Unwinnable

News came a day before Google I/O, Google’s annual developer conference, that Blackberry will release versions of its popular Blackberry Messenger for Android (and iOS) this summer. For many Blackberry users, BBM was one of the main reasons, and perhaps the only reason, to remain loyal to the platform through lackluster devices, poor OS updates, and a shrinking market share being eaten away by Apple, Samsung, HTC and Motorola. Sensing this, industry pundits have been calling on Blackberry to finally port BBM to other devices for years. Now, it’s years too late.
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Turtle Beach’s Ear Force Z Seven is a PC gamer’s dream headset. The amount of fully customizable options, as well as quick on-the-fly audio adjustments from the wired touch controller, is outstanding. It’s a change that could boost your gaming performance and if you consider yourself a hardcore PC gamer, you may want to pay attention. (more…)

With GPS records, computer stats and timestamps in hand, they will eventually strike. They’ll comb through the complaints and the cries until they find a mismatch, and then they’ll issue a statement.

The critic never drove to that point, they’ll say. He did not traverse the highway mentioned in the third paragraph.

And he most certainly did not toggle the hardest difficulty setting. (more…)

The following is the latest in a series of journal entries chronicling the author’s descent into next-gen gaming degeneracy and assorted geekery — from getting his first television in years to trying to figure out why the @$@$&@@ you need two goddamn directional pads just to walk down an effing hallway.

The story of college football star Manti Te’o's fictional dead girlfriend, if somehow you haven’t heard it yet, is riveting. (more…)

Last night, Nvidia announced its first-ever dedicated gaming device, currently code-named Shield. It looks like a slightly oversized Xbox 360 controller with a 5” clamshell screen on its top and it runs a “vanilla” version of the Android operating system.

You might expect such a bulky, open-source gizmo from an industrious hacker – the kind of person who’d squeeze a screen onto a Gamecube controller or turn a toaster into a Nintoaster. What the hell is a company as big as Nvidia doing making one? (more…)

Every year, we struggle to compile the lists of the things we loved over the course of the year. There are so many of them, the movies, the games, the stories. We debate and vote and hem and haw for the entire month of December, trying to distill them perfectly.

The same can not be said of the things we hate. The worst of 2012 – that’s easy to see… (more…)

If you are reading this, then the Mayan Apocalypse hasn’t actually gone down as scheduled. (more…)