The best part of The Walking Dead: The Game’s first episode — «A New Day» — is the thing that will turn many people off: the talking. If you’re looking for a zombie game to shotgun your way through or to entertain you with one-liners and cuss words, it’s best to ignore The Walking Dead altogether. This is a deeply personal and emotional experience, and that’s why it feels so right as a part of this franchise.

In the first of five episodes, you take on the role of Lee Everett, a man who may or may not be a killer. About the time Lee is getting transported to prison, the zombie apocalypse starts and gives him a «get out of jail free» card. For the next two hours, it’s up to you to keep Lee alive and able to protect Clementine, the first grader in his care.

All of this is happening concurrently with the comic book series. Lee’s story kicks off at the beginning of the end of the world, so Rick, the protagonist of the books, is snoozing in his hospital bed. This is a new, independent group of survivors — although you can expect a familiar face or two as a crossover — so meeting each other and figuring out how you’re going to survive is the thrust of A New Day. Yes, there are action sequences (a lot of them, actually), but you’ll spend the majority of your time making decisions and living with the consequences. See, developer Telltale Games has built a brand new adventure game setup for The Walking Dead.

Although you had to choose what to say in Telltale titles such as Back to the Future, you could double back in conversation trees and explore all the options. The Walking Dead removes that and ups the stakes. Here, someone will ask you a question and you’ll have a limited time to pick one of four responses. Whatever you decide, you live with. Characters remember what you say and take note of your pronoun usage, demeanor, and so on. While this might simply be someone questioning Lee’s story in this episode, Telltale says the way people perceive him is going to drastically affect future episodes. What if your squad finds out you’ve been lying from the get-go?

For now, this means I’ve got a reason to replay A New Day. As soon as I was done with my first playthrough, I jumped back in to make different choices. Twice in this episode, you’ll have to choose one life over another, and I had to see how saving each person played out. With three save slots, you’re encouraged to have different takes on the same story.

That’s awesome and is something that guarantees I’m going to get a lot of playtime out of each Walking Dead episode, but it also pointed out how attached I had become to «my» story. The Walking Dead: The Game is a choose your own adventure zombie book, but when I started my second playthrough, I discovered I didn’t want to make the other choices. I had built my Lee — an honest, caring man — and I wanted to see his story unfold. Going back and siding with a jerk in an argument or being mean to Clementine, that wasn’t «my» Lee. In just two hours, I had become so attached to these characters thanks to their top notch voice acting and these deep conversations that wronging them broke my heart. That’s kind of heavy for an adventure game, but it speaks to how well everything comes together here.

But enough of all that emotional stuff, you do bash the skulls of quite a few walkers in A New Day. Similar to the revamped conversation system, The Walking Dead uses a new adventure control scheme. You navigate Lee with one joystick and then move an on-screen reticle with the other (WASD and a mouse on PC respectively). Environments are littered with interaction points that you can hover over with the cursor and choose to look at for more info, open, talk to or so on. When a walker nabs you, it’s a frantic button-tap followed by a kill using whatever you have around you.

As someone who was disappointed by Jurassic Park, I welcomed this new system. It’s easy to get the hang of, and trying to target a slowly approaching walker is harder than you think (though it’s easier with the mouse on PC), and the kills are gruesomely rad. Like, seriously, Telltale doesn’t hold back on the blood and graphic violence, which is a very good thing.

That’s another thing telltale nails — the visuals. Being part of the comic universe, The Walking Dead has this cel-shaded look with thick black lines tracing vibrant characters and objects. It’s striking and pretty. Plus, with the exception of a jarring camera cut or audio oddity, The Walking Dead runs really well. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best performing Telltale game with little slowdown and few stumbles.

There is a moment or two where something goofy breaks the Walking Dead’s narrative — i.e. an adult not knowing a radio would need batteries or how to put in said batteries — and I know some adventure gamers will be disappointed to find that there really aren’t many puzzles. But these are really trivial things when you look at the whole of what’s a remarkable start to an enthralling, true-to-form Walking Dead story.

How Much Does Walking Dead Cost? Release Date?
As it’s coming to so many platforms, keeping track of how much The Walking Dead: The Game will cost you has been tough. If you’re buying it on the PC or Mac, you get a five-episode season pass for $24,99 on Tuesday, April 24th. (EU gets the PC/Mac version for 24,99 Euros on Tuesday, too.) If you buy on PlayStation 3, you can grab each episode for $4,99 or buy the five-episode season pass for $19,99 on Tuesday, April 24th. (EU gets the PS3 episodes one by one for 4,99 Euros and the season pass for 19,99 Euros starting on Wednesday, April 25th.) If you get it on Xbox 360, there is no season pass so you’ll have to pay 400 Microsoft Points per episode sometime this month.

