Rob LeFebvre - page 38

For the horde! This trailer for the upcoming expansion to massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft is utterly fantastic.

Blizzard has a long history of creating amazing cinematic mini-movies for all its games and expansions, and this new one pretty much tops it all.

Even if you don’t know what the heck the orcs in the trailer are talking about, surely you can get behind how gorgeous it looks and how realistic these creatures seem. You’ll root for these monstrous humanoids in their bid for freedom, even if you’re not keen on them conquering the world in the process.

Check out the trailer below to see what we mean.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — 12-year-old Josh couldn’t wait to get to the museum. For once, the visit wouldn’t be about “boring” old artwork or educational science, but something he really loves — Minecraft.

“This is great,” he said while tapping and mousing his way through a multiplayer Minecraft landscape that was part of an activity at The Anchorage Museum. “My friend told me about this and it’s way better than staying at home doing this in my bedroom.”

If you use your iPad or iPhone (or both!) onstage when you perform, you know how hard it can be to find a good place to put them. Putting your iPad on a flimsy music stand just won’t cut it, and leaving your iPhone on the floor near your guitar pedals is just asking for a stomped-on smartphone.

The solution, for me, has always been iKlip iPad stands, which connect right to my mic stand. The new versions, including a sweet new iPhone mount, keep my iPad and iPhone safe from all musician-based harm, and always at the right height and angle to get at my lyric sheets, set lists and guitar effects.

Listen up, soldier! The aliens are headed our way and it’s up to you to keep them out of our base. You’ll have access to a variety of offensive towers that you can upgrade along the way, as well as a special Hero and other power ups to turn the tide of battle in our favor.

If you’re like many of us, you love a good tower defense game on the go. There are a few good ones out there (Fieldrunners, Kingdom Rush), but we’re always willing to give a new take on this classic gaming genre a spin.

The true test of a tower defense game, however, is whether it keeps you in that zen-like flow state while you play, and whether or not you want to keep playing it.

Beautiful piano music, a young protagonist, gorgeous visuals and landscapes fill the new trailer for upcoming PlayStation 4 exclusive, Rime, from TequilaWorks and Sony Computer Entertainment.

The young boy, reminiscent of other young wandering protagonists like Link (Legend of Zelda), Wander (Shadow of the Colossus), and Oliver (Ni No Kuni), finds a keyhole in a distant tower, and races across the landscape to get there.

Why is he running? What will he find when he finally attains the tower? Is this even the right tower? The just-posted trailer (linked below) has no answers, but makes us want to find out.

Take a moment to watch the above trailer for The Walking Dead’s upcoming season five. It’s got all the things that make a Walking Dead trailer great – scary music, tight editing, and enough little details to keep the fans guessing and excited.

Consider our excitement, then, when we found the amazing trailer below: a shot-by-shot recreation of the entire Walking Dead trailer above, made with LEGOs.

Even better, we’re still excited to see the upcoming season, even if we’d just watched the LEGO trailer – it’s that good. Check it out below.

As the eighth of the planned ten episodes in this final season of HBO vamp-drama, True Blood, “Almost Home” brings more storylines to a close, weaning us off the Bon Temps drama gently, with a few fun explodey bits along the way.

Eric and Pam get the lowdown on Mr. Gus’ final solution to the Nu Blood plan to total market domination, while Hoyt, Jason and Jessica start to clean up their complications. The missing kids and jealous vampire story comes to an abrupt yet satisfying end, and Sookie does all she can to help find a cure for her true love, Vampire Bill.

Be warned! Spoilers abound below, but as this is another talky episode, for the most part, we’re going to keep it short and to the point.

Halt and Catch Fire isn’t Silicon Valley where the presence of a woman in a skirt sends the coders into a tailspin. This is the dying cry of the zipless f**k, before everyone got spooked about AIDS. This is hot neon, the smell of the soldering gun on a circuit board, and the deep empty place inside that drives creative people to do crazy things, think different, and meet each other where the metal meets the code.

Unfortunately, dismal ratings may possibly keep the show, whose plot hinges on a rag-tag group of misfits reverse engineering the IBM PC around the same time Woz & Jobs were busy home-brewing in the garage, from being picked up for a second season.

You can watch Halt and Catch Fire, named for the machine code (HCF) that was able to cause a computer to stop working, on AMC or iTunes.

We feel so strongly about this retro-tastic show (Coleco! Pong! Texas Instruments!) that we put up a petition to save it. Here’s why you should sign:

Team Chaos has a reputation for publishing quirky, fun, colorful games like Cat vs. Aliens, Flappy Stache, and Dragon Academy (a “hatch-three” puzzle game).

With Space Colors, they’ve done it again. This time, you’re an Asteroids-style spaceship trying to destroy and mine asteroids, kill all the baddies, and avoid dying for as long as possible while gaining experience points and credits, which can be used in the in-game store to purchase weaponry and armor upgrades.

It’s stylish, easy to learn, hard to master, and is truly a lot of fun.

