Tag: Tech Column

Using a Palm Pilot in today’s smartphone-centric world is absurd and idiotic. These are the insults I bore from everyone I talked to as I explained to them why I was carrying a clunky Palm LifeDrive around with me to classes. Yet for all my peers’ detracting, I’m not so

One evening, before sitting down to write my column, I saw a little game out of the corner of my eye while browsing the app store.  Ocean Tower was its name. The promotional artwork brought to mind a favorite game of my childhood: Sim Tower, by developer Yoot Saito. Sim

Another new semester, another iPhone refresh.  If you are planning on buying the iPhone 5s or 5c … stop. Put your wallet back in your pocket or purse, turn around, walk across the street, and buy an Android phone. You have literally almost no excuse to be settling for a

Summertime … and the living is easy. That lyric probably applies to Porgy and Bess more than it applies to all of us, with our internships, jobs, résumé builders, and whatnot. However, it really wouldn’t be summer if you had no time to relax. If you’re like me, relaxation means

What do you like to do when you get bored? I mean that special kind of bored, as in when you’re so lazy that you don’t even want to procrastinate because it requires too much effort. Some may sleep, some may eat, but I watch bad children’s TV when feeling

What comes to mind when you think of a “hackathon?” If your imagination is anything like mine, the term conjures images of sweaty teenagers, immersed knee-deep in gadgetry and pizza remains, typing furiously at green-and-blue flickering terminals, hard at work on programs that will bring down satellites, financial markets, and governments.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a long stretch of waiting. Quarters two and three of this year, barring any unexpected and brilliant games blindsiding us out of left field, will most likely be spent waiting for video games, rather than playing them. Bioshock Infinite and Crysis 3 are out, the

This week, I’m not going to wax poetic or philosophical about the state of the gaming industry or technology in general. No, today’s topic is a new twist on something I talk about all the time: mobile gaming. Most of you are probably sick to death of hearing my bias dumped

In many ways, pinball is a lost art. For a medium that arguably spawned a generation of coin-operated video arcades that, in turn, had tremendous influence on the video game market we all know and love today, nobody really plays pinball anymore. Two of the three great manufacturers have long

To my knowledge, there has never been a home console pirate game done well. Sure, we had stuff like Sid Meier’s Pirates! and its umpteen remakes, as well as a few first-person shooter scenarios that involved taking on pirates, but the swashbuckling sub-genre has never flourished in the gaming world