Closing Comments
The Walking Dead: The Game is off to a great start with A New Day. It has a believable cast of characters and a great look. Sure, the puzzles some adventure gamers love are missing and there will be an audio hiccup here and there, but as an introductory hook to the five-episode series, The Walking Dead Episode 1 has just about everything fans could want.

At present, PEC offers batteries in fifteen different colors, etched designs which are inspired by artisans, and e-cig cases in more than ten colors. Offering the first single piece e-cig that is disposable, along with batteries which are custom designed, PEC has a selection of digital cigarette items offered that is clearly the widest available selection out there.

The electronic cigarette reduces harmful effects created by the use of tobacco, while still delivering nicotine. It is not intended as a nicotine replacement gadget, yet has nicotine levels which are concentrated and can be adjusted as desired. PEC also offers solutions that are nicotine free as well. The flavorings that the nicotine solutions are available in seem to have popularity with women. More than 19 flavors, including coffee, vanilla, and cola are available.

In an electronic cigarette, an atomizing element delivers a solution of nicotine in vapor form to the consumer through a cartridge. The benefits to using e-cigarettes are many: first and foremost, no tobacco (no toxins, carcinogens, or poisons, and no secondary smoke inhalation), additionally, there is no flame. A lithium ion battery is what powers the electronic cigarette. It allows for the atomizer to fire and thus, no match (no flame) is necessary. Therefore, there is no danger of being burnt, not for the user, or anyone around them. PEC offers a variety of designs, styles, and colors, not only in mainstream retail stores, but online as well.

PEC is a leader in fashion forward items with a large selection of styles and colors in the electronic cigarette industry. They design their products with women in mind, because it is women who make 85% of the decisions regarding purchases. 250 million women worldwide smoke! This means that PEC, along with the industry of e-cigs as a whole, directs a large part of their collective marketing focus to this demographic.

Premium E Cigarettes — Fashion Forward Smoking

A focus on freedom, empowerment, and rebellion has largely been the marketing approach used in targeting women who smoke traditional cigarettes thus far. For instance, back in the days of the flappers (circa, early 1920′s), women were encouraged with slimmer cigarettes to rebel. The glamour of a slimmer cigarette has long been a marketing approach that works with women.

Going a step beyond that, PEC has chosen to focus on design and fashion aesthetics in employing the use of artisan etched batteries and custom designed items, available in abstract, holiday, and floral designs. There are also many colors to choose from, including pinks (for the ladies!), along with shiny metallics, and deeply jeweled tones. All of these colors and styles are appealing to women. How nice to match clothing and wardrobe with one’s electronic cigarette!

Premium E Cigarettes is an offshoot of PremiumEstore LLC, based in Virginia Beach, VA. To learn more about electronic cigarettes, visit them at www.premiumecigarette.com.

The two new products are the first Sony-branded smartphones to launch in Japan, and can download at speeds of up to 75 Mbps over LTE networks, according to Sony. Both are powered by 1,5GHz dual-core processors and will run Android 4,0, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich.

The company has previously announced the LTE-equipped Xperia ion for the U.S. market, which has a 12-megapixel camera. The Xperia GX bests that with its 13-megapixel camera, but a spokesman at Sony didn’t want to elaborate on what differences that will lead to in terms of image quality.

The Xperia GX also has an 4,6-inch HD screen and 16GB of internal flash storage.

For users that don’t want a big screen, Sony has introduced the Xperia SX. The device has a 3,7-inch screen and weights only 95 grams, making it the world’s lightest LTE smartphone.

[Click to enlarge] Sony Launches 13-Megapixel Smartphone with LTE, but Only for JapanThe Xperia SXThe Xperia SX also has 8GB of internal flash storage and an 8-megapixel camera.

Both smartphones will start shipping in Japan during the summer, according to Sony. Pricing was not announced. For now, the company doesn’t have any plans to start selling the Xperia GX and Xperia SX in other parts of the world, the spokesman said.

Around 250 new LTE user devices have been announced over the past year, industry organization GSA (Global mobile Suppliers Association) said in the beginning of April. In total, 63 manufacturers have announced 347 LTE-enabled user devices, including 64 smartphones and 31 tablets.

Microsoft is going to be rolling out a new and improved Bing search engine over the next few weeks that will allow users to enlist their social media friends to aid their searches, a move Microsoft hopes will put more of a dent in Google’s dominance of the search category.

