SPIN

May 18, 2012 – The road to Max Payne 3's release earlier this week for Xbox 360 and PS3 (the PC version releases May 29) has been a long one, both for fans of the titular badass and the world-weary character himself. For the uninitiated, Rockstar Games, of Grand Theft Auto fame, first introduced Max Payne in 2001.

May 2, 2012 – After several years, the era of zombie chic shows no sign of waning. The Resident Evil series continues to pump out video games and movies, Brad Pitt is working on a film version of the popular novel World War Z, and The Walking Dead has become the breakout ratings hit for AMC that the more well-regarded Mad Men and Breaking Bad aren't quite.

April 30, 2012 – Cloud computing is one of those trendy terms that people throw around liberally these days, even if they don't quite understand what it means. In its most basic sense, an online cloud is a collection of remote computers that are accessible from nearly any location and that can either perform a task or store data. Google's new Drive service is the latest example, but chances are you've been using a cloud for years.

April 26, 2012 – Both Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook deserve a lot of credit for getting people to read more, thanks in large part to the instant gratification experience of buying and downloading books on the fly. But the e-ink versions of both readers had the same fatal flaw — they're useless in bed at night, unless you want to turn on a light and wake your partner.

April 23, 2012 – A good music-based video game can be hard to come by. Sure, there were countless iterations of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, but that entire karaoke-lite genre is nearly dead, pushed to an early grave by overeager game publishers who assumed everyone wanted to drop $200 on a new set of plastic drums every 12 months. Fortunately, the music game is making a bit of comeback, thanks in large part to Sony.

April 13, 2012 – We've seen bands use video games as a platform to debut songs and videos before (Mìtley Crüe's single "Saints of Los Angeles" in Rock Band, for example), but now Nintendo is adding a stereoscopic take to a music promo. Starting now and running through April 16, the only place to see the new video for the Shins' "The Rifle's Spiral" is via a download to your Nintendo 3DS handheld.