shooting

Aftermath is a challenging, top-down, zombie-themed arcade shooter with innovative dual-stick controls and a dread-inducing atmosphere.

Similar to other dual-stick shooters, you move around and fire with two touch-screen virtual joysticks, one under each thumb. What Aftermath does differently (and which greatly contributes to the game's tense, anxious feel) is that the left joystick controls movement while the right joystick just turns you left and right, letting you light up the otherwise dark, urban terrain with your handheld flashlight--and automatically using the weapon you're holding to "light up" any zombies in the field of your flashlight. … Read more

Goaaal! is a soccer shootout arcade game, in which you try to rack up the best score possible by taking successive shots on goal.

The interface is simultaneously simple and tricky: you have a fixed view, facing the goal (and the goalie), and you just flick your finger to kick the ball. The trickiness comes from mastering accuracy (requiring much trial and error), learning how to fire on the ground versus in the air, and figuring out how to put spin on the ball by flicking from one side or the other. You can also reposition the ball by holding … Read more

StarCannon is a remake of classic arcade shooters of the past, with 2D shoot-'em-up action and challenging boss fights. The graphics are smooth even on the older iPhone 3G. The controls are mostly effective, but can sometimes feel sluggish using a touch-to-move system rather than an onscreen joypad. Your ship fires automatically as long as you are touching the screen so you can play the game using only one finger or your thumb.

You can acquire three different weapons as you play and, just like top-down arcade shooters of the past, StarCannon lets you upgrade each weapon with more … Read more

SquareTrade, an independent warranty provider for electronics and appliances, has been regularly releasing reliability studies for product groups it covers (laptops, game consoles, and smartphones, so far) and Wednesday, it dropped one on digital cameras. Its analysis looked at customer-reported failure data from a sample of more than 60,000 new digital cameras purchased by SquareTrade warranty customers since 2006.

As you can see in the graph, Panasonic had the fewest reported failures while Casio had the most for cameras priced less than $300. The study (which you can check out in full here) also looked at premium point-and-shoots, those … Read more

This week on preGAME, hosts Jeff Bakalar and Mark Licea take a sneak peek at the action-thriller Metro 2033! Join us as we play it live on the show and talk to the game's executive producer, Luis Gigliotti live in the studio. We chat with Luis about how the title made the jump from novel to video game and how the PC version was built in 3D from the ground up. Make sure to watch the entire episode to find out how you can score a copy of the game for Xbox 360!

But before our live demo, Digital City's … Read more

"That looks craptastic!" was the unsolicited, over-the-shoulder assessment of Space Fighter X11. Hopes that this colorful summary would prove inaccurate were dashed by several attempts at playing this game. The strolling critic was right: Space Fighter X11 is, indeed, craptastic.

The game's premise--frankly, we're surprised that the creators even bothered with one--is that the Wymacet Horde has attacked a space station, and players must investigate the damage. Aside from being told that the left mouse button shoots and the right accelerates, that's all we're to know about the game and how it's played; … Read more

Skeet shooting has always been something of an English gentleman's recreational sport, although there's also Olympic skeet if you're gunning for more competitive shooting. The target is to break clay discs flung into the air at high speed from a variety of angles. It's definitely not something you'd want to try right smack in your living room. That, however, hasn't stopped Interative Toy Concepts from developing a skeet shooter game designed to be an indoor toy. It showed the game off at CES 2010.

To play, the device launches three plastic discs which the … 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

Scavenger is a fun and challenging game in which players must pilot a spacecraft through the Star Hulk Icarus, dodging bullets, collecting treasure, and locating orbs that can open the way out. The game's quality graphics and unintuitive (in a good way) controls made it hard for us to pull ourselves away.

One of the most challenging things about Scavenger is the way that users control their spacecraft. Rather than piloting the craft directly, users must use the mouse to move a cursor, which the craft follows. This is harder than it sounds, especially when you're trying to … Read more