Enlarge / For an unreleased game, Star Citizen still has some really pretty ships... (credit: RSI)

At this point in Star Citizen's drawn-out, 11-plus-year development cycle, we're usually reminded of the game when it hits some crowdfunding microtransaction milestone or updates its increasingly convoluted alpha development roadmap. So last week's announcement that developer Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) has banned over 600 cheaters from its servers is a notable reminder that some people are actually enjoying—and exploiting—the unpolished alpha version of the game.

Shortly after the May release of Star Citizen's Alpha 2.23.1 update, players started noticing that they could easily make extra money by storing a freight ship, selling their cargo, and then returning to the ship to find the cargo ready to be sold a second time. As knowledge of this "money doubling" exploit spread, players reported that the price of basic in-game resources saw significant inflation in a matter of days.

Now, Cloud Imperium Games Senior Director of Player Relations Will Leverett has written that the developer has investigated "multiple exploits within Star Citizen that compromised stability and negatively impacted the in-game economy." In doing so, CIG says it "identified and suspended over 600 accounts involved in exploitative behaviors while also removing the illicitly gained aUEC [in-game currency] from the Star Citizen ecosystem."

Enlarge / Illustration of the Apollo lunar lander Eagle over the Moon. (credit: Getty Images)

On Friday, a retired software engineer named Martin C. Martin announced that he recently discovered a bug in the original Lunar Lander computer game's physics code while tinkering with the software. Created by a 17-year-old high school student named Jim Storer in 1969, this primordial game rendered the action only as text status updates on a teletype, but it set the stage for future versions to come.

The legendary game—which Storer developed on a PDP-8 minicomputer in a programming language called FOCAL just months after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made their historic moonwalks—allows players to control a lunar module's descent onto the Moon's surface. Players must carefully manage their fuel usage to achieve a gentle landing, making critical decisions every ten seconds to burn the right amount of fuel.

In 2009, just short of the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing, I set out to find the author of the original Lunar Lander game, which was then primarily known as a graphical game, thanks to the graphical version from 1974 and a 1979 Atari arcade title. When I discovered that Storer created the oldest known version as a teletype game, I interviewed him and wrote up a history of the game. Storer later released the source code to the original game, written in FOCAL, on his website.

Enlarge / Do you have a few hundred hours to hear the good news about our lord and savior, Diablo? (credit: Blizzard)

Longtime fans of Diablo II are deeply familiar with the extreme timesink that is the late-game grind for the very best loot. But when the creators of Diablo IV tried to re-create that style of grinding for the latest game in the series, they found that their players' tastes had changed quite a bit in the intervening years.

In a wide-ranging interview with Windows Central, Blizzard's general manager of Diablo, Rod Fergusson, said that they launched Diablo IV under "the assumption that D4 was meant to be more D2-like." That meant, in part, increasing the length of time required to discover the game's most valuable items after post-Auction-House Diablo 3 made rare item drops much more common.

"One of the assumptions was that people were going to be okay with the long grind for the Unique or an Uber Unique in particular, because in Diablo II, it can go years," Fergusson said. "You can go three years before you find the Uber you're looking for... and so we were like, okay, this is what people love about the progression of D2, that idea of that very long chase."

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  Much of the time, the game looks a lot like Civilization, like in this city view. [credit: Microsoft ]

We haven't written much about Ara: History Untold, a new historical turn-based strategy PC game that's been in the works for a few years now. Part of that's because its publisher, Xbox Game Studios, hasn't put much fanfare behind it; it wasn't even mentioned in Microsoft's not-E3 extravaganza last week.

But perhaps both we and Microsoft should be putting more of a spotlight on it, given that it now has a release date: September 24, 2024. The game will be released on Steam and Xbox Game Pass for PC simultaneously.

The date was announced during an Official Xbox Podcast interview (and accompanying blog post) with Marc Meyer, president of Oxide Games, the studio developing Ara. The podcast covered more than just the release date, though, with Meyer offering up some new gameplay details—particularly about how multiplayer will work.

