The Zune era is about to come to a definitive end. Microsoft’s new Xbox Music–the service it announced at the E3 conference in June–arrives on the Xbox console on Tuesday and on Windows 8 on the operating system’s debut day, …
Video Games
Why XCOM’s Random Results Sometimes Aren’t (and You Should Play on Ironman)
I started out playing Firaxis’ XCOM: Enemy Unknown on “Classic” difficulty with “Ironman” disabled. I had this idea going in that I was going to inch rather than sprint through the game, reloading if I lost soldiers, like …
Chris Roberts’ Star Citizen Looks Like a Space Sim from the Distant Future
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition, much less Wing Commander maharishi Chris Roberts to emerge from the ether and demo a space sim that looks like something you’d conjure on a Pixar Renderfarm, least of all one that’s …
Maine Republican Party: Playing World of Warcraft Makes You Unfit for Office
In what seems a remarkably cynical, small-minded maneuver, the Republican Party in Maine has chosen to hang a popular video game around the Democratic candidate for Maine State Senate’s neck like an albatross, accusing her of …
Angry Birds: Star Wars Beaming Up (or Whatever) on November 8
Space! A long time ago in a final frontier, Jean-Luc Skywalker and a rowdy gang of merry men stole from the stars and gave to the Sneetches who had no stars upon thars. That’s the basic premise of Star Wars, from what I …
Apocalypse MMO: Death Becomes World of Warcraft
This weekend thousands of players dropped dead where they stood in some of World of Warcraft’s greatest cities, from Orgrimmar to Ragnaros to Stormwind.
Entire populations winked out in a matter of hours, their skeletal …
How XCOM: Enemy Unknown Is Like Bowling
Since the XCOM: Enemy Unknown demo arrived, I’ve noticed an interesting line of criticism develop (or as a longtime PC strategy gaming wonk, I should say reappear) in response to the way Firaxis’s turn-based tactics puzzler …
XCOM: Enemy Unknown — Definitely Not Halo Reach 2
You’d be forgiven for mistaking the new XCOM: Enemy Unknown launch trailer for a Halo Reach 2 teaser. It’s a slick, one minute, 38 second guns-and-aliens action brief — a festival of body armor, jetpacks, green plasma and …
What’s With All the Dismal Resident Evil 6 Reviews?
Resident Evil 6 is in a pickle, caught in a narrow, lightless corridor of its own design and swarmed by critics using words like hacked off limbs to bludgeon it into Metacritic mediocrity.
I’m probably exaggerating a little. …
Sony’s Super-Slim PlayStation 3: One Step Forward, One Step Back
Last week Sony released a surprise three-quel PlayStation 3 — an even slimmer, lighter rendition of its six-year-old games console. It then dropped that into a new bundle, raised the price by $20 and declared it “the ultimate …
Take Kinect, Add Robotics, Strap to a Human and Presto — Automatic Building Mapper!
Mapping the insides of anything in real time is hard. Certainly harder than it looks in movies like The Dark Knight, where, near the end, a bat-suited Christian Bale dashes through a high-rise, taking out small squadrons of …
Bad Piggies by Angry Birds Maker Lets You Anger the Birds Instead
Maybe there really are two sides to every story. Did anyone ever stop to ask the villainous pigs from Angry Birds why they keep stealing the birds’ eggs? I mean, we humans eat birds’ eggs all the time – rarely, if ever, asking …