Phil Villarreal

Sony may be stubbornly refusing to lower the price of its slow-selling Vita handheld, but at least retailers are stepping up to toss in some awesome stuff in for free in order to make the system a sexier buy. Maybe not Kate Upton sexy, but certainly at least Mileena sexy.

Think back to the last half of whatever the decade before this one was called. You loved your Xbox 360, but probably had to keep sending it back to the manufacturer because it kept crashing.

Games based on TV shows, especially comedies, usually turn out like blind dates — bloated, lacking personality and wastes of money that take all too long to end. But developers and publishers keep trying, so that’s why we’re getting new games based on Family Guy and South Park, despite even the series’ most devoted fans having long since given up hope that they’d be worthwhile.

While it’s tough to find the bright side of not only totaling your hot car, but splitting it into separate pieces, and getting to live to wreck another day is always a plus. Such was the experience of a Vancouver man whose Audi ended up burning on someone’s lawn as he sat nearby, trying to make sense of the situation.

GameStop is starting to approach Bill Belichick levels of strange-sounding but ultimately savvy trades.

If you’re rich and your girlfriend happens to be a stripper, it stands to reason that you impressed her by throwing your money around. Moderation is important in all aspects of life, though, especially when it comes to letting stripper girlfriends get behind expensive cars they can’t handle.

Gamers have been swapping rumors about Call of Duty’s next move like giggly high school girls do potential prom dates. Now they have something solid to grasp on to — not only a title but a release date. As expected, the game will be called Call of Duty: Black Ops II, and as most people kinda thought, it will be headed out a little before Thanksgiving. According ...

Zynga, the company responsible for cluttering your Facebook updates with nonsense having to do with FarmVille, CityVille, CastleVille and pretty much every other time-wasting thing that ends with “Ville,” is no longer bragging about raking in tons of money. Now it’s cringing as reports trickle in that the developer got shanked for an $85 million loss last quarter.

Now that Carmen Electra is 40, she seems a little more attainable. Like, maybe, she’s got less going on than when she was in her prime and would be willing to play dirty games with us online.

Like Netflix, Skype is a dirty tramp of the app world. Not long after we spotted it over in the corner hitting on the Xbox, now it’s gone and jumped the bones of our PlayStation Vitas. And it’s already gotten up on just about every smartphone and tablet known to man.

Sony’s PlayStation Vita has struggled out of the gate, with slow sales and a sad little trickle of software to support it. The most telling sign of the device’s lack of popularity is you just don’t see it very often when you’re out and about. Those who’ve managed to wait a couple months to pick one up are in luck, with used copies dipping to as low as $162 at times.

If Boggle ever got Tetris drunk and made sweet love to it while Words with Friends watched, SpellTower would be its love child.