Category: gaming

  • Simplification disaster: The Case of Shafer v Civilization

    How does it happen that a shining success fades into failure, that a popular series falls out of favor, that a great product line drops off into obscurity? Those are the questions I’ve pondered for the past few years after my favorite video game series, Sid Meier’s Civilization, went completely off the rails at version…

  • Best apps for Amazon Kindle Fire tablets

    Looking for the best apps for your new Kindle Fire HD tablet? Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t give you easy access to the Google Android app store with its hundreds of thousands of offerings. Instead, you get just what is in Amazon’s much more limited store, missing plenty of good stuff especially Google’s own apps. But there…

  • Two small hardware updates are game changers for Macbook Air and Mac mini

    Apple massively upgraded two of its best hardware products today, the Macbook Air and the Mac mini. There are loads of changes and improvements. But only two are real game changers to me: 1. The addition of a Thunderbolt port on MacBook Airs means you finally will be able¹ to connect external hard drives and…

  • The iPad as digital library and other lessons of the first year

    Well, we’ve been very satisfied iPad owners for just over a year now so it’s a good time to look back and review. My intention is to dig a lot deeper than the usual gadget reviews and give a sense of what it’s like to have an iPad day in and day out for a…

  • Rock, paper scissors: Should I get a Kindle, iPad or MacBook?

    Well, we’ve been Amazon Kindle owners for almost four years now at our house, we’ve had Apple’s iPad for almost a year and we’ve had Mac laptops since too long ago to remember. So we’re getting asked a lot now: Should I buy an iPad or a Kindle? Can I use an iPad instead of…

  • Trouble finding the best blu-ray versions of Harry Potter

    I’ve written before about the difficulty of finding blu-ray movies that look good and avoiding those that look worse in high-definition. Certainly, the modern and lushly filmed Harry Potter film series looks good in blu-ray. But which edition should you buy? Regular blu-ray disks or the pricey ultimate editions. Unfortunately, the Warner Brothers studio has…

  • Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated)

    (UPDATE in December 2014 — I guess it’s impressive that this debate is still going on and people are still adding comments to the blog post. I personally think it’s a little silly to criticize the post, which was written more than four years ago, over the many game features which have been updated or added since,…

  • New version of Civ? New Windows box

    Well, it happens every four or five years and it’s happening again. Firaxis is about to release a new version of the extremely fun and highly addictive computer game Civilization (Civ V, if you must know) and so we need to build a new Windows PC. It could be months or even years before the…

  • Apple’s iPad may be the perfect computer for kids

    I’m excited about Apple’s new iPad for a couple of reasons. While a lot of the iPad’s features and services had been leaked in advance, I found myself gasping along with the audience in San Francisco when the price was announced. This is a product that is going to have vastly more impact for under…

  • Apple makes deleting a Boot Camp partition super easy

    A couple of years back, when I upgraded the hard drive on my then-new Macbook Pro, I used Apple’s incredible Boot Camp software to install Windows Vista. Using Boot Camp, you’re not just simulating running Windows under Mac OS X — you can actually boot up into “pure” Windows on your Apple hardware. The only…