $10 discount off a purchase of the game through Coke Rewards. Details on that can be found here.

Contest Rules

Log in to your twitter account, follow @cinemablend and then tweet this: "@cinemablend Enter me to win NFS: Shift for the Xbox 360!" The two winners will be selected at random. Entries will be accepted until 3 PM on Monday, November 9th. The winners will then be contacted and the game will be mailed to the addresses they provide.

Cinema Blend staff members are ineligible to enter. We can only ship to addresses in the continental U.S. so only entrants with a U.S. mailing address can participate. No PO Boxes please. No purchase necessary. Failure to comply with the rules will result in your disqualification from the contest.

Electronic Arts has expanded their partnership with Steam today. They've added six more games - some old, some new - to the digital games store's catalog.

The six games available through Steam starting today are Need for Speed: Shift, Battlefield 2: Complete Collection, Command & Conquer Red Alert 3: Uprising, Godfather 1, Godfather 2, and Medal of Honor: Airborne. Their prices range from $9.99 (MOH: Airborne) to $49.99 (NFS: Shift). Battlefield 2: Complete Collection, in case you're wondering, includes the base game as well as the Special Forces, Euro Force, and Armored Fury features that were released as paid and free expansions.

EA first introduced their games to Steam in December. There are now twenty EA titles available through the service.

On October 1st, EA will release a demo of Need for Speed: Shift through PSN and Xbox Live. The sampler allows players to try out five cars on two of the game's tracks.

Four of the five cars - BMW M3 (E46), 2008 Dodge Viper SRT10, 2006 Lotus Elise 111R, and 2008 Nissan GT-R - will be available at the start of the demo. If you perform well enough on the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps and London River tracks, you'll unlock the fifth car, the 2006 Pagani Zonda F. It's a taste of the game's career mode, in which you'll race to earn money for better cars and upgrades.

The PC demo is already available through NeedforSpeed.com. Shift was released on September 15th. If you want to learn more about the full game, check out Blend Games' review.

On September 28th, EA will release a new version off Need for Speed: Shift. It will be available for all mobile phones except for the iPhone.

The short announcement on needforspeed.com promises over 20 races and "the hottest cars on the market." As with the console/PC version of Shift, you'll earn money through winning events and use it to purchase better cars and performance upgrades. Two screenshots from the game are posted below.

The official NFS does mention that an iPhone version of Shift is in development. It's just not the same as this particular game.

At the end of my Need for Speed: Undercover review from last year, I posed a question: "Why does a racing game need to be something other than a racing game?" I doubt EA read the review but they apparently asked themselves the same question. In making Need for Speed: Shift, Slightly Mad Studios tossed aside all of the clumsy action game/movie elements that mucked up previous installments and focused on making a pure racer. The result is a game enjoyable to hardcore and casual racing fans alike.

In case Undercover, Carbon, or ProStreet scared you off, let me reiterate: there's no live-action cut scenes. You're not racing to earn street cred, gather evidence on some illegal drug trade, or to get revenge on the criminal who - you get the point. You're a racer who races so he can earn money and get invited to more prestigious races where he'll earn even more money. There's the occasional cutscene with a pleasant British voiceover that outlines new types of races and tells you "Oh man, this next tier of racing is going to put you to the test" and that's all the story I need, really. I don't need a rehash of Fast and the Furious.

Also gone is the open-world environments and street racing from earlier NFS games. You're racing on closed tracks, most of them in the European or American countryside. Almost all of the tracks are based on real-world locations, too. There's a handful of fictional locations (downtown London, for example) to add some variety but you won't be racing on the surface of the Moon or anything too exotic. The scenery all looks decent and the spectators are a little less cardboard than in other racers (you'll see them taking pictures as you pass) but your eyes are going to be on the road the whole time so you probably won't care.

Well, okay, there's one thing you might spend some time admiring: your cockpit. Slightly Mad has recreated the cockpits of all 65+ cars in the game so that you can race from a first-person perspective. This is the default camera setting and while you may find the third-person camera to be more comfortable, I urge you to give the cockpit a shot. Your vision narrows as you speed up and your perspective rocks back and forth as you hit bumps, make sharp turns, or slam on the brakes. Hitting a wall causes you to lurch in your seat and blurs your vision momentarily. While you'll experience some of the game's visual effects with the other camera perspectives, the cockpit view is colored by so many subtle touches that it's worth at least toying with it a bit. Seeing opposing cars pop in and out of my rear-view and side mirrors just added a little extra tension to each race.

