Games

Come one, come all. Witness the evolution of Blizzard’s authentication security! Those of you who have been playing World of Warcraft long enough know that the game is plagued by gold farmers and hackers very determined to get their grubby mitts on your virtual stuff. Well, in an effort to combat these meddling would be thieves, the folks at Blizzard created a device originally called the Blizzard Authenticator (now referred to as the Battle.net Authenticator.

HackVision, the Arduino-based game development kit from Nootropic Design, has been officially released! Many of our readers may already be familiar with the Arduino; It provides a fantastic integrated platform for DIY hardware hacking. There are many add-ons available for the Arduino to extend its functionality, but using it for game development has been difficult due to the lack of standard controller support and TV-out capability.

Two months ago, Rockstar Games swung its banhammer, booting any Red Dead Redemption multiplayer outlaws in possession of hacked game saves. Today the developer announced it considers those cheaters redeemed, with time served, and is reinstating their access to New Austin. But be warned, Rockstar added, the banhammer is about to swing once again.

Yesterday, Sony announced that Gran Turismo 5 would miss its previously announced street date of November 5th. Sony gave a vague reason as to the cause of the delay, saying only that "creator Kazunori Yamauchi and the team at Polyphony Digital want to make certain they are creating a racing experience of the highest quality."

But a senior moderator with alleged ties to Sony at Blu-Ray.com's forums, has said that the scheduling slip is due to the recent PlayStation 3 jailbreak that opened the platform up to piracy.

Earning copious credits in Halo: Reach is easy thanks to an exploit that allows players to reset and complete challenges dozens of times. It's also a no-no and one of the easiest ways to be identified by Bungie's automated systems -- just ask the more than 15,000 Spartans who recently had their credits reset.

On the Halo: Reach forums, Bungie let gamers know it is able to easily track "challenge reset abusers," and said more credit resets and potential bans will be coming soon. Gamers guilty of the challenge reset exploit were also banned from earning any credits for 24 hours.

Blizzard has permanently sentenced over 5,000 StarCraft II hackers’ accounts to the black list today, and stated that they intend to continue to crack down on cheaters. This follows Blizzard’s September 14 announcement that they would soon be taking action against hackers and cheaters, and emphasizes their commitment to protecting their millions of valued customers from those who use cheats, exploits or hacks in StarCraft II.

World of Warcraft accounts have been under siege for years, with hackers and gold-selling outlets stealing passwords, items and more to fill their coffers, selling that gold to unwitting buyers. Blizzard has fought back incessantly over the years to stem the tide of gold farming and account hacking, and as you can imagine, the scale at which this happens is very tasking on its customer support department.

With a number of PS3 jailbreak solutions appearing over the last few weeks it hasn’t taken long for enterprising hackers to start porting emulators to Sony’s most powerful gaming hardware.

A few days of playing around with the newly unlocked PS3 system has allowed both a SNES and Dreamcast emulator to run. Both are very early stages in development for the machine, but do bode well for the future of the PS3 as a one-stop retro arcade machine.

Over the past few weeks, we've heard of something called the "PS Jailbreak" which hacks the PS3 into doing things such backing up Blu-Ray PS3 games onto an internal or external harddrive and allow for playback of the saved games.

Now, here comes a new type of hack which allows PSP games to be playable on the PS3. This hack has been developed by Russian hacker GameSuper. According to our source, the hack comes in two parts:

If you're cheating at StarCraft II, get your jollies while you can. Blizzard plans to start swinging the banhammer.