first person shooter

First-person-shooter video games have nothing on a new combat simulator by defense giant Raytheon. Fully rigged warfighters can roam freely in the real world and engage unseen virtual enemies through their VR goggles, tossing real flash-bang grenades and even shaking off the muscle-numbing effects of getting shot.

When first-person-shooter video games first hit the market, the computer-controlled bot characters that were deployed in multiplayer matches to fill out the ranks ran around like the Keystone Cops. Now, the bots do a bit better, but not nearly good enough for the people behind the BotPrize.

Why they waited until after the big E3 gaming conference this weekend is a mystery to us, but a group of hard-line Iranian students unveiled a new game on Monday called Rescue the Nuke Scientist. Designed by the Union of Students Islamic Association, the same folks that hosted a Holocaust denial conference, the game is apparently a response to Assault on Iran, which was created by a U.S. company, Kuma Reality, and centers around a mission involving an Iranian nuclear facility. In Assault, your goal, as the central player, is to infiltrate the base, secure evidence of illegal uranium enrichment, rescue your man on the inside, and destroy the centrifuges that promise to take Iran into the nuclear age. Assault has drawn criticism in the past, and now this student group has issued its own response, creating a virtual scenario in which players rescue two scientists from facilities in Iran and Israel. Its designers say it is meant to promote defense, sacrifice and martyrdom.

Oddly enough, Reuters is also reporting the debut of another new Iranian video game, a first-person shooter called The Special Operation based on the story of four Iranian diplomats kidnapped in 1982. No word yet on whether either game will be available on Nintendos Wii.—Gregory Mone

Via AP

Out of the box, the iPod is basically a one-trick pony. The games and applications found under the â€Extras†menu get old faster than Britney. But thanks to four years of work by a crafty group of programmers, you can now use your iPod´s processing power and scroll-wheel interface to play dozens of games, record voice memos, or browse Wikipedia, all without messing up the existing software or your music.

The secret is iPodLinux, an alternative operating system you can install free alongside the existing one on any iPod model.

Armed with the Razer Copperhead, hardcore gamers can no longer blame ignominious defeat on the !@#$% mouse. Among its foe-fragging features is a first-ever tracking precision of 2,000 dots per inch and a one-millisecond response rate for the fastest and most accurate moves. It's also the only mouse to dedicate 32 kilobytes of onboard memory to saving different settings for different games, so you can go from the precision-demanding first-person shooter to a more casual role-playing fantasy without messing around in a control panel.

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Half-Life 2

At this summer's Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, new video cards capable of producing more lifelike imagery left gamers twitching with anticipation. ATI displayed the powers of its new Radeon 9800 Pro card ($499) with a demonstration of Half-Life 2, a first-person shooter game, and NVIDIA went with Electronic Arts' Tiger Woods 2004 to show off its new GeForce FX 5900 ($499). Here are some of the technologies that programmers are using to produce sweet eye candy for high-end gamers.

It was a plum assignment, one I'd dreamed about since my teenage days at the local arcade: test the latest game systems -- the all-new Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo GameCube, plus Sony's year-old PlayStation 2 -- and, in the end, pick the best.