At this year's E3 conference in Los Angeles, Sony invited famed game developer Hideo Kojima on the stage during the company's PlayStation 4 press conference to announce the latest from Kojima Productions, curiously called Death Stranding.
For decades now, the only real way to enjoy the many fan-modified versions of classic console games floating around was through the legally questionable method of downloading altered ROM files and running them through a computer emulator (legal cartridge-ripping hardware notwithstanding). Now, Sega is finally lending some official support to what has until now been a very unofficial activity, adding the ability to modify and redistribute certain classic PC-emulated Genesis titles through Valve's Steamworks platform.
Way back at the beginning of 2015 I tasked myself with building a gaming PC for the living room. 12 months later and finally—after coming to work for Ars, travelling halfway around the world a few times over, and patiently waiting for someone to release a console-like case that didn't suck—it is done.
We woke up today to a world where Activision is now, overnight, one of the biggest mobile gaming publishers in the world. And Wall Street seems OK with the deal.
Like many MMORPGs, World of Warcraft can be a grind. To sidestep the time commitment required to continually level up a character, gather resources, improve skills, or whatever else is desired, some gamers turn to bots, software that automates the process. The only problem is, Activision Blizzard isn't so keen on this behavior and has dropped the ban hammer hard on gamers who've been using them.
After receiving a lot of interest in Trivia Cracker, a Chrome extension that lets you easily cheat in the popular game Trivia Crack, I decided it might be interesting to see if the same kinds of vulnerabilities existed in other popular games. Given its insane popularity, the first game I thought to investigate, of course, was Candy Crush.
Valve has revealed the Steam Machines and the companies that are going to build them, alongside some of the hardware configurations, so the real question now is this: will you buy a slightly overpriced PC with non-descriptive hardware that runs Linux?
Electronic Arts is closing the Maxis office in Emeryville, California. While other Maxis studios around the world will remain open, the Emeryville location was the studio's headquarters, and was home to the principals behind the poorly-received and poorly-conceived 2013 reboot of the legendary SimCity franchise.
News of the closure was initially made public by the now former staff on Twitter. Lead gameplay scripter and designer on SimCity, Guillaume Pierre, tweeted that everybody at the site had lost their jobs.
Clearly, hackers who sympathize with North Korea don't have a great sense of humor. Weeks after Sony briefly cancelled The Interview, Moneyhorse Games has frozen work on its Kim Jong-un parody shooter Glorious Leader.
The studio says that hackers destroyed game data and locked the company out of its computers, making it tough to both continue work on the dictator-inspired side-scroller and maintain a crowdfunding drive for the title. The funding goals weren't likely to be met as-is, for that matter.
A few months ago, the Intel Edison launched with the promise of putting a complete x86 system on a board the size of an SD card. This inevitably led to comparisons of other, ARM-based single board computers and the fact that the Edison doesn’t have a video output, Ethernet, or GPIO pins on a 0.100″ grid. Ethernet and easy breakout is another matter entirely but [Lutz] did manage to give the Edison a proper display, allowing him to run Doom at about the same speed as a 486 did back in the day.