Enlarge / Remember, folks inside those polygons: If your housing feels too expensive, spend less money on resource consumption. It's just math. (credit: Paradox Interactive)

City building simulations are not real life. They can be helpful teaching tools, but they abstract away many of the real issues in changing communities.

And yet, sometimes a game like Cities: Skylines 2 (C:S2) will present an issue that's just too timely and relevant to ignore. Such is the case with "Economy 2.0," a big update to the beleaguered yet continually in-development game, due to arrive within the next week or so. The first and most important thing it tackles is the persistent issue of "High Rent," something that's bothering the in-game citizens ("cims" among fans), C:S2 players, and nearly every human living in the United States and many other places.

C:S2 has solutions to high rent, at least for their virtual citizens. They removed the "virtual landlord" that takes in rent, so now a building's upkeep is evenly split among renters. There's a new formula for calculating rent, one that evokes a kind of elegant mathematical certainty none of us will ever see:

Enlarge / "So slim you can play it anywhere." (credit: VGHF)

Gamers of a certain age may remember Nintendo's Game & Watch line, which predated the cartridge-based Game Boy by offering simple, single-serving LCD games that can fetch a pretty penny at auction today. But even most ancient gamers probably don't remember Mego's "Time Out" line, which took the internal of Nintendo's early Game & Watch titles and rebranded them for an American audience that hadn't yet heard of the Japanese game maker.

Now, the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) has helped preserve the original film of an early Mego Time Out commercial, marking the recovered, digitized video as "what we believe is the first commercial for a Nintendo product in the United States." The 30-second TV spot—which is now available in a high-quality digital transfer for the first time—provides a fascinating glimpse into how marketers positioned some of Nintendo's earliest games to a public that still needed to be sold on the very idea of portable gaming.

Imagine an “electronic sport”

A 1980 Mego catalog sells Nintendo's Game & Watch games under the toy company's "Time Out" branding. (credit: Mego Museum)

Founded in the 1950s, Mego made a name for itself in the 1970s with licensed movie action figures and early robotic toys like the 2-XL (a childhood favorite of your humble author). In 1980, though, Mego branched out to partner with a brand-new, pre-Donkey Kong Nintendo of America to release rebranded versions of four early Game & Watch titles: Ball (which became Mego's "Toss-Up"), Vermin ("Exterminator"), Fire ("Fireman Fireman"), and Flagman ("Flag Man").

Enlarge / The "Xbox Series V" was a social media hoax, but the idea of a portable Xbox seems to still have legs inside Microsoft. (credit: Reddit)

The extremely long-standing rumors regarding Microsoft making a portable game console got a strong shot in the arm over the weekend from none other than Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer. Speaking on stage as part of an IGN Live interview, Spencer said directly that "I think we should have a handheld, too."

The comment stops just short of an official announcement that Microsoft is actively working on portable gaming hardware for the first time. But if anyone is in a position to make an "I think we should..." into an operational reality, it's Spencer.

"The future for us in hardware is pretty awesome," Spencer continued during the IGN presentation. "And the work that the team is doing around different form factors, different ways to play, I'm incredibly excited about it."

Enlarge / Looking more like a refrigerator than ever before. (credit: Microsoft)

A new version of Microsoft's top-end Xbox Series X will launch without a disc drive for the first time this holiday season.

The new "Digital Edition" console option—which sports 1TB of storage and an Xbox Series S-like "Robot White" color scheme—will be available "in select markets" for an estimated retail price of $449 (or 500 euros). That price is just $50 less than the MSRP for the current, disc-drive-equipped Xbox Series X, which is currently on sale for $449 from the Microsoft Store.

Word of Microsoft's plans for a disc-drive-free Xbox Series X first leaked last September as part of the Federal Trade Commission's case against the Microsoft/Activision merger. But the new disc-free Series X bears little resemblance to the cylindrical "Brooklin" refresh shown in those leaked promo materials, which also touted redesigned internals and improved power usage. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said at the time that "so much has changed" from the "old emails and documents" in those leaks.