Ultimately, though, I ended up ditching the cockpit in favor of the traditional third-person perspective because it's a tad nicer for making turns. No big loss there though because this view allowed me to admire my car. Even the bad installments of NFS have featured nice-looking cars and Shift is no exception. The wide range of vehicles can all be tuned to your heart's content as well. The subtleties of tuning might be lost on the average gamer but there's plenty of very straightforward upgrades you can purchase and you're shown with little colored bars how each upgrade will affect the attributes of your car.

I like the cars but there are a couple issues with the car shop. The shop menu kind of drags, for starters. You can't quickly flip through it until something catches your eye because it seems like the picture of each car takes 4-5 seconds to load up. Also, you never seem to earn enough money to buy more than one car per tier. When you enter the next tier of competition, you'll buy one of the best in class, upgrade it a bit, and then save up for the next tier's vehicle. However, the small amount of cars you'll own is balanced out by the game's inclusion of Manufacturer Competitions, a race in which a company provides the same model car to every competitor.

Though Need for Speed: Shift is billed as a simulation racer (its arcade-like counterpart, Need for Speed: Nitro, hits the Wii and DS in a couple months), the game isn't merely for racing game vets. Once you start Career mode, Shift will provide suggested settings based on how well you perform in a test lap. Neophytes can turn down the A.I.'s difficulty, make gear shifting automatic, get a little help with handling, and so on. Many players will also want to make use of the optional driving line, a colored guideline that appears on the track to show you the correct path. The turns yellow when you need to slow down and red when you really, really need to slow down and it's a must for learning to navigate turns.

The structure for Shift's Career mode is a familiar one: you start on a tier with fairly easy tracks and so-so cars and gradually work your way up into more competitive tiers with faster cars and longer, tougher courses. The way you unlock the next tier is by accruing Stars, which can be earned in a few ways. You'll get one to three Stars by finishing first, second, or third in a race but there are bonus goals that can earn you a Star, such as driving five cars off the road throughout the event. Subsequently, you can make progress toward the next tier even if you're not getting podium finishes (though that certainly speeds things up). There's over 200 events in the game so you're never going to be forced to eke out a win on one specific race in order to proceed in the game. You can repeat races as much as you like to get missed Stars or extra cash for upgrades or new cars, too.

One other method of earning Stars that I didn't mention is by racking up points throughout the race. Points are doled out for successful turns, overtaking other cars, and so forth. Each action rewarded by points is split into two categories: Aggressive and Precision. Precision drivers are clean and cautious while Aggressive drivers try to run opponents off the road, slide through turns at full speed, and tailgate opponents. The game keeps a tally of how many points you have in each category and you're branded an Aggressive/Precision driver based on which category has a higher point total.

The type of racer you are determines what type of Invitationals (standalone events that exist outside the tiers) you'll receive and factors into online match-making as well so it's not a huge factor in the game. It's good that its effect is limited because the system's a bit flawed. First, it seems a bit simplistic to simply brand someone a "Precision" driver because they've got 99 Precision Points and 98 Aggressive Points. It's pretty tough to rack up Aggressive points if you're way behind or way in front, too, because there's no nearby cars to trade paint with. I understand why they'd want to implement such a feature for online matches, because serious drivers probably don't want assholes like me trying to ram them at every opportunity. Still, aren't real world races filled with aggressive and precision drivers alike? Furthermore, most people act a bit differently when they're playing off-line and online. Knocking cars off the road is a lot more enjoyable to me when I know there's a human driving it.

Though I don't completely get the point of the Precision/Aggressive thing, I do like that the game is constantly boosting your self-esteem by handing you these points. The points boost your Driver Level over time, and each level adds invitationals, sponsorship money, extra garage space, and other perks to assist your climb to the top of the racing world. The game also gives you badges for your various mini-achievements throughout your Career (50 cars passed, 100 cars passed, etc) and keeps track of your win/loss record so you've got a complete profile of your Shift accomplishments.

