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Our growing infatuation with Destructoid took another uncomfortable turn into full-on mancrush this week, as they put up a couple of MiBI posts recently.

Ben posted about our potential Webkinz-ish DLC plans (that may still yet come to fruition) here. Yes, it is a pretty complicated and/or convoluted scenario to get things figured out in order to do something like that, but if enough folks buy the game and the interest is there, I’m sure we would figure out a way to make it work. I know I’d like to kill somebody as Repvile.

Then Hamza used his underground sources at Interpol and scooped the field with his announcement that we’re coming out this week on XBLA. I can just envisage the handoff of the manila envelope in a dark parking garage. Though I guess the intrigue factor would be less “Deep Throat”-y, and more “Eddie Murphy in Trading Places”-y.

We are also featured on GameSpot UK’s Start+Select video podcast last week (which was put together just before we got wind we’d be out this week, so that’s why Guy isn’t in the know about release dates and price and such things– clearly, his underground contacts do not have the Spy-Fu that Hamza’s has). But still, you get to see the game in action with Guy’s British accent voiceover which definitely adds class to what at its core is a silly game with balls and guns.

Paul squeezes in some XBLA love on the Major Nelson Podcast in the midst of a bunch of AAA titles. Impossible to try to cram all of our game features and highlights into five minutes of airtime, but he gets most of our awesome in there. Give it a listen (starting at 1:12-ish).

Anyway, we’re gearing up for a big and sleepless week here at Playbrains, and hope y’all are ready to check out the game in…Holy Hell…two days. Two days? Seriously? Two days. Yikes.

We had many stops last week in the UK talking to some of gamedom’s greatest print mags, but we also got to see some folks who do great game coverage online.

One of those sites is Resolution Magazine who had Christos come in to play the game on Friday afternoon, and they’ve put up their Hands-on Preview. I guess we can colour them impressed: “Without a shred of doubt, Madballs is the best XBLA title I have ever played“. Take *that* Spongebob Underpants!…

I don’t speak English very well (as evidenced on the GameSpot podcast last week), so I put the phrase through Babelfish and did an British-to-Canadian translation and yeah, it actually means the same here as it does there (Oh, I know…I was surprised, too).

Also last week, James from Totally Gaming Network came by to play (in his own words he mopped the floor with Andy from CVG. We were in the room at the time and can absolutely corroborate this statement. Andy will surely blame it on a slow network connection, but James got skillz…).

Anyway, James’ preview is up as well, and my favourite line is “they attack in a vaguely Pokemon-eque way, except about 200 times cooler“. It’s a bit of a shame really, since our target metrics were to get up to 240x cooler, but we’ll take 200.

All of this to say, it would appear as though the Brits have just as much taste and intelligence as their American counterparts when it comes to previewing videogames.

You know, through the global good vibes we’re putting out there, I think it’s obvious that MiBI will end up being a catalyst for world peace once it gets out to the truly evil countries of the world (I’m looking at you, Iceland…)

We’ve done a couple of MiBI previews for GameSpot– first with Sophia Tong out in San Francisco and then with Guy Cocker in London.

Sophia posted her preview last week, where we took her through the first level of “The Third Faction”– the adventure mode campaign inside the game, as well as giving her an overview of all of the multiplayer features in the game, of which there are many. Sophia showed the world she had style and taste when she said that she was impressed by the “the number of multiplayer features included in this peculiar game of goofy balls armed with high-tech weapons”. Well said, indeed.

As for Guy from GameSpot UK, we’re getting him into some multiplayer matches very soon so he can feel the frantic action of the arenas and hope to get him doing some creative British swearing at our dev team back in Ottawa who have not shown much mercy to the previewers so far (good strategy, guys).

Guy was kind enough to have me and a couple of super guys from Codemasters join himself and Luke on their weekly podcast yesterday to talk about our games and our comments and feelings on the issues of the day, which you can enjoy from the comfort of your own bed by clicking here.

While we were on the tour last week, we stopped in to show the game to the good folks at G4 who had the bright idea to have us go through one of the levels in the game and narrate what was happening.

We definitely agree that showing gameplay from MiBI is always a good plan, but it’s a shame that James Earl Jones was not available to narrate.

So here we go, taking you (quickly) through “First Contact”, the first level of the adventure campaign that you can play in single-player or up to 4-player online co-op:

Feel free to concentrate on the pictures, and ignore the sound. I know that’s what I do.

We were fortunate enough to get a couple more good previews last week after we showed the game to two of our fave-rave online pubs out in California.

AJ from Kotaku watched the demo of the game and then grabbed the controller and killed a bunch of balls with extreme predjuidice and flair. Once the dust and goo had settled, a pretty kick-ass preview of the game appeared on the Giant K.

Obviously, AJ is a smart and tasteful individual with taste and style, and is clearly not someone to be trifled with.

Tom got pretty detailed in his own preview on TeamXbox, taking readers through the game features and wrapping up by saying “For now, believe us when we say that Madballs looks surprisingly fun, graphically slick and could have one of the most innovative ideas in multiplayer gameplay we