Enlarge / A slide-up screen is just one of the novel features for Adata's Steam Deck clone. (credit: RetroHandhelds)

For PC gamers used to the modular design of a desktop rig, there are pros and cons to the all-in-one, pre-fab design of the Steam Deck (and its many subsequent imitators in the growing handheld gaming PC market). On the one hand, you don't have to worry about pricing out individual parts and making sure they all work together. On the other hand, the only way to upgrade one of these devices is to essentially throw out the old unit and replace the entire thing, console-style.

Korean computer storage-maker Adata is looking to straddle these two extremes. Lilliputing reports on Adata's XPG Nia prototype, which was shown off at the Computex trade show. The unit is the first gaming handheld so far to embrace the CAMM (Compression Attached Memory Module) standard that allows for easily replaceable and upgradeable memory modules, as well as a number of other mod-friendly features.

CAMM on down

Samsung shared this rendering of a CAMM ahead of the publishing of the CAMM2 standard in September. (credit: Samsung)

If you've read our previous coverage of the emerging CAMM standard, you know how excited we are about the ultra-thin modules that can simply be screwed into place on a laptop or portable motherboard. That offers a viable replacement for the now-standard soldered LPDDR RAM, which saves space but is incredibly difficult to repair or replace.

Enlarge / All these goons are targeting Captain America, as shown in icons above their heads. Good. That's just how he likes it. (No, really, he's a tank, that's his thing.) (credit: 2K/Firaxis)

I fully understand why people don't want multiple game launchers on their PC. Steam is the default and good enough for (seemingly) most people. It's not your job to compel competition in the market. You want to launch and play games you enjoy, as do most of us.

So when I tell you that Marvel's Midnight Suns is a game worth the hassle of registering, installing, and using the Epic Games Launcher, I am carefully picking my shot. For the price of giving Epic your email (or a proxy/relay version, like Duck), or just logging in again, you can play a fun, novel, engaging turn-based strategy game, with deckbuilding and positioning tactics, for zero dollars. Even if you feel entirely sapped by Marvel at this point, like most of us, I assure you that this slice of Marvel feels more like the comic books and less like the overexposed current films. Just ask the guy who made it.

Tactical deckbuilding is fun

The game was very well-regarded by most critics but was not a financial success upon release in December 2022, or was at least "underwhelming." Why any game hits or doesn't is a combination of many factors, but one of them was likely that the game was trying something new. It wasn't just X-COM with Doctor Strange. It had some Fire Emblem relationship-building and base exploration, but it also had cards. The cards blend into the turn-based, positional, chain-building strategy, but some people apparently saw cards and turned away.

Enlarge / COMING SOON (credit: 2K / Imgur)

2K Games is expected to show the first trailer footage of the upcoming Civilization VII as part of this weekend's Summer Games Fest marketing extravaganza after a logo for the game leaked on 2K's website this morning.

Eagle-eyed gamers at ResetEra and Reddit both noticed the Civ VII banner atop the publisher's official site early this morning, alongside a "Coming Soon" label and inactive links to a trailer and wishlist page. The appearance comes just ahead of the trailer-filled Summer Games Fest livestream, which will premiere at 5 pm Eastern Friday afternoon.

In May, the Summer Games Fest Twitter account teased that 2K would be using the event "to reveal the next iteration in one of [its] biggest and most beloved franchises." Civilization VII now seems primed to fill that pre-announced slot, which may be unwelcome news for fans of 2K-owned franchises like Borderlands, Bioshock, and NFL2K (which was first publicly mulled for a revival in 2020).

Enlarge / At least my son will be able to use my copy of Fallout: New Vegas to distract him from mourning... (credit: Getty Images)

A few weeks ago, we called some attention to the legal difficulty of passing on your digital Steam game library after you die. While Valve hasn't responded to a request for comment on the matter, PC gaming platform GOG tells Ars that it is ready and willing to help users transfer their accounts in the event of their death.