In addition to the Manufacturer Competitions mentioned earlier, the Career mode is also stocked with a bunch of time attacks (in which you compete for the best lap time) and standard mixed races. Car Battles make a return as well: you and a single opponent are given pre-selected cars and try to either finish the race in the lead or get five seconds ahead of them. Precision drivers are allowed to do Hot Laps (essentially time trials with a sponsored car) while Aggressives get Eliminator races that periodically remove the last place driver until only one remains. Finally, there's Drift competitions in which you're graded on how well you slide through turns. You're awarded points based on the angle and speed of your turns, as well as how close you get your car's nose to the inner edge of the corner. Drifting takes a lot of random flailing and experimentation to master but, as I said, you don't need to do every event to progress through tiers so you're free to skip this glorified mini-game.

You can do all of these events through the game's multiplayer mode as well. You can race with up to 7 other players at a time (depending on the event) and races ran smoothly for me even at max capacity. The only really unique multiplayer mode is the Driver Duel Championship, a series of Driver Duels in which a group of players work their way up the ladder to more trying events with higher-powered cars. You'll earn money for multiplayer events at a seemingly greater rate than off-line events so there's some definite incentive to hopping online. Even if you're playing normal Career mode, though, you can see your friend's best scores and lap times for each event. It's a little more noob-friendly than the standard global leaderboard also included with the game. I know damn well that I'm never going to be the best in the world on a given track but hey, at least I can beat my friend's time.

Let's address the elephant(s) in the room: Gran Turismo 5 and Forza Motorsport 3 are both coming out this year too. I don't doubt some of you PS3/Xbox 360 owners will bypass this game in anticipation of those other ones. Shift really shouldn't be overlooked, though. It's a well-executed game that provides enough realism for the racing purists while still remaining accessible to schlubs who can't drive stick. With this game, Slightly Mad's not only lifted the Need for Speed franchise out of a deep funk but managed to create a viable competitor to some of the best games in the genre.

Players: 1-8 Players

Platform(s): Xbox 360 (reviewed), PC, PS3

Developer: Slightly Mad Studios

Publisher: Electronic Arts

ESRB: Everyone

Rating:

Like many other sports games by EA, Need for Speed: Shift will feature a number of licensed tracks. Here's the full list of songs, which range from Kanye West to The Prodigy:

• Buraka Som Sistema feat. Pongolove - Kalemba (Wegue-Wegue)
• Chase And Status feat. Plan B - Pieces
• Deadmau5 - Ghosts N Stuff
• Eagles Of Death Metal - Anything 'Cept the Truth
• Fort Knox 5 feat. Asheru - Insight (The Nextmen Remix)
• Gallows - I Dread The Night
• In Case Of Fire - This Time We Stand
• Jamal - Pull Up
• Kanye West - Paranoid (Part 2)
• Kasabian - Underdog
• The King Blues - The Streets Are Ours
• Mala Rodriguez - Te Convierto
• Mando Diao - Mean Street
• MSTRKRFT feat. E-40 - Click Click
• N.A.S.A. - Whachadoin? Feat. Spank Rock, MIA, Santigold and Nick Zinner
• The Prodigy - Run With The Wolves
• The Qemists feat Mike Patton - Lost Weekend
• Regular John - Transmitter
• Rootbeer - Under Control
• Shinichi Osawa - Electro 411 (Lies In Disguise Mix)
• Spoon Harris & Obernik - Baditude
• TOKIO - Dogonim
• Twisted Wheel - Oh What Have You Done
• Two Fingers feat. Sway - High Life

Shift arrives in North America on September 15th and in Europe on September 17th.

Today the Need for Speed team released the official minimum system requirements for Need for Speed: Shift. It turns out they're a bit different than the specs that were floating around the Internet a few months back so read closely:

• Required – Internet Connection
• OS - Windows XP (Service Pack 3) or Windows Vista (Service Pack 1) / Windows 7
• Processor – Intel Core™2 Duo 1.6 GHz or faster
• Memory – XP: 1 GB RAM; Vista/Windows 7: 1.5 GB RAM
• Hard Drive – 6 GB
• DVD Drive - 8 SPEED
• Video Card – 256 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 3.0*
• Sound Card - DirectX 9.0c compatible
• DirectX - DirectX 9.0c compatible
• Online Multiplayer – 512 Kbps or faster; 2-12 Players
• Input - Keyboard, Mouse
• Optional – USB Steering Wheel / Dual Analogue Gamepad

*Supported Video Cards: ATI Radeon X1800 XT 512MB or greater; NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT 256MB or greater. Laptop versions of these chipsets may work but are not supported. Updates to your video and sound card drivers may be required.

