soldiers

The guns of D-Day remain powerful

OMAHA BEACH, France--When you study the liberation of France in school, you get a basic primer in D-Day history. You hear about the famous beaches: Omaha and Utah. But you don't learn much more.

As part of Road Trip 2011, I had a chance to come to Normandy this week and visit some of the most important sites of the Allied invasion of 1944 that freed the French people and helped lead eventually to the defeat of the German army.

What I didn't know prior to coming here was just how many important sites there were--and how many … Read more

At Ramstein, America's military aeromedical mission heats up

RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany--It's warming up in the Middle East, and as the mercury rises, so does the intensity of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that means the number of seriously injured American soldiers passing through here is also rising every day.

Ramstein is known as the U.S. military's gateway to Europe, since it's where most personnel touch down when deployed here, the Middle East, or Africa. It's also part of the Kaiserslauten Military Community, whose 54,000 U.S. citizens make up the world's largest concentration outside the United States. But it'… Read more

Humans are the enemy!

Super Mega Worm is the Mac version of the retro-looking iOS arcade game of the same name, in which you control a giant bloodthirsty worm that's out to wreak some (cartoonishly) gory eco-vengeance.

You control your mega worm ("Wojira," in classic megamonster-movie style) as you navigate back and forth across a horizontally scrolling landscape, burrowing into the earth and then emerging to feast on eco-unfriendly humanity (pressing Z to pick up speed, or to spit acid when you're above ground). Your game ends when your ever-shrinking energy bar is depleted, so you have to keep eating … Read more

Patrol dangerous waters

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

Locked up

Ever since our teenage years, when we had folders full of journals and unsent love letters, we've wished for a way to password-protect folders on our computer. Third-party software is really the only way to do this, and Sofonica Folder Soldier is one such option. Although the program works, we have definitely seen similar programs that we like better.

The program's interface is plain and fairly intuitive, which is a good thing, because there's no Help file. When the program is first launched, users are asked to select a password; this is the password used to access … Read more

preGAME 19: Halo: Reach

This week on preGAME we're getting an exclusive First Look at Halo: Reach, almost two months before the game hits stores! In the studio today is Bungie Community Director Brian Jarrard, who will show us some of the single-player campaign as well as the revamped four-player co-op mode Firefight.

But first, we'll take a few moments to finally put E3 2010 to rest and go over a few things we thought were missing from the show. We'll also chat about the new Xbox 360 slim and figure out why the new console can't red-ring even if it wanted to. … Read more

Defend against waves of zombies

BioDefense: Zombie Outbreak is a one-player zombie-survival game that mixes elements of real-time strategy with an open-map tower-defense game.

The core of BioDefense is a survival mode, in which you protect your base from random waves of zombies. You have to juggle several interdependent factors as you construct and defend your base: you have to build collectors on top of "toxium" deposits (toxium is the game's currency, and a finite resource on the map), but you can only build where you have light--so you also need to build spotlights. Predictably, spotlights are fragile, so you need to … Read more

Bring out the heavy artillery

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

Gadgettes 180: The Multi-tasking Clothes Episode (podcast)

OK, so we suck at bringing you a show every week. But we promise that when we do, they'll be as explosive and ridiculous as this one right here! We revisit the idea of multitasking, but this time, we focus on functional clothing. That and we insult you a whole lot. Thou wimpled plume-plucked pignut!

Subscribe with iTunes (audio) Subscribe with iTunes (video) Subscribe with RSS (audio) Subscribe with RSS (video) EPISODE 180

Ping, a social networking garment

Hoodie buddy with built-in headphones (thanks Jacob!)

Sleeper hoodie (thanks Jacob!)

Beer opener dog collar (thanks Rodney)

How one soldier can carry a whole power plant on his back… Read more