As long as they bring a court order, that is.

"In general, your GOG account and GOG content is not transferable," GOG spokesperson Zuzanna Rybacka tells Ars. "However, if you can obtain a copy of a court order that specifically entitles someone to your GOG personal account, the digital content attached to it, taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it, and that specifically refers to your GOG username or at least email address used to create such an account, we’d do our best to make it happen."

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  The new PS5 packaging, as seen on the PlayStation Direct online store, is missing the "8K" label in the corner. [credit: PlayStation Direct ]

When we first received our PlayStation 5 review unit from Sony in 2020, we reacted with some bemusement to the "8K" logo on the box and its implied promise of full 7630×4320 resolution output. We then promptly forgot all about it since native 8K content and 8K compatible TVs have remained a relative curiosity thus far in the PS5's lifespan.

But on Wednesday, Digital Foundry's John Linneman discovered that Sony has quietly removed that longstanding 8K label from the PS5 box. The ultra-high-resolution promise no longer appears on the packaging shown on Sony's official PlayStation Direct store, a change that appears to have happened between late January and mid-February, according to Internet Archive captures of the store page (the old "8K" box can still be seen at other online retailers, though).

A promise deferred

This packaging change has been a long time coming since the PS5 hasn't technically been living up to its 8K promise for years now. While Sony's Mark Cerny mentioned the then-upcoming hardware's 8K support in a 2019 interview, the system eventually launched with a pretty big "coming soon" caveat for that feature. "PS5 is compatible with 8K displays at launch, and after a future system software update will be able to output resolutions up to 8K when content is available, with supported software," the company said in an FAQ surrounding the console's 2020 launch.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Members of the Legendary Computer Bugs Tribunal, honored guests, if I may have your attention? I would, humbly, submit a new contender for your esteemed judgment. You may or may not find it novel, you may even deign to call it a "bug," but I assure you, you will find it entertaining.

Consider NetHack. It is one of the all-time roguelike games, and I mean that in the more strict sense of that term. The content is procedurally generated, deaths are permanent, and the only thing you keep from game to game is your skill and knowledge. I do understand that the only thing two roguelike fans can agree on is how wrong the third roguelike fan is in their definition of roguelike, but, please, let us move on.

NetHack is great for machine learning…

Being a difficult game full of consequential choices and random challenges, as well as a "single-agent" game that can be generated and played at lightning speed on modern computers, NetHack is great for those working in machine learning—or imitation learning, actually, as detailed in Jens Tuyls' paper on how compute scaling affects single-agent game learning. Using Tuyls' model of expert NetHack behavior, Bartłomiej Cupiał and Maciej Wołczyk trained a neural network to play and improve itself using reinforcement learning.

Enlarge / Sony's marketing image for PSVR2 on PC. (credit: Sony)

It doesn't seem like PlayStation VR2 is having quite the same success as its predecessor, which was a runaway hit at a moment when public curiosity and investment in VR were at an all-time high. Nonetheless, it's one of the most advanced VR headsets available—tied to a tiny library on the PS5.

That's about to change, as Sony has confirmed its plans to launch a PC adapter for the headset on August 7. It will cost $60, and it will, at a minimum, let PSVR2 owners play a large library of SteamVR titles, provided their PCs meet the minimum specifications.

Sony's blog post about the adapter says players will need a Steam account, so it's unclear how or whether you can use the headset to dive into PC VR experiences through various channels besides Steam.

Enlarge / How well do you know your friends and family? Can you smack a 2010-era controller in their hands to win intangible points? (credit: Die Gut Fabrik LLC)

If there is any reason to head into your garage or attic and dig out that PlayStation Move controller, it's Johann Sebastian Joust. Actually, there's a second good reason: that game, and three others with the same spirit, are all free now on Steam for PlayStation, Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The reason and timing are unfortunate, as Die Gute Fabrik, the Danish developer collective behind Sportsfriends, can no longer support or update the 10-year-old game. But the group is doing the right thing, making the game free on all platforms, including Steam, transferring ownership of the game to Bennett Foddy (Getting Over It), and working to open-source a version of the JS Joust game for Linux so that perhaps it can be fit to work with other motion-sensitive controllers or through some other scheme.

