Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two Review - Xbox 360

Nobody knew quite what to make of Disney Epic Mickey when its strange and unusual concept art first hit the internet years ago. Upon release, Junction Point’s compelling exploration of lost and forgotten cartoon characters inhabiting a dark reflection of Disneyland called Wasteland suddenly being rediscovered by the most famous cartoon character of all time was one of our favorite games of 2010. Thankfully, Disney saw fit to greenlight a sequel,...

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Hitman: Absolution Review - Xbox 360

Hitman: Absolution is outstanding. Best in the series by a wide margin, and easily one of the best games released in 2012. IO Interactive tapped into something unique in 2000 when Hitman: Codename 47 was released. There's always been this vision in popular entertainment of the well-dressed, urbane contract killer, and 47 emobodied that vision perfectly. Each new hit amounted to a murderer's sandbox, with makeshift weapons, disguises, and environment-specific...

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Remember Me Review

Remember Me never comes into its own, but it's an entertaining and attractive adventure all the same. Within Remember Me, there's an outstanding game struggling to be set free, held back by a story that never takes off and claustrophobic levels that never allow the fantastic near-future setting to take center stage. Remember Me is not the game its world and premise hint that it could have been; rather, it's simply a good third-person action game:...

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Far Cry 3 Review - Xbox 360

Far Cry 3 Review: Far Cry has always been a series with tremendous potential. The open tropical areas of the first game provided a lush setting for a fairly pedestrian adventure, marred by the eventual appearance of game-breaking mutant monsters. Far Cry 2 brought things down to earth with a gritty story of mercenaries in Africa, but suffered from irritating gameplay decisions like constantly respawning enemy outposts and a tendency for your character...

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ZombiU Review - Wii U

Ubisoft seems to have approached ZombiU with a sensible formula: introduce the relatively unique properties of the Wii U gamepad and present them in the context of a very accessible and appealing zombie apocalypse. In doing so, Ubisoft, no stranger to third-party launch titles, has stepped it up a notch to deliver one of the few worthwhile original Wii U titles out of the gate. There's something eerily familiar about the outbreak imagined in ZombiU's...

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Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara Review

Two of Capcom's best arcade beat-'em-ups get HD ports worthy of their heritage, providing a good, if easy, co-op experience. The pair of games in Capcom's Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara collection may very well be the best of its beat-'em-up games from the '90s arcade era, and these ports from Iron Galaxy are the most robust versions of the duo of Tower of Doom and Shadow Over Mystara to date. The 1999 Sega Saturn ports were exclusive...

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State of Decay Review

State of Decay is an immersive and suspenseful open-world zombie adventure that shouldn't be missed. ____________________________________________________________________________ The Good Breakable weapons keep the focus on stealth Permadeath for characters ensures that you're careful about taking risks Heavy doses of suspense in a large, immersive open world Convincing stat-driven survival system Welcome focus on interpersonal relationships. ______________________________________________________________ The...

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Mobile Call Logs Can Reveal a Lot to the NSA

Research shows how much the NSA could glean from call records, and why efforts to downplay the significance of such metadata are misleading. Of all the recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance activities, the collection of metadata from Verizon’s U.S. call records may be the most concerning. Despite reassurances that the information collected is limited in its scope, academics who study such data say it could still reveal a great deal about the people being monitored. To defend the program, members of Congress...

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MacBook Air review (13-inch, mid-2013)

What once was a fresh and exciting design has now, it must be said, become rather familiar. That's in part because of the success of the MacBook Air -- we see them popping open on trains and airplanes all the time these days -- but largely this is thanks to Apple not significantly revamping the design for nearly three years, a period over which we've seen radical changes on the PC side of things. Is this the result of priorities being committed...

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Facebook’s Wi-Fi Spreads in the Wild

The idea of offering people free Wi-Fi in exchange for their physical coordinates began at Facebook as a one-off experiment, a project by two engineers during an all-nighter in May 2012. Since then, Facebook has gradually spread what it now calls “Facebook Wi-Fi” further and further beyond the company’s corporate walls, deploying the system to cafes in Palo Alto and San Francisco and even into a line of routers made by Cisco. The growth of Facebook’s...

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The iPhone 5S rumor roundup

It's inevitable...but when will it happen? The rumor roundup for Apple's next iPhone starts now. iPhone rumors are like flies at a summer picnic: they're nearly unstoppable. Collected in one batch are all the iPhone 5S/6 rumors CNET has reported so far, with some commentary on where these rumors came from. We always have long wish lists for newer features and further redesigns, but the bottom line is this: nobody knows exactly what we'll...

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In iOS 7, Twitter takes over social -- again

New integrations turn Twitter into an intelligent content provider for iOS device owners, and make Facebook seem less relevant. It's like 2011 all over again. Showing some repeat favoritism, Apple has once again picked Twitter to power the coolest social experiences for its 600 million iOS device owners. During a keynote address at its annual Worldwide Developer Conference, the Cupertino company lifted the veil on iOS 7, its next-generation...

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