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New Madden games are like football seasons: each one arrives full of promise and hope, and inevitably it's either disappointment or excitement depending on who you are. Anyone who's even slightly confused, apprehensive, or disinterested in the NFL will find no friendly hand of welcome from Madden: at its heart, this is a game for football fans, not football hopefuls. We start with that observation because, unlike last year's efforts to make Madden 11 more accessible for the newcomer, Madden 12 chooses to deepen the deeper parts of its game instead.

Scott:I'm speaking mainly of Franchise Mode, that perennial way for fans to endlessly play out alternative NFL season histories with obsessive detail. Franchise mode now has a deeper free-agent bidding system, between-game practices, and player attributes beyond mere ratings that flux on a per-game basis like a role-playing game, to name a few. My favorite is the more realistic preseason period, where games now cycle first-, second-, and third-streamers more realistically, and cut-down days make you force hard decisions on your rosters just like a real NFL team, turning your preseason into a mini reality show.… Read more

SMRecorder is a simple desktop audio/video recorder that not only captures desktop video and audio but also camera and microphone inputs. You can add onscreen annotation and narration to create clips for presentations, tutorials, and embedded media. It's freeware, too.

During the installation process, we were given the choice between standard and custom installation options. We chose the custom option, which let us deselect some extras like toolbars that we didn't want. SMRecorder's main interface is more or less a minimized media player, with six buttons and a counter. Three buttons access recording tasks, and start, … Read more

Portable storage devices can be a blessing and a curse. They're a convenient way to back up data and make files portable, but they can also introduce malware to your computer and let people easily copy files that they're not supposed to remove. Pen Drive Unlocker is a simple utility that lets users lock and unlock their computer's USB ports, protecting their machines from the unauthorized use of external storage devices.

There's not much to Pen Drive Unlocker, really; the interface consists of a small rectangle with a drop-down menu that lets you select Normal, Read … Read more

Fun fonts can liven up presentations, newsletters, art projects, and all kinds of other documents. Cartoon Font Pack is a set of 22 fonts inspired by cartoons and comic strips. If you like the look of fonts that resemble text written by hand, Cartoon Font Pack is a fun option that's suitable for a variety of applications.

Since Cartoon Font Pack is really just a folder containing the various fonts, it helps to have some knowledge of how to install new fonts in Windows. This isn't a difficult process, however, and we installed the fonts in Cartoon Font … Read more

We love puzzle games, and all the better if there's something about them that engages our word nerd tendencies. Letter Blocks combines aspects of the puzzle game Tetris with the word-forming challenges of Scrabble. It's not perfect, but it is an awful lot of fun.

The game's interface consists of a grid of letters, which you must string together into words that are at least three letters long. Forming a word causes the letters used to disappear, making more room on the screen for the letters that drop from the top. The rate at which the letters … Read more

More than a month after we got our first surprise peek at the Samsung Series 3, a new mainstream line of Samsung laptops that included some very attractive and affordable 12- and 11-inch ultraportables, the 12.5-inch version of the Series 3 has arrived at CNET's offices. We've taken it out of its box and will be running it through benchmarks and testing it, but for now here are our initial impressions.

Ultrabook, schmultrabook: why pay a lot of money for a thin laptop if you can get one for cheaper? While the Series 3 isn't technically an "Ultrabook" by Intel's definitions--it's thicker and uses a regular non-solid-state hard drive--this little laptop reminds us a lot of the Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E220s. It's nearly the same size and weight and has the same-size screen and keyboard, but features an even faster processor. … Read more

Google Chrome is a free Web browser that's become a legitimate contender due to its speed and versatility. It's especially easy for programmers to create and share extensions that add useful capabilities to the basic Chrome engine and framework. We looked at Google Chrome Portable, a portable version of Chrome from PortableApps. PortableApps modifies popular open source programs for portability, packaging them with an installer that copies the program file to a destination of your choice, which can be on your hard drive or a removable device such as a USB drive or memory stick. All you have … Read more

Passwords are the computer user's eternal paradox. If you make a password easy enough to remember, it's likely not very secure. If it's a strong password, you'll be prone to forgetting it--unless you write it on a notepad next to your computer, which again compromises your security. Random Password Generator is an extremely easy-to-use program that can help you create strong passwords and keep them stored securely.

When we first launched Random Password Generator we were prompted to create a master password that would protect the password manager from prying eyes. The program has an intuitive … Read more

Excel is capable of doing all kinds of useful things, if you have the time and know-how to take advantage of its features. If you'd like to use Excel--or OpenOffice, or Google Docs--to keep track of employee timesheets but you don't want to mess around creating templates on your own, try Simple Employee Timesheet Template. This simple set of templates makes it easy to track your hours either weekly or biweekly in three of the most popular spreadsheet programs.

Simple Employee Timesheet Template is a set of four templates: weekly and biweekly timesheets that track partial hours as … Read more