Sportsfriends, previously described at Ars as a "stellar pack of multiplayer-only gems," are four games meant for "couch co-op," i.e. playing in the same room as other folks holding controllers (or glowing Move sticks, in the case of JS Joust). Each one is a little masterwork of clever design and hard to encapsulate briefly, but if you don't have time for the deeper dive, here goes:

Enlarge / After nearly four years of the PS5, a lot of people are still using their old PS4s. (credit: Sony)

If you're still getting use out of your aging PS4 after nearly four full years of PS5 availability, new data from Sony shows you are far from alone. The Japanese electronics giant says that both the PS4 and PS5 currently have about 49 million monthly active users, suggesting a significant number of PlayStation players have yet to spend $400 or more to upgrade to the newer console.

The new data comes from an extensive Game & Network Services report presented as part of Sony's most recent Business Segment Meeting. Those numbers suggest that about 42 percent of the 117 million PS4 units ever sold are still in active use, compared to 86 percent of the 56 million PS5 units sold thus far.

Despite the parity in active consoles, Sony also points out that the PS5 is responsible for significantly more gameplay hours than the PS4: 2.4 billion for the new system compared to 1.4 billion for its predecessor (it's unclear what time period this comparison covers). Sony's monthly user numbers also include any console "used to play games or [access] services on the PlayStation Network," so an old PS4 that serves as a convenient Netflix box in the spare bedroom would still inflate the older system's numbers here.

Enlarge / Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann, seen here not questioning the accuracy of a PR interview. (credit: Getty Images)

Sony has taken down an interview with Naughty Dog Studio Head Neil Druckmann (Uncharted, The Last of Us) that the company now says contains "several significant errors and inaccuracies that don't represent his perspective and values." The surprising move comes after Druckmann took the extreme measure of publicly questioning a portion of the PR interview by posting a lengthy transcript that conflicted with the heavily edited version Sony posted online.

The odd media saga began last Thursday, when Sony published the interview (archive here) under the heading "The Evolution of Storytelling Across Mediums." The piece was part of the Creative Entertainment Vision section of Sony's corporate site, a PR-driven concept exploring how Sony will "seamlessly connect multi-layered worlds where physical and virtual realities overlap to deliver limitless Kanto—through creativity and technology—working with creators." Whatever that means.

Druckmann's short interview started attracting attention almost immediately, primarily due to Druckmann's apparent promotion of using AI tools in game development. Such tools "will allow us to create nuanced dialogues and characters, expanding creative possibilities," Druckmann is quoted as saying. "AI is really going to revolutionize how content is being created, although it does bring up some ethical issues we need to address."

Enlarge / Is this an aspirational image for mass shooters? (credit: Activision)

The families of multiple victims of the 2022 mass shooting at Uvalde's Robb Elementary School are suing Activision in a California civil court, alleging that the company's Call of Duty games act as a "training camp for mass shooters."

The lawsuit (as obtained by Polygon) compares Activision's Call of Duty marketing to the cigarette industry's use of now-barred spokescartoon Joe Camel, putting the gaming company "in the wildly lucrative business of training adolescents to become gunmen." The Call of Duty games "are chewing up alienated teenage boys and spitting out mass shooters," the lawsuit alleges, and in Uvalde, the games "knowingly exposed the Shooter to the weapon, conditioned him to see it as the solution to his problems, and trained him how to use it."

Meta platforms is also a party to the lawsuit for "explicit, aggressive marketing" of firearms to minors via Instagram.

Enlarge (credit: Bungie)

They wanted to make money by selling cheating tools to Destiny 2 players. They may have ended up setting US legal precedent.

