territories

Build your railroad routes across the country

Ticket to Ride is another solid iPad adaptation of a classic board game, which has the same name, in which you race other players to build railroad routes across a map of the U.S. and southern Canada.

Fans of the board game (and its online version) will find this a satisfying reproduction of the original--but, of course, with the added bonus of not having to fumble with all the little pieces, cards, and bookkeeping. You can play a solo game in about 15 minutes, with no cleanup. If you don't know the game already, it's pretty easy … Read more

Check out this European-style board game

Small World for iPad is the two-player iOS adaptation of the popular European-style board game Small World, a whimsically designed, fast-playing game with a little bit of luck and a lot of strategy.

Small World for iPad looks and plays great, with the same board, artwork, and rules as the tabletop version. This exceptions-based game is relatively complex to learn: players compete to dominate the Small World map with randomly assigned combinations of races (for example, Trolls, Skeletons, or Amazons) and special powers (for example, Flying, Wealthy, or Alchemist). Each combination starts with a set number of tokens, which you … Read more

The 404 407: Where we pack Vienna Teng's lunch into the PS3 Slim box

On today's show, we've got Vienna Teng--singer, pianist, and former computer programmer. But before we get to her music, we have the PS3 Slim in the studio. Afterward, we talk to Vienna about her journey from software engineer at Cisco to touring musician.

At the top of the show, we do a little unboxing of the new PlayStation 3 Slim. While Vienna and Justin may not care too much about the game console, Jeff and Wilson don't particularly like its new finish. In almost all respects, however, it functions just like the original 80GB model that it replaces, plus it comes with a 120GB hard drive. (No Linux for those homebrew fans out there.)

The star of the show is Vienna, a singer, songwriter, and pianist from the San Francisco Bay Area who graduated from Stanford University. Vienna later took up a job at Cisco as a computer programmer and made the leap to musician during her time there. We end the first half of the show with a track from her first album "Waking Hour," called "Gravity." The song is about the ups and downs of her roommate's relationship.

On the second half of the show, we listen to her song "Radio" from her current album "Inland Territory." And we talk about how now one in four songs sold in the United States is through iTunes. Finally, we end the show with her song "Augustine." You can find her music on iTunes, Amazon, MySpace, Last.fm, and her own Web site. (Editor's note: Last.fm is a part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET.)

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E3 2007: id Software gives us its take on Games for Windows Live

We didn't learn anything that isn't already public about id Software's forthcoming Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and it wasn't really showing off its next-gen id Tech 5 graphics engine to journalists. We made good use of our meeting, though, by getting the shooter pioneers to open up about Microsoft's Games for Windows Live platform.

Quake Wars won't incorporate a Games for Windows Live element, so all of the voice chat and player matching will go through id's own in-game software. It cited the fact that Vista came out three years or so into … Read more