guns

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

Sniper Strike is a first-person arcade game that manages to drain much of the fun out of a time-honored video-game pursuit: shooting bad guys in the head.

This game's main problem is its clunky interface. You see a small portion of the playfield through your rifle's scope, and you touch and drag to move the terrain around--which varies over the game's two built-in maps, a village and a city. When a target moves into the center of your screen, a small reticle appears over it, and then you tap a touch-screen fire button to shoot. The animations … Read more

Air Assault is a relatively unremarkable arcade game in which you fight "invading Russian/Afghanistan forces" in Afghanistan with "Anti-Air and Mortal" (presumably "mortar") guns.

Every game begins with a slowly scrolling text introduction set to "Flight of the Valkyries," which you can thankfully skip. It outlines a muddled, quasi-historical backdrop with dubious references to "September 11" and Operation Enduring Freedom (which isn't helped by later appearances of apparent suicide bombers and oil-production fields, something that Afghanistan is not particularly known for). The game's wide-screen interface has you … Read more

Have you noticed how many times bullets miss their mark in the movies?

If you need to shoot a bank robber, Sean Bean, John Malkovich, or even an ugly looking two-dimensional chap on a distant target, it seems as if it's very much a hit-or-miss affair.

This, believes professor Timothy Kraft of the University of Alabama, Birmingham, is because no one has re-thought the basic principles of a pistol sight for a hundred years.

Kraft, who happens to rather enjoy shooting and is good at it, dedicated some of his finest mental armory to solving the problem. As he describes it on the university's site, … Read more

Coast Defense Free is a fun, no-cost preview of Coast Defense, a straightforward arcade wargame with some similarities to castle-defense-type games. Your objective in Coast Defense is simple: gun down waves of enemies as they advance on your bunker, from infantry (with bazookas or rifles) to tanks and troop transport trucks. The interface has you looking out from your foxhole, with enemies charging from left to right across a beach--and you can tilt your device right or left to scan the entire beach (close to twice the width of your screen). You aim with your left thumb, with a touchscreen … Read more

The Italian army has ordered 81 Hitrole Light remote-controlled weapon stations for its Iveco Lince vehicles in response to increased attacks in Afghanistan employing improvised explosive devices, according to a statement last month from Italian Ministero della Difesa, or ministry of defense.

Italy has struggled to live up to its NATO commitments in the face of widespread domestic opposition to the war in Afghanistan, and it has gone to great lengths to keep casualties to an absolute minimum. One way to do that is to stay buttoned-up.

The Hitrole is an electrically powered machine gun turret, operated by a single … Read more

Star Defense is a noteworthy addition to the crowded field of tower-defense games on the iPhone and iPod Touch. In addition to tight game design and lavish effects (both audio and visual), Star Defense introduces a substantial twist to the genre: a 3D space environment, in which you fight the insectoid S'rath on small planets that you can quickly twist, rotate, and zoom in and out on.

Waves of S'rath march toward your fragile colonist base on a set path through trenches on the game's seven different planets. You can choose between five different types of defense … Read more

Kevin Cogill, the man who pleaded guilty to leaking nine tracks from the then unreleased Guns N' Roses album "Chine se Democracy," was sentenced on Tuesday in Los Angeles to a year's probation and two months of home confinement.

Cogill is lucky not to be headed to jail. Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian recommended to the judge that Cogill spend some time behind bars, but the judge ignored it. "I wanted to send a strong message to people who might consider committing these kinds of crimes in the future," Missakian said.

Last August, Cogill … Read more

I had a fairly good shop program in high school (what's up, Tumwater T-Birds!). Instead of making rickety chairs for our mothers to injure themselves on, or fire-prone wooden ashtrays, our class concentrated on technology. That's where I got to play with my first industrial laser, built my first robotic arm, and designed my first circuit board. It was pretty great.

But not as great as the work of this kid, who, as a side project, built a six-round, bolt-action, high-powered coil gun. For those who don't play video games, a coil gun is an electronic weapon … Read more