Video Game Troopers Talk Abu Ghraib

Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones return for alien flick

(NEWSER) - Sure, no one was that desperate for a Men in Black 3—but it's actually a pretty good summer movie. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are back defending the planet from aliens, and this time, Josh Brolin's along for the ride as a young Jones.

• The movie "turns out to be so much fun," writes AO Scott in the New York Times . While it "carefully fulfills its blockbuster imperatives—with chases and explosions and elaborately contrived plot twists—it swerves into some marvelously silly, unexpectedly witty, and genuinely fresh territory."

Henry David Thoreau's masterpiece goes digital; Jay-Z has game, too

(NEWSER) - Henry David Thoreau lived at Walden Pond to escape the comforts of modern life; soon, you'll be able to share his experience right on your flat-screen TV. Thanks to a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the University of Southern California is developing a video game based on Walden, Thoreau's account of his time at the pond, the Guardian reports. It's intended to be a whole new kind of video game, "in which reflection and insight play an important role in the player experience." More»

He also read more than 600 bomb-making guides

(NEWSER) - Anders Behring Breivik "trained" for his shooting massacre by playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, studying al-Qaeda, and reading bomb-making guides. The best-selling military game let him practice his shot using a "holographic aiming device," much like the one he used when slaughtering 69 people at a youth camp last summer, Breivik explained yesterday. "You develop target acquisition," he said. The court also heard that Breivik spent a year between summer 2006 and 2007 devoting 16 hours a day to playing World of Warcraft, the Guardian reports. Breivik described the fantasy game as a "hobby" that isolated him from the world. More»

Classic games like Super Mario Brothers actually 'NP-Hard'

(NEWSER) - Science has confirmed what you already knew as a 10-year-old: Super Mario Brothers is hard to beat. But the paper by a team of international computer scientists uses actual math to come to that pointy-headed conclusion, the Washington Post reports, and focuses on not just the Mario series but also Donkey Kong, Zelda, Metroid, and Pokemon. The title of the paper? "Classic Nintendo Games are (NP-)Hard." More»

These super-Earths are all over the galaxy, say scientists

(NEWSER) - Could aliens be hanging out in the Milky Way? A new discovery by astronomers shows they'd have plenty of possible homes in the galaxy, reports Reuters . The researchers found that tens of billions of planets reside in a habitable zone close to a star, allowing water to flow on the surface and the right temperature to sustain life. More»