[These days, keeping up with games can be a full-time job. So how do you separate the signal from the noise, the wheat from the chaff, the Temple Runs from the Temple Jumps? Allow us to help by regularly selecting a game You Should Play.]

I'm really, really tired of zombie games. Between Plants vs. Zombies, Zombies, Run! and Zombie Gunship, I think we’ve hit our zombie quota for the foreseeable future. I’m ready for something new.

Despite my fatigue I've fallen in love with The Walking Dead from Telltale Games, and I think you really ought to play it. Regardless of whether you’re a fan of the AMC television series, the comics or completely unfamiliar with either, this game is worth playing if you love a good harrowing adventure.

Keep reading...

[Streaming movies—on services such as Netflix—are ephemeral: Here one day, gone the next. The purpose of the Now Streaming series—written by film critic Jeffrey M. Anderson—is to alert you to what movies are new to streaming, what you might want to watch before it disappears, and other cinema treasures that are worth checking out.]

Memento

★★★★★

Now that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises is here, fans may want to go back and take a look at his slightly less expensive productions, like the ingenious Memento (2000). It’s based on a brilliant idea: the hero has short-term memory loss, and to illustrate this, the movie plays backward, beginning at the end, and with each previous scene unfolding after that. This way, as each scene begins, like the hero Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), we have no idea what’s going on. Ostensibly, Leonard’s ongoing goal is to find his wife’s killer, but are the mysterious Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) helping or hindering him?

Keep reading...

[Rather than giving you a review packed full of benchmark numbers and charts, our Field Test series is all about taking technology out of the box and out of the lab. We use it in our everyday lives, and report what we find.]

If you have golden ears, a golden pocketbook with which to indulge them, and an iPhone 4/4S with a music library encoded in Apple Lossless, you’ll want to know about the V-Moda Vamp. If music isn’t your passion, and you think audiophiles are fools with more money than sense, forget I ever mentioned this exquisite headphone amp and DAC (digital-to-analog converter), which comes in the form of an iPhone case with extended battery. It's priced at a cool $650.

If you’re wondering why any rational human being would buy a headphone amp, you’re probably doubly dubious about buying a headphone amp for a phone—and triply dubious about a headphone amp for a phone that costs more than the phone itself. After all, an iPhone can pump enough decibels into your ears to damage your hearing all on its own, right?

And you’re right; no one needs a headphone amp any more than they need an expensive smartphone—the Vamp is a high-performance luxury item designed to augment one of the iPhone’s many capabilities, music reproduction. But if you’re a serious music listener, you buy a headphone amp in order to hear musical details that—provided you have high-quality headphones—the built-in headphone jack on most consumer electronics can’t reproduce. A good headphone amp’s additional power and upgraded circuitry simply let your high-end headphones perform better.

Keep reading...

[Every time a hot new gadget is announced, the buzz can reach a boiling point before anyone stops to think about what all the fuss is all about. In our Scouting Report series, we’ll cut through the marketing jargon and examine what makes a certain product special—or in some cases, simply overhyped.]

The Google Nexus 7 tablet is here. Is this bargain 7-inch tablet the tablet you’ve been waiting for? With a starting price of just $199, the Nexus 7 has set its sights on the first-generation Amazon Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble's Nook Tablet, and Samsung's Galaxy Tab 2 7.0. Of those tablets, only Samsung provides a full-blown version of Android, albeit one with the company's own TouchWiz customizations. Amazon and Barnes & Noble each use their own variants of Android, which means you don't get the full Android tablet experience with either. Thinking of taking the plunge with the Nexus 7? Let’s dig into what it offers and find out.

Keep reading...

[Rather than giving you a review packed full of benchmark numbers and charts, our Field Test series is all about taking technology out of the box and out of the lab. We use it in our everyday lives, and report what we find.]

While I was lost last year in the football fields of tech called the Consumer Electronics Show, 50 Cent announced a new partnership with Sleek headphones. The prototype looked very cool, like a direct competitor to the Beats series featuring 50 Cent’s former mentor, Dr. Dre. I looked forward to getting my hands on them. Lo and behold, 50 Cent’s deal with Sleek headphones collapsed and the rapper-turned-businessman found SMS Audio to produce his headphones. They finally shipped this summer. Unfortunately, as much as I want to like them, it’s hard to recommend 50 Cent Headphones with the amount of cake you’ll have to drop to get them and the buggy proprietary tech they rely on.

Keep reading...