With over 200 videos, the team at LORE have helped fill in the blanks in stories of many games that would either take hours upon hours of gameplay, interpretation of in game events or a keen attention to detail and almost neurotic level of completionism to get to. Their two shows Lore In a Minute and Fast Facts have covered classic titles, new releases, franchises and even various developers and hardware manufacturers. These explorations are increasingly useful for titles that have a loose in game narrative with hordes of supplemental material like Team Fortress or Left 4 Dead to fill in the tons of backstory that most players wouldn’t take the time to research.

In some cases though, LORE just goes off and does whatever the heck they want since some games literally have no story other than move to the right. That’s where Flappy Bird LORE comes into play. With nothing but the idea of tapping a screen and the pipes of Flappy Bird, the LORE team came up with a whole mythos behind the now defunct and infamous title. It’s likely the creator will never tell his true inspiration behind the game and the 80,000,000 people who downloaded it will never hear its true intentions. But, LORE did a heck of a job hypothesizing on it.

Are you a Gmail user? If you’re like most people, you probably are. In fact, you probably have multiple accounts that you check on a daily, hourly or even a minute by minute basis. Heck, we get it, you don’t want to miss anything important and Gmail is a great service.

Well, good news because it seems Google understands. Or, at least they’re trying to by continuously updating and refining the Gmail experience both on the desktop and via their mobile apps to make it even better.

Continuing the trend this week, Google has announced they are updating Gmail yet again for Android, iOS and the desktop. This time, the update will include features designed to help users unclutter their inboxes and deal with email in a more efficient way.

The redesign changes the layout of Gmail and separates messages into tabs. You can have up to five with each designed to group messages into categories that make it easier to process email. In addition to the main tab, which continues to be sorted by priority, the new tabs include social (messages from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.), promotions (for Groupon, LivingSocial, etc.), updates (for confirmations, receipts, bills, etc.) and forums (messages from discussion boards, mailing lists, etc.).

When I went to the Apple App Store last night looking for something for the Mondayy Freeview, I figured I would help put everyone in the Memorial Day spirit and looked for the first App to pop up to pop up with Memorial Day in the title that was free. The one I came across was Memorial Day Barbeque Mayhem and had a four star rating with fifteen reviews.

I figured even at only fifteen ratings, it couldn’t be that bad if it still had four stars, right? Plus, who doesn’t love a Memorial Day BBQ? Oh, how wrong I was.

Memorial Day Barbeque Mayhem is what I like to refer to as a “jumper” where a player has the screen moving for them as their character travels left to right at whatever pace the game wants. It isn’t a full platformer because the X axis motion is completely out of the player’s control.

Instead, they just control when and how high they jump. Unlike games like Robot Unicorn Attack 2 which features additional actions like charging, Memorial Day Barbeque Mayhem keeps itself limited to just jumping. Now as a mechanic, this can work except for the hordes of issues that plague the game.

As far as online payment services go, if you want to send money to someone, you’re pretty much stuck using Paypal.

Not because it’s a great service (ask anyone who’s ever needed support or had to dispute an arbitrary Paypal decision) but because there’s pretty much no other choice. Well, that’s not good enough. We like competition and we think competition is good.

Enter Google. Today at their I/O conference Google announced a new featuring coming to its existing Google Wallet and Gmail services. That feature? Payments.

Put simply, once this feature goes live, you will be able to send and receive money via your Gmail account.

Sometimes we find some real hidden gems that have lots of thought and effort behind them for the Monday Freeview. These games have teams of hundreds working on them to create persistent MMO worlds or an ever expanding cast of unique characters… and sometimes we find Robot Unicorn Attack 2.

A sequel to one of the most popular Adult Swim games to make it to iOS, Robot Unicorn Attack 2 is an incredibly simple game. Players hit one side of the screen to jump (and double jump) and the other to dash. That’s all you get for controls. While the game has special boosts that can be purchased with in game currency, the basic nature of this runner style game is an addicting premise.

By giving players attainable goals, the game keeps leaving the bread crumbs to keep going “just one more time”. Additionally, a single game is divided up into three runs called “wishes” (keeping with the unicorn theme) so that a player gets in the routine of going just a little bit further and having to continue to the next run. By the time the third wish is complete and awards are given out, it doesn’t take much for a player to commit to three more.

It isn’t that often that iOS users don’t get the latest and greatest aps first, before their Android-using pals. However, when the app in question happens to come from Android-maker Google, iOS users tend to take a back seat.

Most apps from Google do eventually arrive for iOS (thank you Google for Maps) and when they do, iOS users are usually very happy. However, when the app in question causes a problem, that happiness can turn to anger pretty fast.

Sadly, that seems to be the case with the newly-released Google Now feature update to Google’s iOS search app. The shot story is the updated app, which just went live earlier this week, seems to be draining users batteries at an alarming rate.

