Darren Gladstone

From the company that brought you such creatively named titles such as "Alien Shooter" and "Alien Shooter 2" comes Zombie Shooter. I'll give you two guesses what the game's about. There are zombies. And you shoot them. How's that for a review?

Seriously, though, the "Shooter" games from Sigma Team aren't really about conserving ammo or carefully creeping around corners. They make balls-to-the-wall versions of Diablo. There's some Role-playing elements (you level up stats and your weaponry), but gameplay-wise, it's about as deep as a kiddie pool. And I'm okay with that. The game revolves around sweet graphics, satisfying sound blasts and then the ride is over. You could probably power through this game in a couple hours and walk away happy if all you're looking for is a straight up shooting game (other, less engaging modes exist if you're still hungry for blood). Hey, they pretty much tell you what's up in the title.

Brutally hard gameplay. Unforgiving foes. Fun, right? That's the legacy of Capcom's classic Ghosts 'n Goblins series. The latest sequel, Ghosts 'n Goblins: Gold Knights, is the first to grace the iPhone platform. Depending upon how you rate yourself on the gamer scale (n00b to g4m3zmast3r97) will gauge how much you'll like GnG: Gold Knights. Me? I find it a valiant, but flawed, effort.

Let me explain how the game works: You're a knight, Arthur or Lancelot, running from the left to the right, jumping and slicing up demons to save the day. Arthur has a little more in the ways of armor while Lanceleot has a slightly different arsenal. Classic stuff! Maybe it's the nostalgia talking, but they did a good job of capturing the flare of the original games. The creepy zombies, the lantern lighting, the fire demons... it's all here. The moody music is true to the source material as well, but when you get down to playing, the graphic style had me conflicted. The lush backgrounds look great but the oddly animated characters in the foreground looked off--like I was controlling a paper doll. Seeing the strange characters run around made me want to watch Youtube clips of the old NES version.

My index finger went completely numb. You could poke it and I wouldn't feel a thing. That was the flashing red neon sign telling me something was wrong. The culprit: laptops. My esteemed partner in crime, Patrick Miller, recently wrote about what bugs him about laptops. Now it's my turn, but I want to share a personal tale with you. Along the way, I'll tell you how to avoid the same mistakes I made.

Carpal Tunnel: A Loathe Story

This week is as good a time as any--just before Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Consumerpocolypse Tuesday--to look back at a year's worth of laptops. In fact, we've got a huge laptop holiday gift guide feature that I encourage you to check out. In the meantime, though, I threw out an innocent-enough question to the Internets (Facebook, Twitter, TwitBook...whatever!) this past week: "What are you looking for in a new laptop?"

You wouldn't believe (or maybe you would) some of the answers I got from folks. Here, in no particular order, is a sampling--with some of my snark thrown in for good measure. (Note: Messages from Twitter were expanded from 140-characterese.)

Nokia spokespeople are quick to correct you if you slip and call the Booklet 3G a netbook. Well, let's see: It has a tiny, clamshell, laptop-like design. It has meager specs (1GB of RAM, Intel's Z530 1.6-GHz Atom CPU, and a 4200-rpm 120GB hard drive). It has a 10.1-inch screen. Last time I checked, that was pretty much the definition of a netbook. The Booklet 3G just happens to be a reasonably well-constructed model with a focus on being 3G wireless-ready. But are you willing to shell out $599, sans contract (price as of 11/13/09), for Nokia's maiden effort in the netbook market (or $299 subsidized through an AT&T data plan)?

As you can probably tell, I'm not exactly enamored with what lies under the Booklet's hood--certainly not at the asking price. Let's start with the hard numbers. In PC WorldBench 6, the Booklet slogs along to a 27. That's what happens when you have a underpowered machine running Windows 7. In a a quick, subjective performance spin, it seemed painfully pokey. From a cold start, it takes 45 seconds to boot into the Windows 7 Starter Edition desktop. Try opening up more than two applications at a time, and brace for the lag. As for battery life, it's a slightly better story. In our labs, the Booklet lasted an impressive 8 hours, 39 minutes. It may be nearly delivering on that promise of all-day computing. You just might need that time to get the computer to run.

Last week, while I was jet-setting off to Dell HQ to get a gander at the Adamo XPS (you did read our exclusive look at prototype laptops that'll never make it to market, right?) I found myself with a lot of free time at the airport. I could have been productive and done some writing--but that was prime time to marry my love of laptops with my love of goofing off. This week, I'm telling you how to make the most of a low-powered PC, be it a netbook or humbly equipped business machine.

The Plan Behind the Adamo XPS

Earlier this year, I remember AMD reps stumping about how laptop battery life gets measured. It's misleading, to say the least. MobileMark07, they said, is a synthetic test that measures idle time before a laptop battery dies. Many vendors use MobileMark07 results because it's a repeatable test, and those are the numbers you see pushed in promotional materials. But is that how you use your laptop? Hell no! You're running apps, watching video, listening to music, firing up the Wi-Fi--you get the idea.

Someone I know recently visited a couple brick-and-mortar stores to try a little social experiment. Playing the dummy, she said she needed a laptop with a long battery life. On every occasion, she got directed to an Intel machine. When I mentioned this to AMD's Leslie Sobon, VP of Worldwide Product Marketing, she: "The way people report numbers needs to change."

The Acer Aspire 5738DG-6165 grafts a 3D panel onto a mainstream laptop. It's a gimmick, a feature that caters to maybe 1 percent of the computing population--and at first I was completely skeptical. People are offering 3D as a crowd-pleasing extra in movie theaters, as a ploy to justify the purchase of Blu-ray discs, and now as a new reason to buy a high-end graphics card. But in a $780 all-purpose laptop?

After kicking the tires on the 5738DG-6165 for a few days, I've seen some mixed, finicky--but also at times surprisingly good--results. Since the rest of the laptop (even the discrete GPU driving the visual experience) is so average, I have to make the 3D panel the focal point of this review.

The latest model in the Aspire One netbook line is fairly nondescript. The D250-1613 has the same 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU, plus 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, a tiny keyboard, and a microscopic multitouch pad. With its cookie-cutter netbook design, it fits into the crowd somewhere between the Fujitsu LifeBook M2010 and, say, the Lenovo S10. The only real difference is that, for a $350 asking price, Acer is offering a dual-boot system, with both Windows XP and Android tailored for a netbook. Regrettably, throwing in Google's OS gratis isn't enough to make this netbook a winner right out of the box.

Still, Android is the big draw of this netbook, so we should examine that first. Upon your first boot-up of the D250-1613, it goes into Windows XP, as just about every other netbook does. It's loaded with all the trials and shovelware you've come to love (games you won't play, security software you don't want...you get the idea). Nestled somewhere among those shortcuts, however, is the Android configuration tool. Once you complete the configuration and reboot the machine, it loads up the Acer flavor of Android in about 18 seconds.

Hope you didn't put away those Windows 7 party hats because, apparently, Lenovo waited a couple days longer to share its news: It has crafted "Enhanced Experience" PCs that are faster and Windows-ier than competitors. Lenovo worked closely with Microsoft on the optimizations, even going so far as to say that its products get the nod from Microsoft for the "Enhanced Experience" certification. Of course, we can't back up these claims with conclusive tests just yet (when some of these new rigs show up, we can give you a better idea where things stand)--but that isn't going to stop me from telling you the how's and the what's....

The Big Claims

Lenovo says that its machines boot 33 percent faster and shut down up to 50 percent quicker than comparable rigs.