So let’s get the obvious out of the way at the start: Streets of Rage isn’t exactly new. The original game came out in 1991 — meaning that it would now be of legal drinking age were it a person. The iOS port is newer (obviously), but coming out in 2009 that puts it in roughly the same timeframe as iOS 3. Ancient.

So why are we reviewing it?

That didn’t take long. Just twenty-four hours after Cult of Mac first reported that a jailbreak for iOS 6.1.3, 6.1.4 and 6.1.5 was incoming, it’s here, allowing even iOS 7 holdouts to get in on the jailbreaking fun.

Ugh, Flash content, right? It slows everything down, and buries content within inaccessible Flash movies, and forces you to install and keep updating the plugin, even if you don’t need it.

Honestly, I hope Flash goes the way of the dodo, and HTML5 takes over. If I had my druthers, I’d disable Flash on my Mac

Until then, however, there are some sites where you actually need to enable Flash to see the content. So, instead of completely dumping Flash in a fit of pique, you can enable it in Safari only for specific sites.

Love iOS 7, but don’t have a device powerful enough to rock it? Good news — Whited00r, the custom firmware for older iOS Devices that adds many of the features of newer versions of Apple’s mobile operating system — has just been updated to version 7, and it brings a lot of iOS 7’s look and feel along with it.

In addition to all the new products of 2013, the past year was a whir of activity in the vintage Apple space. Apple may be content to only move forward and deny existence of any products older than seven years – what do you mean my first generation MacBook Pro is vintage??? – but the public has not forgotten them.

The biggest retro news of the year was probably the ascendancy of the Apple 1 on the auction block. In May, an Apple 1 fetched a record price of $671,000 at an auction in Germany – until just recently the highest price ever paid for a personal computer. Other Apple 1s sold this year in the $300,000 range, so if you are lucky enough to have one of these oldies-but-goodies in your attic, dig it out now!

Remember when Tim Cook said it was going to be an iPad Christmas?

According to the latest analytics data from research group Flurry, it looks like he was spot-on.

It was widely reported in January that Apple was in talks to buy Waze, an Israeli startup with a hugely popular maps app. Waze was rumored to be asking Apple for $750 million. The same outlet that broke the acquisition rumor quickly backpedaled and said no such deal was taking place. Google ended up buying Waze in June for $1 billion.

And so goes the buyout game in Silicon Valley, a power play where tech giants like Apple and Google court hot startups with the hopes of adding them to their war chests.

Apple had its biggest year ever for acquisitions in 2013, with a record 15 smaller companies joining the fold. A dozen of them have now been publicly disclosed.

For an entity as secretive as Apple, examining the companies it buys is one of the only ways to peek into its future plans. When AuthenTec, a company that specialized in fingerprint readers and identification software, was purchased in July 2012, speculation immediately followed. What did Apple want with fingerprint sensors? The answer ended up being obvious, and the technology debuted in Touch ID in September 2013.

Often the outcome of an Apple acquisition isn’t so immediately apparent.

Historically, Apple acquires far fewer companies than its competitors. But the line is starting to blur. Google publicly bought three times as many companies as Apple in 2012 and not even twice as many in 2013. Apple bought more companies than Microsoft in 2013.

So what does all of this say about Apple’s future?

Remember the 25 billion iTunes downloads? How about when Vine came out, or Flipboard? What about that Ashton Kutcher movie?

There was a lot of Apple-related news in 2013, so we decided to pop it all into a video for your viewing pleasure. If you’re like us, you’ll dig this trip down memory lane.

So, let’s take a look back at the long year behind us as we gear up to head into the new year.

Given its tremendous success over the past 12 years, it’s easy to forget that the whole iTunes concept was once a risky proposition people weren’t sure would succeed.

Well, leap forward to the present day, and even the U.K.’s much-lauded BBC is taking its plays from Apple’s playbook — by announcing that it is rethinking (or at least augmenting) its classic flat license fee by borrowing from the iTunes/Netflix model and charging users £5 ($8.25) to download their favorite shows.

Having taken the holidays off (in Samsung’s case to nurse its wounds), Apple and Samsung are back to patent negotiations.

According to an article which appeared Sunday in The Korea Times, the two companies have resumed their patent battle — with officials at the Fair Trade Commission saying the companies are looking to hash out issues related to royalties.

BitTorrent Sync has received an end -of-2013 update — adding an often requested feature and several important fixes.