Bing is being revamped to offer a more streamlined results page with more relevant information and, most notably, a right-hand sidebar with results from the searcher’s Facebook friends. Type in «Maui Hotels,” for instance, and the sidebar fills with status updates from friends who’ve visited Maui, live in Maui, or posted photos of their vacation in Maui.

The new Bing interface is divided into three columns, as was explained in a Microsoft blog post. Besides the Facebook results on the far right of the screen, the main search results will be on the far left side. In the middle is a column Bing calls «Snapshot.» If the user moves their cursor over one of the links on the left, some information about that link appears in the middle column with more details about that hotel or perhaps a review.

The alliance with Facebook, if it works as intended, could give Bing a noticeable boost to its middling market share performance and perhaps finally make it profitable. According to the New York Times, losses in Microsoft’s online services division, which includes Bing, were $2,6 billion in the last fiscal year.

Since Microsoft launched Bing in June 2009 to replace its ghost town of a search site, Bing has become more popular but still hasn’t quite broken out. According to the latest results from ComScore, Bing’s U.S. market share for search was 15,3 percent in March compared to Google’s 66,4 percent.

In March 2011, Bing’s share was 13,9 percent to Google’s 65,7 percent. Arguably, Bing should also get some of the credit for Yahoo’s search market share numbers, given that Bing powers Yahoo search and Yahoo’s ad sales are handled by Microsoft. However, Yahoo search market share was 13,7 percent this past March, down from 15,7 percent in March 2011.

Globally, the picture is even worse for Google’s search engine competitors. The research group Net Applications has April 2012 numbers for search that show Google on top of the world with a 78,6 percent share compared to Yahoo’s 6,67 percent and Bing’s 4,75 percent.

A line graph on the Net Applications site makes it look like Google is riding atop the waves while every other search engine is bumping along the ocean floor. Nonetheless, the competition has slightly chipped away at some of Google’s lead, as its current share is down from a high over the last year of 83,38 percent in November 2011.

Those Net Applications numbers are only for desktop searches. Net Applications tracks mobile and tablet search share separately from desktops (ComScore’s numbers are desktop only). In Smartphones and tablets, Google sucks nearly all the air out of the room with a 91,4 percent share to Bing’s 1,29 percent and Yahoo’s 4,86 percent.

Microsoft’s best hope for mobile search growth is that its partnership with Nokia to run its Windows Phone 7 operating system, including Bing, on Nokia smartphones succeed in boosting penetration of WP7 in the mobile market.

It features a dedicated BBM key, bringing the power of RIM’s popular mobile social network up in an instant, as well as the best keyboard in its class for quick and easy typing. It includes a built-in FM radio, allowing users to tune into their favorite local stations, and listening to the FM radio does not require a data plan or use data services. Designed to allow both 3G connectivity and long battery life, customers can get up to 7 hours of talk time or up to 30 hours of FM radio listening or music playback with headphones.

Customers can easily interact with their social network in real time, using preloaded apps for Facebook and Twitter. The new Social Feeds 2,0 app is also preloaded, allowing users to post updates to multiple social networks simultaneously and capture updates from news sources (RSS), social apps and instant messaging apps all in one consolidated view. The integrated camera includes a flash and supports video recording, and pictures can be tagged with their location thanks to the smartphone’s built-in GPS.

The BlackBerry Curve 9320 comes with the new BlackBerry 7,1 OS, which supports features such as Mobile Hotspot and Wi-Fi calling where available. Parental Controls is a brand new, on-device feature that provides parents and guardians with simple options to help protect children by restricting access to specific functions, features and applications. Additional features include a 3,2-megapixel camera with flash, 4x digital zoom, image stabilization, geotagging and extended depth of field.

Also announced was the near identical BlackBerry Curve 9220, which has a paltry 2-megapixel camera without flash or image stabilization. Otherwise its dimensions and talk-time are the same.

The Bluetooth headset weights only 5 grams and is ergonomically constructed while providing multipoint connectivity with support for two phones, base for storage and charging, and Voice Prompts for battery and connection statuses.

Popular Nokia Bluetooth Headset in Fuchsia

Nokia Luna in Fuchsia is a stylish mobile accessory for ladies, which supports up to 8 hours of talk time and a standy of up to 60 days. The model is available for purchase for £59.95.
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Perhaps this is the greatest asset in the Pinball Arcade arsenal. More so than the PS3/Vita cross-play functionality and two-for-one price, even. Although its digitized ports don’t do much to shake up the genre, they contribute to what’s becoming a growing trend and worthwhile new obsession on PSN. It’s bringing back the origin of species to show fans new, old, or undiscovered why pinball rules.

