tower

Block Fortress is a great mix of tower defense and first-person shooter that lets you build a home base with turrets and other defenses, then play in first person while you help defend your blocky base. It's an incredibly deep game, but the way the developers named the game types is a bit confusing on first play.

The graphics in the game are almost exactly like those in the hit game Minecraft, with tons of different block types to unlock and use to defend your fortress. Fans of Minecraft will feel right at home during the building phase of … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Cell phone towers disguised as trees are a puzzling attempt at aesthetics.

- You know you're rich when you have the luxury of turning down an iPad.

Bathroom break video: ASMR keyboard raindrops… Read more

Game maker Popcap today revealed Plants vs. Zombies Adventures (PvZA) beta for Facebook, but gamers might be more interested in the mention of Plants vs. Zombies 2.

The social spinoff PvZA takes gardeners out of the backyard (the primary setting in the first game) and sends them on the road to fight off ravenous zombies. To freshen up gameplay, Popcap enhanced the title with new plants, zombies, and defenses, as well as the implementation of social features that include leaderboards and community challenges. … Read more

Our favorites games tend to be the simple, mindless ones because we typically play them while trying to kill time. Icy Tower 2 certainly falls under that category. Its simple gameplay will keep you entertained for hours.

We did notice that Icy Tower 2 took about 30 seconds to load. An instructional intro walks you through the game's controls. For example, tilting the phone to the left and right moves the character; tilting it a bit more makes him jump higher. The object of the game is to jump higher and higher on platforms to reach the top of … Read more

If I were Wayne Dobson, I'd move house. I'd move a few blocks away from his Las Vegas home. Or I'd leave Las Vegas altogether.

Dobson, you see, suffers constantly by virtue exclusively of where he lives.

Angry Sprint customers turn up at his door and demand he gives them their cell phones back.

He doesn't have their cell phone. He doesn't have anyone's cell phone. He doesn't even own a cell phone.

As the Las Vegas Review-Journal painfully portrays it, 59-year-old Dobson is at his wit's end.

However, he's also … Read more

Wharfedale is an 80-year-old speaker company, not to mention one of the oldest names in British audio. They make high-end and affordable speakers with prices starting at around $300 a pair. I recently checked out the Wharfedale Diamond 10.5 towers; their curvy cabinets cut a nice figure in the sound room at the In Living Stereo store in NYC. I listened to a few LPs on the stunning new Rega RP8 turntable. The tower speakers sell for $950 a pair.

The Diamond 10.5 is a three-way design with a 6.5-inch woofer, a 2-inch dome midrange, and a … Read more

I don't know how I missed Kudos Audio before, but the company has been in business for more than 20 years. When I heard Kudos' little X2 speaker at Sound by Singer in NYC I knew it was a serious high-end contender, but one that can easily fit in the most cramped apartments. Andrew Singer knows his market, and even fairly wealthy New Yorkers live in small spaces. The X2 is a mere 31 inches high, unusually petite for a tower speaker.

Though the speakers are made in England, the X2's 6-inch woofer and 1-inch tweeter are manufactured … Read more

MITAD DEL MUNDO, Ecuador--The effort to mark exactly where the equator traverses this tiny country roughly the size of Colorado -- if Colorado were filled with not just tall, jagged mountains, but also with jungle and rainforest and swamp and humid lowlands -- has been filled with centuries of folly and misplaced monuments. Now a provincial government in Ecuador wants to finally get it right, and make a big statement at the same time.

Despite being the longest way around the Earth, the equator is relatively hard to get to. Just take a look at your globe (OK, Google Earth will do) and you'll notice it passes through an awful lot of empty ocean, some remote islands, the Amazon, and some typically inaccessible parts of Africa. These raw geographic realities have made Ecuador particularly important for those on a quest for middle earth (not Middle Earth) for centuries. … Read more

Most speaker docks are on the small side, with an eye toward portability. Consequently, they're rarely powerful enough to fill a room with sound.

One option, of course, is a traditional stereo system with a receiver, a pair of speakers, and wires all over the place. What is this, the '70s?

Another option: pack that entire stereo into a single, floor-standing speaker that docks your iPhone or iPod -- no wires required (except for power, natch).

Like this one: for a limited time, you can get the Fluance FiTSD600 2.1-channel tower speaker dock for $249.99 shipped. That'… Read more