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Popular Facebook Games in 2011

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Facebook

A recent study of Facebook usage has revealed that approximately forty percent of Facebook’s traffic is the use of Facebook apps. Social games are some of the most popular apps. Below are some of the top Facebook apps that gamers used during 2011.

Farmville and Cityville

These Zynga classics have been popular with Facebook users for a couple of years now. Farmville, one of the most popular Facebook games invites players build and maintain a virtual farm by attending to crops, building storage and feeding farm animals. Farmville players are encouraged to play with their friends and are given the opportunity to grow their rural empire either by paying for Zynga Farmville credits or asking Facebook friends for favors. Also popular is the Zynga game Cityville. Cityville operates along the same lines as Farmville, but with more of an urban twist.

Gardens of Time

This game has recently been listed as one of the most popular Facebook games of 2011. Playdom, a Disney owned company, has created a beautifully designed game where the players are required to find hidden objects in a garden throughout history. The objects eventually give the players clues to a secret society that must be thwarted in order to protect the earth from a sinister fate. → Read More

All you need to know about Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition

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Intel Sandy Bridge-E

Intel without a doubt has been the leader in providing us with processors that get better and faster with each release, and this explains their position as the leading manufacturer of semiconductor chips. Intel has a history of breaking its own speed records in terms of computing speed, and keeping its tradition, it has come out with Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition. This model is an extension of the Sandy Bridge family that follows a production process also known as the “tock” development model. It offers a blistering speed that can only be appreciated by die-hard gamers or those whose work take their machines to their edges.

Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition, a six core chip has a base clock speed of 3.3 GHz, coupled with Intel Turbo-Boost technology that it gets from the Sandy Bridge family; it can provide a supercharged processing even when your usage isn’t maxed out. You can quickly jump to a charged performance of 3.9 GHz without the need for over clocking. But, it doesn’t come without its fair share of caveats. It lacks on board video processing capability that is standard in the Sandy Bridge family, assuming that a person who will have the resources to get this highly priced processor will not mind spending a little more on a separate video card. Intel has also decided to omit CPU cooler, which is an inexpensive part to buy, but a very important omission. → Read More

Head in the Cloud

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OnLive Cloud Gaming

As the world prepares for the launch of on-demand cloud gaming, is the humble disc set to become redundant? Provided below is a review of this exciting technological development and how it might change the behaviour of gamers forever.

Gaming has been popular among children, teenagers and young adults (not to mention older folk) for numerous years – at least since Atari, Amiga, Nintendo and other such gaming firms arrived on the scene.

After games consoles dispensed with cassette tapes and video cartridges, CDs and then DVDs became the standard medium on which games were supplied to the masses.

Nowadays, consoles such as the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 utilize DVDs just as video players relied on VHS tapes. As preparations for on-demand cloud gaming are finalized, is the DVD destined to join VHS on the scrapheap? → Read More

Facebook Fights Back Google+ Games With New Gaming Features

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The faceoff between Google+ and Facebook is all set to write a new chapter in the domain of cyber rivalries. Google is leaving no stone unturned to uproot the dominance of Facebook. Out of various stunts performed by Google to spread its user base further, ‘Gaming’ is a new entry in the list. On Friday, it launched almost a dozen games to attract users but Facebook was quick in retaliating and fired back with revamped game features for its existing game plays.

Since the launch of Google+, industry experts were expecting a tiff between these two tech giants. While Facebook has a well established rapport with a user base of some 750 million, Google+ is (comparatively) a newbie in the field with a user base of around 25 million. No matter how wide the gap is, Facebook is not ready to give even a slightest chance to any competitor to slit its throat. It has made it clear that nobody is to mess around with it by taking the moves of this new competitor seriously. Facebook’s roll out of new gaming features was cleverly timed so as to even the score with Google. → Read More

Rumor – Android 3.0 Playstation Phone to be Introduced by Sony Ericsson

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Android Playstation PhoneWhy, this is a surprise! Sony Ericsson with an Android 3.0 phone? Combined with Playstation features? We have yet to receive official announcements from Sony but Engadget claims such a Playstation phone is indeed coming soon. So what will this crazy device do and look like? Let’s take a closer look!

Hardware-wise, the “Playstation Phone” (not a real name but this is how we’ll refer to it) will be similar to the PSP Go, meaning it won’t have a QWERTY keyboard but Playstation controls. Most of the buttons will remain the same but the joystick will be replaced by a touchpad. Display size will most likely be between 3.7” and 4.1” with a decent resolution of at least WVGA. Expect core internals to be similar to the recently announced in America Xperia X10 (1 Ghz Snapdragon, 5 megapixel camera, etc…). As for the brand, it will carry both Playstation branding and that of the Xperia line. → Read More

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars Hits the App Store

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Grand Theft Auto

The iPhone’s got its first GTA title, and it looks pretty great. As teased before, this is a top-down GTA, and it’s a near-direct port of the Nintendo DS version, albeit with better graphics, and more awkward controls.

Touch Arcade‘s had some time to run/jack/drive/murder their way around the game a little bit, and here’s what they noticed: → Read More

Smart Bowling Ball Searches for the Perfect Technique

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Smart Bowling Ball

The few times I go bowling each year are more about pitchers of cheap beer than they are satiating some desire for the perfect game, but nevertheless I’m intrigued by this “smart ball” from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

Developed by sports scientist Franz Fuss, the smart bowling ball contains aluminum tubes in the finger holes that track the force a bowler applies to each roll. Fuss had ten bowlers of different skill levels bowl various shots down the lane, measured the force, and used it to try and find the perfect shot.

The simple system found that the better bowlers were consistent (surprise!), in that they always pinched the ball with “much greater force prior to release.” This allowed for a much faster delivery than the newbs, and of course higher scores. [New Scientist] [Gizmodo]