After a trial in federal court in Seattle last week, a jury found cheat-seller AimJunkies, along with its parent company Phoenix Digital and four of its employees and contractors, liable for copyright infringement and assigned damages to each of them. The jury split $63,210 in damages, with $20,000 to Phoenix Digital itself and just under $11,000 each to the four individuals. That's just under the $65,000 revenue the defendants claimed to have generated from 1,400 copies of its Destiny 2 cheats.

Bungie's case appears to have gone further than any other game-cheating suit has made it in the US court system. Because cheating at an online game is not, in itself, illegal, game firms typically lean on the anti-circumvention aspects of the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). That's how the makers of Grand Theft Auto V, Overwatch, Rainbow Six, and Fortnite have pursued their cheat-making antagonists. Bungie, in taking their claim past settlement and then winning a copyright claim from a jury, has perhaps provided game makers a case to point to in future proceedings, and perhaps more incentive.

Enlarge / But... but I was just about to check out Tacoma. (credit: Getty Images)

With Valve's Steam gaming platform approaching the US drinking age this year, more and more aging PC gamers may be considering what will happen to their vast digital game libraries after they die. Unfortunately, legally, your collection of hundreds of backlogged games will likely pass into the ether along with you someday.

The issue of digital game inheritability gained renewed attention this week as a ResetEra poster quoted a Steam support response asking about transferring Steam account ownership via a last will and testament. "Unfortunately, Steam accounts and games are non-transferable" the response reads. "Steam Support can't provide someone else with access to the account or merge its contents with another account. I regret to inform you that your Steam account cannot be transferred via a will."

This isn't the first time someone has asked this basic estate planning question, of course. Last year, a Steam forum user quoted a similar response from Steam support as saying, "Your account is yours and yours alone. Now you can share it with family members, but you cannot give it away."

Enlarge / VideoCardz' leaked image of a ROG Ally X, seemingly having gone through the JPG blender a couple times. (credit: VideoCardz)

Asus' ROG Ally was the first major-brand attempt to compete with Valve's Steam Deck. It was beefy and interesting, but it had three major flaws: It ran Windows on a little touchscreen, had unremarkable ergonomics, and its battery life was painful.

The Asus ROG (Republic of Gamers) Ally X, which has been announced and is due out June 2, seems to have had its specs leaked, and they indicate a fix for at least the battery life. Gaming site VideoCardz, starting its leak reveal with "No more rumors," cites the ROG Ally X as having the same Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU as the prior ROG Ally, as well as the same 7-inch 1080p VRR screen with a 120 Hz refresh rate.

VideoCardz' leaked image, seemingly from Asus marketing materials, with the ROG Ally X's specifications. (credit: VideoCardz)

The battery and memory have changed substantially, though. An 80-watt-hour battery, up from 40, somehow adds just 70 grams of weight and about 5 mm of thickness to the sequel device. By increasing the RAM from 16GB to 24GB and making it LPDDR5, the ROG Ally X may be able to lend more of it to the GPU, upping performance somewhat without demanding a new chip or architecture. There is also a second USB-C port, with USB4 speeds, that should help quite a bit with docking, charging while playing with accessories, and, I would guess, Linux hackery.

It has been a tumultuous run for Netflix's popular adaptation of The Witcher novels and games. A series of setbacks and controversies led to a long delay after the show lost its star, Henry Cavill. Now a brief season four teaser gives us our first look at Cavill's replacement in the role of Geralt of Rivia, Liam Hemsworth.

The video above reveals little about the direction for the season beyond establishing that, yes, Hemsworth is now Geralt, and here's what it looks like. He looks the part, though it's hard for some fans to imagine him matching Cavill's pitch-perfect presence and delivery for the character.

See, Cavill is famously a passionate gamer. He's talked at length about his deep fandom of Warhammer 40K, his experiences playing World of Warcraft, and yes, his experiences with 2015's immensely popular open-world RPG The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. He even has appeared in a video building a gaming PC.