This genie is a jerk. Smash him with balls.

Given their heritage, the Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Black Hole, Theatre of Magic, and Tales of the Arabian Nights machines don’t share the luxury of modern pinball boards. At times, the dense, garish imagery obscures the ball locations.

In digging through the menus and discovering the original ads and information about each, it’s clear this was always the case. A lesser developer prioritizing accessibility over preservation may have cleaned this up a bit. Farsight Studios is clearly committed to the history, even if it means an imperfect gameplay experience at times.

Even then, the issues are microscopic. There are only three camera options, none of which are static; tracking the ball can be disorienting. The ball slips by the flippers or through the sides with suspicious regularity, which gets frustrating. Quests end with unceremonious praise. Such issues only stand out because there aren’t any upsetting issues worth addressing in Pinball Arcade.

The Black Hole table has a miniature table inside the main board.

After all, these tables are awesome. The joyous warbling and ding-dong sound effects, appropriate physics, and through instructions for each table meet the mandatory minimum expectations.

Meanwhile, the inner-workings of the complex table designs present a deep and satisfying challenge for players dedicated to completing elaborate goals. Each table has an advanced tier for hardcore players who seek additional goals — hitting holes, ramps, and objects in a time limit, for example. The usual stuff, as expected, since these are the tables that inspired what we now understand as the basics.

Welcome back.

Closing Comments
The Pinball Arcade is a reminder and a reassertion. It establishes itself as a major player in a mostly monopolized space on XBLA. Farsight aims to release more real-world machines in digital form long-term, and for tournament play, and it’s clear why: We’re going to want to play these.

It’s an admirable goal: The developer is manufacturing a museum full of terrific, timeless proxies. Whether you’re obsessed with the old-school or still waiting to discover it, playing four pieces of history for $10 is absolutely worthwhile.

«People want a cloud that seamlessly connects their files to the apps and devices they use every day,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to TPM, «Over a billion people rely on Office apps and their Windows devices every day to create, capture and share from anywhere. SkyDrive is the only personal cloud storage service that works seamlessly with Office and Windows.”

Specifically, Microsoft points out that unlike Google Drive, launched April 24, and another popular competitor, the independently owned Dropbox, SkyDrive allows users to collaborate on and simultaneously edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents stored on the Web, even if those users are on a Mac or don’t have those programs installed on their machines.

In fact, unlike other competing services, Microsoft’s SkyDrive doesn’t require the file to be converted to open on other devices, storing the information entirely on its servers and making it accessible via Web browsers.

Microsoft has attempted to highlight these and other SkyDrive features in the past week as Google has fought back criticism and concern that its terms of service for Google Drive (and nearly all other Google products) are too expansive, giving the company carte blanche when it comes to accessing and repurposing user data in advertisements, for example.

Microsoft claims its service is more protective of user privacy, pointing to its general terms of service, which read as follows: «Except for material that we license to you, we don’t claim ownership of the content you provide on the service. Your content remains your content. We also don’t control, verify, or endorse the content that you and others make available on the service.”

«Beyond this, we have nothing to share at this time,” Microsoft’s spokesperson told TPM.

In fact, the day before Google Drive was unveiled to the world, Microsoft attempted to strike a pre-emptive blow, announcing that it was expanding SkyDrive to support remote viewing of a user’s entire Windows desktop and to support SkyDrive support directly through Apple’s iOSX Finder application.

But the changes also came with a newly-imposed storage limit: 7 GB of free storage for new users of SkyDrive, down from 25GB previously. Older users can still retain their 25GB of free storage going forward, but new users will have to pay $2,49 a month for the same space and upwards for additional space, the exact same price point as Google Drive.

Microsoft’s moves to promote SkyDrive in the wake of Google Drive’s launch and controversy and reminiscent of the no-holds-barred approach the company has taken toward Google in the recent past, such as using public concerns over Google’s new unified privacy policy as an opportunity to slam Gmail and promote Microsoft’s own Hotmail service instead.

Whether any of these approaches ends up working out for Microsoft remains to be seen. Right now, Microsoft is playing catchup in the cloud-based storage game, with only 17 million monthly active users compared to Dropbox’s 50 million and Apple iCloud’s 125 million. Google did not release Google Drive numbers to TPM.

The only problem is the «4GB» inscription indicates what the accessory actually is.