Shift arrives in North America on September 15th and in Europe on September 17th. It will be available for the PS3 and Xbox 360 as well.

Electronic Arts released a new trailer for the upcoming Need For Speed: Shift and it features the lengthy track from Wisconsin, Road America. As the commentator points out, it’s an easy track to race on but a difficult track to go fast on.

NFS: Shift is definitely shaping up to be a hardcore racing fan’s kind of simulator. So far it’s sporting some fairly realistic looking physics, dynamic driving mechanics not featured in previous Need For Speed games and a heck of a lot of prototype and professional racing vehicles.

The game is due out on September 22nd for the Xbox 360 and PS3. However, the main problem is that 360 owners could wait just one extra month and purchase Forza Motorsport 3 which has no shortage of anything featured in NFS: Shift. In fact, Forza 3 has far more customization, multiplayer, track and damage features than NFS: Shift.

I’m not sure exactly why EA put the release so close to Turn 10’s monster racing simulator but at least PS3 owners will have a semi-realistic racing sim to hold them over until Gran Turismo 5 releases.

You can check out the Road America trailer feature below. For more info on Need For Speed: Shift feel free to drop by the Official Website. For more gaming news, updates, insight and media, be sure to stay tuned in with Blend Games.

Any racing fan knows that the one track that is completely worn out, over-done, hard and obnoxious is the Laguna Seca raceway. Well guess what? If you guessed that Need For Speed: Shift is all about Laguna Seca and that we have a trailer for it because you read the headline, then you guessed right.

In all honesty, NFS is just a dying franchise. The best of the series was when it featured the Underground games. However, NFS: Underground didn’t last long and soon the series went right back to being so-so and nearly forgettable.

Why didn’t they just add cops to the Underground games and go from there? I have no idea. But now EA is trying to revitalize the Need For Speed franchise by including horribly boring and hard tracks such as Laguna Seca, in hopes of appealing to the people who already have pre-orders in place for Gran Turismo 5 and Forza Motorsport 3. Good luck with that, EA.

Anyway, you can check out the now realistically-charged NFS: Shift trailer featuring the always dangerous, and brutally annoying Laguna Seca raceway. Need For Speed: Shift is due out mid-September for the Xbox 360 and PS3. For more gaming news, info, updates and media, be sure to stay tuned in with Blend Games.

Know much about Need for Speed: Shift? Neither do we! EA's released eight new screenshots from the game that we can gaze longingly at, though.

Unlike many previous NFS games that emphasized street racing and arcade-style driving, Need For Speed: Shift is a realistic, simulation racer. It's being developed by GT Legends creators Slightly Mad Studios. It's set for a Fall 2009 release for PS3, Xbox 360, PC, and PSP.

Shift is one of several different NFS titles currently in development. Also in the works is the arcade-style Need for Speed: Nitro, free-to-play Need for Speed: World Online, and an unannounced project.

Despite disappointing sales of Need for Speed: Undercover, the franchise will live on. In fact, EA's so confident in it that they're planning three Need for Speed games.

Keith Munro, EA vice president of marketing, revealed the three NFS projects in an interview with Gamestop. The first, Need for Speed: Shift will be released for PS3, Xbox 360, PC, PSP and is a more hardcore, realistic Need for Speed game. The Wii and DS will get Need for Speed: Nitro, an arcade-style racing game. EA will also be producing Need for Speed: World Online, a free-to-play online racer for the PC. What, no collectible card game?

GT Legends developer Slightly Mad Studios will be handling the development of Shift, EA Montreal will develop Nitro, and World Online is a collaboration between Black Box and EA Shanghai. Nitro and Shift should hit stores by Fall 2009. World Online will arrive next Winter, after being first launched in Asia this Summer.