Customizing devices of all sorts to look like other devices is nothing new. Heck, I used to be fairly active on a forum board that specialized in theming a modified version of Windows 98, oftentimes to mimic other operating systems. As time has gone on software developers have grown increasingly unfriendly towards this kind of customization, and in general the latest technology looks pretty decent to begin with, but one bastion of personalization that practically everyone is familiar with is Android. And yet, while Google’s ubiquitous platform is ripe as can be for some pretty radical modifications it can be rather difficult to find any significant change of pace that isn’t a joke app or a step down from the spartan usability of the default Android launcher. If that last sentence has you expecting an “until now”, you’re dead on…but you may still be a bit surprised at what you get. It’s an unlikely candidate for ‘best alternative Android launcher’ in many ways, from being branded as a f...

Ever since OnLive took the world by storm offering instant access to triple-A video games by means of YouTube-like streaming video and controller input data other companies have sought to turn game streaming into a real industry and simultaneously grab their share of the pie in the process. But while the technology’s roots may lie in giant servers feeding games long-distance for a fee—often a recurring one, at that—as time has gone on a necessary shift in focus has taken place from the large-scale to the small. Though there is still a place for subscription-based game streaming services to some, most would rather take control of the streaming process themselves, using a gaming PC as the host and any variety of other devices as the clients just around their own homes. We’ve seen lots of attempts at this, from little-known developers like Splashtop and big names such as NVIDIA alike, but to date streaming has been something of a pipe dream—or is it pipeline dream—severely limited by curr...

If you cringed at the word ‘social’ in the title, my apologies. I did the same thing. No, really, I did. Because up to this point, ‘social’ and ‘gaming’ (which virtual reality is definitely linked to) have always gotten together to spawn the likes of Zynga and other infamous companies which like to exploit social media platforms by bombarding the world with games that everyone is playing, so, you know, you totally should too. For the next five minutes at least, until the next fad outdates the game you just downloaded onto your smartphone, rendering all those in-app purchases lost cash. Indeed, there are only two kinds of people in the world: those who play social games obsessively, and those who hate them passionately. So why on earth would I be writing about the social aspect of virtual reality? Why tarnish every geek’s dream for the future with its worst and lowest exploitation—before anything has even happened? Well…that’s exactly why. I didn’t really need to spend those first 160 w...

Remember when Square Enix teased the next installment in the Chaos Rings series of Japanese role-playing games would be Chaos Rings Sigma, a F2P card-based social RPG ? Well, they lied (thank goodness). And not just because the latest trailer for Sigma, shown at TGS 2013, shows that Square Enix has dropped the card-based genre. Supposedly Sigma is still happening and will be released TBA 2014, but now, after a long period of silence regarding the popular mobile series, Square Enix has come forward with even bigger plans. That’s right, Sigma won’t be the next Chaos Rings game—that honor will belong to Chaos Rings III, titled Chaos Rings III: The Prequel Trilogy on Vita. The news comes by popular Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu , which says that Chaos Rings III will hit the Japanese market on October 16, 2014 on Android, iOS, and even the Playstation Vita—the latter of which will even be available at retail, a first for the series. Square Enix also released a handful of screenshots, sh...