Fortunately, the folks at Cult of Mac have got you covered. Over at their site they detail just how to make sure Google Now doesn’t kill your battery in short order. You simply turn off location reporting from the privacy setting in the app.

It’s really pretty simple and we’ve included the pic (courtesy of LifeHacker) of where to look for the setting after the break.

If you’re an iOS user who has installed this app are you having any issues with battery life? Let us know in the comments.

Even though they don’t release updates quite as often as a company like Microsoft, Apple does tend to update its products pretty often. In fact, they just issued an update today.

Today’s update is for iOS and the iPhone 5 and brings the software on that device to version 6.1.4. In typical Apple fashion the notes for this up;date don’t really tell a whole lot what the update actually contains.

In fact, ion this particular case, they only contain one sentence: Updated Audio Profile for Speakerphone.” Heck, maybe that’s all it does? Although, it’s kinda hard to believe Apple would got to the trouble to release this update for only one issue.

Still, you never know. iOS 6.1.4 is available from Apple immediately as an over the air (OTA) update. It should also be available for download through iTunes soon.

So I did it. I finally gave in. After months of avoiding Facebook invites from friends, family and total strangers, it was only after the recommendation of our own Matt Raub when he talked about how addictive it was that I decided to give Candy Crush Saga a chance. And now I see what the hype is about.

On the surface, one could attempt to say that Candy Crush Saga is a ripoff of the classic “Match 3” formula that made titles like Bejeweled so successful. But it takes bits and pieces from various other “Match 3” games into an incredibly simple but addictive formula. Early levels involve hitting a certain amount of points within a specific number of moves.

Quickly the gears get clogged up when levels change shape and it isn’t just the perfect square that they are used to. And then comes the jelly which players must not only hit a minimum score on but also make matches over specific squares to clear them. And once you think you’ve mastered that, then you have “ingredients” which are pieces that you must work down to the bottom of the screen by eliminating the blocks below them.

Oh Facebook, as if we didn’t already waste enough time on you, now you want to be an even larger part of our mobile lives? Oh boy. That’s right folks, Facebook today unveiled it’s new “Facebook Home” for Android smartphones designed to integrate with Android and become a larger part of your user experience.

The new software takes over several core functions of Android and replaces them with features that tie into various Facebook services. This, in effect, turns you smartphone into the much-touted “Facebook Phone.”

According to Facebook frontman Mark Zukerberg:

“You’re going to be able to transform your phone into a great social device.” Facebook Home makes it so that “phones are designed around people first,” rather than apps, as is the case with most modern smartphones. Instead of burying content that users want to see inside apps, Facebook Home makes it available at all times.

With Samsung’s press event a short time away (tonight at 7PM Eastern, to be exact), more photos and videos have come out showing the new hotness that is the Galaxy S IV. These new leaks leave little doubt as to what the new device will look like and to most of its cooler features.

The high-quality photos, curtesy of IT168, show the handset’s sleek design in sharp detail and pretty much confirm what everyone already thought it would look like. The videos also do pretty much the same and highlight several of the features of the Galaxy S IV including floating touch, a new lock screen and the devices speed at browsing the Internets.

The Samsung Galaxy S IV is expected to feature a 5-inch Super AMOLED HD display, an eight-core Exynos processor or a quad-core Snapdragon chipset depending on region, up to 64GB of storage, 2GB or RAM and Android 4.2 Jelly Bean.

Check out the photos and the videos after the break.

Do you love comics from Marvel and prefer them in digital format? Are you a current or future Marvel Unlimited subscriber? Have an iPad or iPhone?

Well, if you fit the quickly expanding segment of the population who can say “Yes” to these questions, Marvel has a new iOS app just for you. That’s right, today Marvel released its new “Marvel Unlimited” app for iPad and iPhone.

The free app allows subscribers of Marvel’s digital comics subscription service to access their comics from their iOS device, even when not connected to the internet. Non-members can also use the app, but they are limited to accessing free comics and previews of other issues in Marvel’s digital collection.

Heck, that’s pretty cool. Get the app right here in iTunes.

Now normally, I’d just toss up a game review for something like Final Fantasy: All The Bravest like it was any other game. But it isn’t really like any other game. In fact, I am not even sure it is really a game at all. Let’s give a little background first. Final Fantasy: All The Bravest (or FF: ATB for the purposes of this discussion) was pushed as a combination of some fan favorite Final Fantasy nostalgia and the Active Time Battle system (also known as the ATB, see the connection?).Think about it. Cloud from FF VII teaming up with Locke from FF VI or the Dark Knight Cecil from FF IV teaming with a Magitek armored soldier and a moogle. Now combine that with classic villains from the series as well as a party with upwards of thirty members. How could it go wrong?