It wasn't "well after square denied it". Their magazines have quite a bit of lead time. The issue that RiseToFall is reading now was finalized over a month ago. At the time EGM had that in their magazine, all they were going off of was the E3 video.

The rumour mill has been fairly accurate in the past, but they are in fact just 'Rumours' and not quite 'news'. In fact, I remember an issue late last year that hinted at Kojima's involvement with Nintendo for a "Revolution" game. It was very vague, in fact they didn't even finish the sentence and left it hanging. And here we have Solid Snake in Smash Bros.

For something more concrete, I have in my hand last year's April issue (which was probably finalized in late february/early march). Among the things mentioned: PS3 more powerful than Xbox 2 (unannounced at the time), Xbox 2 will be released before Christmas that year (also unannounced at the time), and the Nintendo DS WiFi would be launching with some BIG titles (Mario Kart).

In the same segment, they have a couple of misses: they state that Half Life 2 will be skipping Xbox and going straight to Xbox 2 (half wrong, HL2 did come out for Xbox but it's also coming to 360/PS3) and Soul Calibur 3 was going to be multiplatform as well with exclusive characters like SC2 (turned out to be PS2 exclusive). So it's sort of a 50/50 chance for this stuff.

EGM's quality hasn't diminished at all. Perhaps you're getting older and finding your own identity and realize that EGM isn't the be-all-end-all awesomesauce you thought it was when you were a few years younger.