battle

You've been teaming up with that hot night elf in the World of Warcraft, killing thousands of mobs and doing hundreds of instance runs with her, and yet you don't know if she is actually a girl in real life? Now there's a way for you to possibly find out.

Blizzard announced early this week that together with the launch of patch 3.3.5 for WoW, it will offer a new feature called "Read ID." This is a voluntary, optional level of identity designed to keep players connected even outside of WoW.

In fact, the company says that as long as you play games that use its Battle.net online gaming service, which currently includes WoW and the upcoming Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3, you will be able to stay in touch with playmates.

According to Blizzard, the new Real ID features include:… Read more

Heavy Gunner 3D is a satisfying if repetitive sci-fi-themed arcade shooter with short, fast-paced levels and an RPG-style system for buying and upgrading weaponry.

Heavy Gunner 3D's most striking feature is its 3D-ness: from your fixed first-person perspective, you look down the barrels of your two guns (one on the left, one on the right, controlled with touch-screen thumb-joysticks), but you can tilt left or right to rotate your view 360 degrees, and you can tilt forward and back to look up and down. This makes for physically involving gameplay, as you rack up kills and chains on large … Read more

Team of builders and engineers are repairing wounds, testing hydraulics, charging batteries, and sharpening weapons in preparation for the next round of matches following Friday's fierce battles during the opening day of RoboGames, the world's largest open robot competition.

The three-day competition, which opened Friday at the San Mateo Fairgrounds, features more than 50 robot games and challenges, sporting events, and contests, from sports like soccer and sumo wrestling to climbing, shooting galleries, and weightlifting, but the big draw is the awesome power of the combat robots.

In weight classes up to 340 lbs., these monstrous machines are … Read more

Air Assault is a relatively unremarkable arcade game in which you fight "invading Russian/Afghanistan forces" in Afghanistan with "Anti-Air and Mortal" (presumably "mortar") guns.

Every game begins with a slowly scrolling text introduction set to "Flight of the Valkyries," which you can thankfully skip. It outlines a muddled, quasi-historical backdrop with dubious references to "September 11" and Operation Enduring Freedom (which isn't helped by later appearances of apparent suicide bombers and oil-production fields, something that Afghanistan is not particularly known for). The game's wide-screen interface has you … Read more

Vector Tanks Extreme is a tank combat game that is obviously inspired by the classic stand-up arcade game Battlezone. In the original you used two joysticks to move your tank, with one controlling the left track and the other controlling the right. In Vector Tanks Extreme you use up and down motions on either side of the screen to simulate the two-joystick control method, and touch the middle of the screen to fire your weapons. As you blow away tanks, you'll find powerups that give you new weapons, add to your shield supply, and give you rapid-fire guns for … Read more

World of Warcraft publisher Blizzard Entertainment on Wednesday announced that it has begun closed beta testing for its real-time strategy game, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty.

StarCraft II has been a long time coming. It is the sequel to the 1998 hit, StarCraft. The new game will feature an entirely new 3D graphics engine, and like its predecessor, will focus on the battle between the protoss, terrans, and zerg. Blizzard said StarCraft II should launch sometime in the first half of 2010.

Already, the company said in a release, there are thousands of people in the beta test. One of … Read more

Kai-Fu Lee, the president of Google's Greater China operation and the subject of a bitter employee custody battle between Google and Microsoft, will leave the search giant later this month.

Lee, who left Microsoft in 2005 to take over Google's operations in China, is resigning from the company to start his own venture and will be succeeded by a Google employee, the company confirmed Thursday evening. Lee's departure was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

"With a very strong leadership team in place, it seemed a very good moment for me to move to the … Read more

Championship Chess All-Stars offers to help users have fun and improve their chess game. With a great selection of ways to play and many helpful tools, this is a fantastic choice for chess players of all skill levels.

The program's interface is highly intuitive, thanks in part to its well-labeled and cartoonish, but professional, design. Users will not need to utilize the Help file, because on-screen direction is so helpful. Users begin their play by selecting a game style: untimed, speed play, suicide play, progressive, or customized. From there, gameplay is remarkably simple: users click on a piece and … Read more

Napster has come a long way since its inception as a file-sharing service 10 years ago, and there is little doubt that without it, Rhapsody wouldn't exist--at least not in the form we enjoy today. Now, thanks largely to the fact that most competing services gave up on the game and passed their subscribers over to the two remaining companies, these music subscription companies are rulers of the roost when it comes to paid streaming. But who will come out on top when we pit Napster and Rhapsody against each other in five bone-shaking rounds? Read on for the … Read more