Godus, the much-anticipated video game from god-game specialist designer Peter Molyneux and 22cans, is available now for iOS devices. Godus will let you play as your own private deity, letting you create and nurture a little island paradise on your iPad, iPod touch, or iPhone.

You’ll get to carve out landscapes with the touch of a finger, placing mountains, rivers, and flora wherever you like. You’ll also have the care and feeding of devout, worshipful followers of your very own.

“In Godus your hands will sculpt the mountains and carve rivers,” said Molyneux in a statement. “Your touch will create pastures for your people. You will be loved by tiny worshipers that need your help to grow and your direction to progress through the ages of civilization.”

Apple’s EarPods aren’t too bad for gaming, what with their in-line microphone capabilities, but they’re really not the best for long game sessions; honestly, they just end up hurting the inside of my ears.

And as far as gaming mice are concerned, you really do need one with a second button at the very least.

While you’re at it, of course, you want your gaming peripherals to match your Apple style. Razer’s Taipan ambidextrous gaming mouse and matching Kraken-pro headset are exactly that – quality peripherals that make your gaming life easier and your style just that much more put together.

It’s another episode full of story set up and a ton of talking this week on True Blood, the HBO vampire romance-drama that’s now seven episodes into it’s final season.

The plot moves inexorably on toward some sort of conclusion, but seems to be more of an exercise in arranging characters so that they can fall in love and have sex with each other. Eric and Pam continue their search for Sarah Newland, Holli and Andy keep looking for Adilyn and Wade, Sookie still holds out hope that there will be a cure for Bill, who she infected with the Hepatitis-V virus her own darn self.

Here’s hoping that the endless plot devices slow down and merge into a series finale we can all be excited about in the next three episodes before it’s all over and done with.

Keep reading to see all the spoiler-y detail of this week’s episode of True Blood.

I’m all about minimalist bags; paring down my kit to the bare essentials so I’m not bogged down when traipsing from place to place is a daily goal of mine. I’ve gone minimal with my wallet, my MacBook and the various digital and analog ephemera I need to carry with me as I go about daily tasks for work and at home.

There is a time, however, when you need to have a larger subset of your general kit. You might need that extra battery pack (or two), your MacBook Pro, both your iPads, a couple of backup hard drives, an external keyboard, a gaming mouse, a PlayStation Vita, headphones and (of course) all the associated wires and plugins that these items require. Oh, and maybe a water bottle, a wallet, an iPhone and a set of keys.

That’s the exact stuff I’ve got packed into an STM Quantum Messenger bag — and it fits handily, with room to spare.

Lovely Planet is a twee little game for your Mac (or Linux/Windows box) that distills the essentials of the first-person shooter genre down to the basics: shoot, jump, run.

You’ll do this, over and over, across five distinct worlds and hundreds of levels armed with nothing more than your adorable little bow and arrow and a sense of adventure.

Be warned, though — you’re going to die repeatedly, especially at first, because while the visuals and soundtrack are kawaii as heck, the levels are designed as diabolical tests of your gaming sanity. But please, don’t throw your Macbook across the room when you have to re-start a level for the hundredth time. Maybe take a break.

If you make music of any kind, or are just looking to upgrade your sound system from the decent-yet-not-audiophile Bluetooth speakers you currently use, you know you want a set of speakers that can handle the highest of highs, the deepest of lows and everything in between without sounding muddy or overly tinny, middy or bassy. You want a speaker set that can handle the deep boom of drum ‘n’ bass and the sweet, high melodies of a Mozart concerto along with any type of loop you can throw at it from your own collection.

Studio monitors are a big deal when making music, as they offer up sound that is as true to the source as possible. You want to hear everything going on in your mix so you can make sure to create the sound that best captures your musical vision, whether during the recording, mixing or mastering phase.

The Reveal 402 studio monitors from Tannoy promise to deliver unparalleled sound and fury without a huge footprint, letting you create music properly on today’s ultra-portable MacBooks. They also let you just plug in any sound source, from XLR to mini-audio jack, with ease, making these ideal for both music creation and plain old rocking out while you’re working.

While we wait for this weekend’s highly-anticipated Marvel movie, The Guardians of the Galaxy, we thought it’d be fun to pass along this sweet speed-painting from filmmaker Matthew Pearce.

It shows an illustration of Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord, created on a 1984 Macintosh using MacPaint. Now that’s some serious special effect magic, right there.

Check out the video below.

It’s definitely trailer week, especially for comic book and other genre movies, but here’s one for an upcoming DC television show based on the Vertigo property, Hellblazer. The show will cover the exploits of a certain John Constantine, supernaturally sensitive wizard-type who wears a trench coat, smokes incessantly (in the comics, at least) and does smart-ass battle with the angels and demons who plague us mere mortals.

The trailer really brings on the horror tropes: the creepy bugs on the wall revealing a scary message, the creepy flat-affect kid with the sharp knife, the broken-neck demon in a human body shot. You know, all the hits.

Check out the trailer below for all the creepy footage from what could be the best comic book show of the upcoming season.

