strategy

Navy Patrol: Advanced Premium is the paid version of Navy Patrol, a naval-themed tower-defense game with several innovative features but a surprising number of missteps for such an expensive and mature app.

For the most part, Navy Patrol is a traditional open-map tower-defense game, in which you place defensive towers in a strategic pattern to defeat incoming waves of enemies before they reach your base. Fans of tower defense will find a lot to like here, with a handful of different upgradable tower types and some cool extras like tower-specific targeting controls (for tracking fast, strong, or weak enemies), optional … Read more

When rumor broke that Twitter would be launching official "tweet" buttons for third-party sites, the first question for many was: How will they deal with TweetMeme, the third-party company that already operated Twitter sharing buttons and a Digg-like aggregation page?

To be sure, official Twitter "tweet this" buttons just had to be on the way--Facebook's "like" button continues to proliferate--in order for Twitter to avoid being completely eclipsed as the hub of choice for social-media sharing. But the lack of a formal Twitter tweet button had led to TweetMeme's filling … Read more

Search engine optimization tools help Web site administrators attract visitors through a high ranking on major search engines like Google and Bing. Link-Assistant's SEO SpyGlass Enterprise is a powerful backlink checker that analyzes top-ranked sites to learn what makes them successful; in effect, the program legitimately "spies" on sites to copy their methods and uncover the high-quality links that drive keyword searches to their sites. The program uses that and other data to create a highly focused Web site optimization strategy in 30 minutes or less, claiming to save time over doing it all manually, step-by-step, as … Read more

Trenches is a fun and challenging World War I-themed trench-warfare arcade game with strong elements of real-time strategy and unit and resource management.

With its killer combination of winning art direction, well-designed gameplay, and a shallow but steady learning curve, Trenches is hard to put down. You control British troops advancing from trench to trench, left to right, across a long, scrolling map (which you can tilt to scroll, or touch and drag the skyline to move). You touch and drag units to determine their path, and you can use a two-finger motion to direct all onscreen units to retreat, … Read more

Debates flare up all the time about what is the "right" way to consume cloud computing. Public cloud providers push for ditching your data center in favor of pay-per-use services delivered over the network. Many hardware vendors claim that the enterprise's road to cloud computing is through the operation of private clouds. Still others argue that the whole concept is a crock of...well, you get the idea.

Which argument do you buy? How should you plan to deploy and operate your IT resources over the next 3, 5, even 10 years? In who's basket should … Read more

The mobile phone industry saw its shipments reach 308 million in the second quarter, with Nokia and Samsung still holding the largest chunk of the highly competitive market, according to a report released Thursday by Strategy Analytics.

The 308 million units shipped across the globe represented a 13 percent gain from the 273 million shipped in the same quarter one year earlier, largely driven by low-end 2G handsets in emerging markets and high-end 3G touch screen phones in more mature regions, the report said.

Among the top five major mobile phone players, Nokia remained in first place with a 36.1 percent slice of the market, down from its 37.8 percent share in the year-ago quarter. Samsung came in second with a 20.7 percent stake, up from 19.1 a year ago, while LG's share dipped slightly to 10 percent.

Only Samsung and Research In Motion, which logged a 3.6 percent chunk of the market, saw their shares rise year over year, thanks to strong demand for QWERTY keyboard phones and touchphones, according to Strategy Analytics.

Looking at the specific vendors, Nokia continued to shed market share as it shipped a lower-than-expected 111.1 million handsets in the quarter. Sporting the enhanced Symbian 3 interface, the N8 smartphone should reach customers in time for the European holiday season, helping profit margins over the second half, said the report. But the phone's lack of buzz in the U.S. could dampen its overall global prospects.… Read more

When I think of Risk, the board game, I think of sitting around a table with a bunch of buddies, arguing loudly, cursing dice-rolls, and just generally being aggravated for several hours.

Risk: The Official Game for iPhone, iPod, and iPad offers a wholly different experience--and that's not at all a bad thing.

For one thing, it gives you the opportunity to play solo, something you can't do with the board game. You can declare war on two-five AI opponents and choose between three difficulty levels.

On the multiplayer side, Risk lets you "pass and play" … Read more

Five words that may make your day: Star Wars meets Tower Defense.

That's Star Wars: Battle for Hoth in a nutshell. The game combines obvious elements of Tower Defense with one of the franchise's all-time greatest action sequences.

In other words, it's up to you to defend Echo Base against endless hordes of droids, snow troopers, Imperial AT-ATs, and the like.

To do that, you'll deploy infantry, towers, snow speeders, and even X-Wings.

The game spans 15 levels and offers two modes of play: Classic and Fortress. It also treats you to clips, music, and sound … Read more

Aqueduct takes a page from those popular classic pipeline-type puzzle games, bringing the same challenging gameplay to your touch-screen iPhone or iPod Touch. Like many online versions of the game, the mission in Aqueduct is to use available tiles to create a pipeline between a spigot and drain before you turn on the water supply. Aqueduct adds to the old pipeline formula by including conveyor belt tiles, teleports, door switches, and more, to create a fun and challenging time-waster that's easy to pick up and play wherever you are.

When we first started playing Aqueduct, we weren't immediately … Read more