Christmas is a filthy time of year. First, it’s in the middle of the winter, when coughs, sneezes and dirty old diseases are most common. And second, extra germs, bacteria and viruses hitch a ride on us meatbag humans as we jet around the globe to see our families, swirling the air into a slurry of septicity.

It’s no wonder Santa spends the rest of the year in bed.

What you need to counteract this insurgence of influenza is the PhoneSoap charger, a kind of Howard Hughes-style tissue box for your iPhone, only with a UV lamp inside.

Here’s a reason to download Apple’s 12 Days of Gifts app if you haven’t already: the latest gift — freely downloadable using the app — is Martin Scorsese’s critically-acclaimed 2011 film Hugo.

The movie, based on Brian Selznick’s New York Times best-seller, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, tells the story of a 12-year-old boy living in the walls of a Parisian train station, who meets a down-on-his-luck toymaker, who turns out to be silent movie special effects maestro Georges Méliès (the guy that famously made this iconic short, entitled A Trip to the Moon).

Mountain is a very useful little widget that sits in your Mac’s menubar and tells you all about the disks you have mounted. It also lets you eject them right from its drop-down menu, and do a whole lot more besides.

The goDock is nothing if not ambitious. It’s a cleverly-fashioned block of aluminum which works as both a cable-wrapping spindle and portable dock for the iPhones 4 and 5/S. But it’ll cost you a ker-azy $85 ($58 for Kickstarter supporters), and needs a whopping $75,000 in pledges to get it started.

What?

If you write anything longer than a paragraph, then Gabe Weatherhead’s new Bookmarker Macros for Editorial are going to get you pretty excited. They let you highlight any section of a text document and save it as a bookmark.

Apple’s flagship Apple Retail Store in Brisbane, Australia may be less than two weeks away from opening.

Following a period of construction — including a delay — barricade signage has appeared outside the location: usually a surefire indication that launch is imminent.

StorySkeleton is an amazing app that’s been around for a little while, but a recent update to add iPad support has made it even better. At heart, it’s a kind of index-card-based note and outlining app for writers (screen, fiction and non-fiction) to help structure and plan stories. But the design is fantastic, making it easier to use than most other alternatives.

Oh, and it exports directly to native Scrivener files.

No, don’t worry: it’s not another terrible mouse design from Apple. This is the Tempo from UK-based Blue Maestro, and it’s a smart Bluetooth thermometer disguised as a pebble.

Google and Audi plan to announce a partnership to build in-car dashboard systems based on Android, according to a new report.

The deal will be rolled out Jan. 7 at the big International CES trade show in Las Vegas, says The Wall Street Journal, with the companies also set to reveal others involved in the collaboration, including Nvidia.

In iOS 6, the dock was a glass shelf. In iOS 7, it’s far more abstract: a blurry transparent layer over your wallpaper.

Some people love it, some people hate it. If you’re one of the latter, and you have already jailbroken your iOS 7 device, you’re in for a treat: a new jailbreak tweak lets you adjust the transparency and blurriness of the iOS 7 dock to your heart’s content.

Google+ was not the immediate Facebook-killer that Google wanted it to be, perhaps, but slowly and surely the search giant has been making its social networking service more and more useful to average folk.

That trend continues with the release of Google+ Auto Backup, a new app that will automatically upload images from your computer to Google+, thus storing them in the cloud.

We’re still at least six months away from the debut of iOS 8, but designer Sam Beckett has come along already with a very enticing look at one hot feature that could be in store for all of us: interactive notifications. And boy, do they look rad.

Tweetbot is probably our favorite Twitter client for iOS, especially after Tweetbot 3 gave the app a major makeover for iOS 7.

It’s also one of our favorite Mac Twitter clients, but it tends to hover a bit behind Tweetbot for iPhone when it comes to features. A new update, however, narrows the gap a little bit, introducing a number of useful bug fixes. Don’t expect a major aesthetic overhaul, though.

Have you ever thought about building your own website without spending thousands of dollars or thought about starting a freelance web development gig? What if it was all possible without knowing how to code? Well, it’s true.

WordPress is a full content management system and so much more through the thousands of plugins, widgets, and themes. It’s a system that makes it easy for anyone to get a professional website up and running without knowing how to code, and now WPMU DEV has created an amazing membership service that will give you all the essential tools you need to get a WordPress website up and running…and all for just $89.