Flickr has just jumped into the photo licensing market with both feet, hoping to help you sell your stunning photos to a variety of “photo agencies, editors, bloggers and other creative minds.”

Image licensing isn’t a new idea for Flickr, long a repository for the best in high-quality photos posted by professional and amateur photographers alike. Flickr’s always allowed photographers easy access to creative commons licensing to tell editorial staffers which photos could be used, and for what purposes. It also allowed creators the ability to license their photos professionally via Getty Images and get paid, though the specific deal with Getty was discontinued back in March of this year.

Now, though, the list of places that you can sell the images you take on your iPhone to is even larger.

Can you dig it? The second part of the new content update for EA’s Plants vs. Zombies 2: The Dark Ages, is now live and wending its way to your very own zombie-infested iPad, iPhone, or Android device.

This new content update has ten new levels and two new plants: the Magnet-shroom and the Pea-nut, which gets you both offensive and defensive capabilities. There are new Zombies as well, with the dastardly Wizard zombie, who turns your plants into sheep, and the King zombie, who can upgrade peasant zombies on the fly.

If you play through the extra levels, you’ll come across a new zombie boss, too, and there’s an additional Arthur’s Challenge to hone your old-school medieval skills with. Check out the trailer below to see some of the new content in action.

“One day I’ll remember,” says Bilbo Baggins. “Remember everything that happened. The good, the bad. Those who survived, and those who did not.”

Thus starts the latest trailer for the upcoming sequel to The Hobbit movies: The Battle of the Five Armies. Check it out below in all it’s glory.

If you’re a fan of stylish, true-to-the-comics movie adaptations, you’ve probably already seen Sin City. The trailer (below) released during last week’s Comic Con shows us the sequel, based on the second book in the Sin City series by Frank Miller, A Dame To Kill For.

Rodriguez (Spy Kids, Sin City) will produce and Miller (Dark Knight Returns, 300) will direct a script co-written by the two men and William Monahan (The Departed).

Actors returning include Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Powers Boothe, Mickey Rourke, and Bruce Willis. New folks to the series include Josh Brolin, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Christopher Lloyd, Ray Liotta, Stacy Keach, Christopher Meloni, and yes, even Lady Gaga, who you can see as a waitress handing over some cash to Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character in the trailer below.

It’s time for the various residents of Bon Temps to face the music. Karma’s a bitch, and in the latest episode of the final season of this hit vampire romance TV show from HBO, we’re gonna watch most of the main characters deal with the consequences of their past behavior and poor choices. Andy, Holly, Bill, Sam, Sookie: Each of these True Blood staples have to stand up and own their life choices.

This is a pretty expository episode, so we spend a lot of time watching characters explain their situations in sometimes excruciating detail. Let’s hope that our karma for watching the show will be some more action-packed and hilarious scenes in the upcoming shows left in the season, rather than a payback for following the show for so long. We still have faith, though.

Spoilers abound below, so be warned. Find out what happened on last night’s episode after the jump.

Full disclosure: the publisher of the naughtily-named Age of Booty: Tactics sent Cult of Mac a really nice wooden treasure chest with some fun promotional stuff in it. This usually means that we’d give it a skip, as generally, the better the swag, the crappier the game. We were pleasantly surprised, then, when we found Age of Booty‘s first outing on iOS to be a pretty darn great free-to-play game, with only a few caveats for the novice player.

The original Age of Booty was a 2008 downloadable real-time strategy game for Xbox and PlayStation, developed by Certain Affinity and published by Capcom. This time around, Certain Affinity took the concept to iOS with Age of Booty: Tactics, which switches things up, adding some new mechanics to the strategy formula and putting it into an asynchronous multiplayer format.

The graphics are charming enough, the soundtrack is appropriately pirate-themed, and the sea and boat sounds are nicely atmospheric. It’s in the strategic gameplay, though, that Age of Booty: Tactics surely shines.

You know how it is — you want to share that lovely photo of your new puppy, but you really don’t want the person you hand your iPhone to swiping to those over-the-top party photos from your last lost weekend.

Overswipe, a new app from developer Haley & Hughes, aims to solve that very problem in a super intuitive way. All you do is open the app, tap on the photos you want to share, and then hand over the iPhone. Your intended viewer will only see the photos you chose, and won’t be able to swipe into anything super embarrassing.

If you’ve been wary of joining the digital comics revolution because of digital rights management (DRM) concerns, Comixology, a comics portal and mobile app, is creating a solution.

Announced Thursday at the company’s San Diego Comic-Con panel, the new DRM-free backup service will let you keep a local copy of your purchased digital comics from the likes of Image Comics, Dynamite Entertainment, Zenescope Entertainment, MonkeyBrain Comics, Thrillbent, and Top Shelf Productions. You’ll be able to save a local copy in PDF or CBZ (a comic-book archiving format) right on your iPad.

“For those out there who have not joined the comic reading community because of DRM – you have no excuse now,” said ComiXology’s John D. Roberts in a statement. “We’re excited about the launch of DRM-free backups today and look forward to announcing more innovative features as we move ahead with our mission of making everyone on the face of the planet a comic book fan!”