How long did you figure it would take before somebody figured out how to hack into the Nintendo Switch Online program to install more games into its NES emulator? This time, it took less than 24 hours. The evening after NSO launched, denizens of the hacking community revealed their screenshots and videos.
A hacker who goes by “jamchamb” has discovered a built-in NES emulator hiding in the code of the original Animal Crossing for Gamecube. That may not sound surprising at first, but we’re not talking about the specific NES games you can collect in Animal Crossing. We’re talking about a specific item in the game that, it turns out, was once capable of playing ANY NES game — reading directly from the memory card.
Master Mario 64 hacker Kaze Emanuar has brought us a lot of craziness over the last few months. He’s given Mario the Odyssey ability to control enemies with his hat, introduced a Mario 64 Maker program, hacked in an online mode to the game, thrown in working Portal guns, and even created an entire sequel to Mario 64 with entirely new environments and enemies (that last one wore Nintendo’s patience enough to send him a C&D).
One of the highlights of the past couple Games Done Quick marathons is the showcase of ACE tricks. ACE stands for “Arbitrary Code Execution” and it’s a method of using a glitch to allow the user to manipulate a video game’s data in real time, allowing for theoretically anything to happen. These are usually accomplished with the help of a TASBot (a program that automatically inputs pre-determined data into a game), because the act of entering the code is usually too complicated for a human.
It wasn’t that long ago that the DS game Cubic Ninja was discovered by hackers to open the Nintendo 3DS up to homebrew applications. Nintendo, seeing the obvious potential for piracy, quickly closed the loop and removed Cubic Ninja’s digital version from the eShop. Then Cubic Ninja was found to have a second exploit, Again, it was patched.
These days, if there’s a display that glows, you can probably get Netflix on it. The PS4, the PS3, the XBox One, the XBox 360, the Wii U, the original Wii, the PS Vita and both versions of the 3DS can stream Netflix, as well as any smartphone and any smart TV, and any TV that can be made smart via a Roku device. Clearly, Netflix will not stop until all electronics that exist in this world can receive it. Case in point: they got Netflix running on an NES.
Remember when Sony was hacked? No, not THAT time they were hacked. Or the time before that. I’m talking about way back in 2011, when their database of paying customers on the Playstation Network was broken into and thousands of credit cards were stolen. The Playstation Network had to be shut down for a few days while they patched things up with gum and waited for the next breach. Sony elected to give away some free games to make their public forget. (For their sake I hope they didn’t.)
A game rental service in the United Kingdom may have been subjected to an online attack that has compromised credit and debit card information. Boomerang Rentals, which sprang to prominence in 2012 when Amazon’s LoveFilm service ceased to provide video games for rent, received a number of messages over the weekend from concerned customers who believed that the service’s security measured may have been compromised after unauthorized payments were made through credit cards associated with accounts from the website. This was followed up by threads on both Reddit and NeoGAF where multiple users reported similar problems, all with the common theme that the cards used had all been associated with Boomerang Rentals at some point in the last two years.
Sony Corporation — maker of game consoles, producer of Spider-Man movies and inventor of Beta — was compromised last week by a massive hack that brought every computer in their building down. Currently, when they turn on their monitors, all they get is an image of a red skull and a message written in broken English.
EA gets ban-hammer happy. Battlefield 3 is now receiving a clean up.
