towers

Say bonjour to the Eiffel Tower USB drive

Why travel all the way to Paris when you can skip the lines and see the Eiffel Tower sticking out of the side of your computer? The Eiffel Tower-shaped USB flash drive holds 8GB of data, and it doesn't get annoyed when you speak bad French.

The drive, which supports password protection, goes on sale this week at USBfever for $38.99. What do you think: mais oui or mais non?

Get a quad-core HP desktop for $369 shipped

Quad-core desktops have been mighty popular of late. The ones I've posted in recent weeks have all sold out in a matter of hours. I think that's because a lot of folks are looking to replace their aging Windows XP boxes with something more powerful--and Windows 7-powered.

J&R has a refurbished HP Pavilion p6247c quad-core desktop for $369 shipped. I won't say this is the best configuration I've ever seen, but it packs more than enough punch for most home users.

The system's heavy hitters include a 2.6GHz AMD Athlon II X4 … Read more

Wake up refreshed and kill zombies with plants: iPhone apps of the week

Before we get to the apps today, I have a couple of news items to tell you about. First, there is a sale right now for the game I wrote about in last week's post, Space Miner: Space Ore Bust (was $4.99; now $1.99). I really can't recommend this game enough (I'm still playing whenever I get a chance), so if you were waiting for the price to come down, now is the time to pull the trigger.

Also, a new Apple patent application, reported by AppleInsider, suggests that a future handheld device will have … Read more

Get a quad-core desktop PC for $279.99 shipped

Finally ready to replace that old Windows XP box? Here's your chance to score a seriously powerful system for a seriously low price: Buy.com has the Gateway DX4200-09 quad-core desktop for $279.99 shipped.

I know what you're thinking: too good to be true. But I'd say this system has only two shortcomings, both of them minor.

First, it's a refurb with the typical 90-day warranty. You know my thinking on that: any problem that might have existed with the system has been fixed, so in some ways it's actually better than new.

Second, … Read more

Stop the aliens from taking your sheep!

TowerMadness Zero is the free, ad-supported (and full) version of TowerMadness, a tower-defense game in which you defend a small herd of cute sheep against an advancing army of aliens (who want to turn your sheep into "a new scarf for their emperor").

The game and its interface will be familiar to fans of tower-defense games, with enemies from multiple UFOs attacking across an open plain at first, but then mixing in fixed-path and open-path challenges as the game progresses through 15 maps. You touch the map to build and upgrade towers, and you can use two fingers … Read more

Get a quad-core desktop PC for $325

It's remarkable how much bang for the buck you can get from a PC these days.

For example, if you're looking to replace an aging desktop with something far more powerful, Tech For Less has a refurbished HP Pavilion a6700y quad-core desktop for $325.04. Shipping will run you about $25.

The system offers some mighty impressive specs for the price, starting with an AMD Phenom 9150e quad-core processor. Multitask all you want; it won't break a sweat.

It also comes with 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive, a DVD burner, and built-in 802.11b/g (… Read more

Cityscape wallpaper

This wallpaper features a photo of a silhouette cityscape, shot at an angle from the 37th floor of the Millennium Towers building in New York. The Wallpaper: Cove Towers download includes a wide-screen and regular version of the photo, as well as thumbnails of each photo and a Read Me file that contains information about the location and technical aspects of the photos.

We appreciated that there was a wide-screen version of the photo because our computer is wide screen, as are many contemporary computer monitors. We encountered no difficulty accessing the photos included in this download, but we were … Read more

Five awesome iPhone tower defense games

If there's a bigger game genre for the iPhone than Tower Defense clones, I haven't found it. A quick search of the App Store reveals well over 100 titles matching that description.

No surprise there: the iPhone's touch screen lends itself perfectly to this kind of game (which, for the uninitiated, requires strategic placement of defensive armaments to ward off increasingly powerful attackers).

OK, but which TD titles are worth your time--and cash? Here's a roundup of my five favorites. It's by no means a definitive list, but I think fans of the genre will enjoy them all.

Bloons Tower Defense Balloons. Monkeys. Darts. Nearly everything from the beloved Web-based classic appears in the iPhone version. The controls are a little finicky, but if you want to introduce young kids to the world of tower defense, this $2.99 game is the one to get. Navy Patrol: Coastal Defense Though the learning curve is a bit steep and the onscreen action can get a little cluttered, this naval-themed, open-path TD exercise offers some of the most in-depth and challenging gameplay I've found. And the $1.99 purchase price includes new maps as they get added to the game.… Read more

Defend Mars from attack

Sentinel: Mars Defense is a visually rich, science-fiction-flavored, fixed-path tower-defense game, the less interesting--but also less expensive--predecessor to Sentinel 2: Earth Defense. You command the dropship Sentinel, tasked with defending a colony on Mars from seemingly endless waves of remorseless aliens.

Following a traditional fixed-path format, aliens advance up a single (sometimes forking) route, as you use your limited resources to marshal an array of upgradeable towers to stop them across four different maps, making strategic decisions on which towers to buy, where to place them on a grid, and whether to sell or upgrade units. The enemies are largely … Read more