It seems that reports of a possible hacking of Origin is popping up on Reddit, with users reporting that their accounts are having unauthorised purchases and other activities appear within them. Some users are reporting that they’re being charged for games they didn’t buy, while some are lucky enough to have had the purchase fail to go through and are receiving e-mails informing them of the fact. One user reports realising something was up when he started gaining achievements for a game they didn’t own, while another has had their account banned because the hacker used it to farm coins with a FIFA game.

EA customer support seem to be handling this well, although the level of satisfaction varies from user to user as is the case usually. Origin has a similar login setup to Steam when it detects an account being logged into from an unfamiliar device, sending a security code to the related e-mail for input before the user is allowed to proceed. Electronic Arts themselves are currently investigating the issues to find out what is happening and how it has happened, but right now no further information has been released from their side.

Either way, if you have an Origin account it might be a good idea to go check its history and do the usual security checks when hackers are around (i.e. change your password, make sure the right e-mail is registered…)

Recently on Steam forums for Croteam’s puzzle game, The Talos Principle, a number of players have been posting about a strange glitch they’ve been experiencing in the game. It seems that a number of them get to a certain point with an elevator, only the elevator won’t let them out once they’re in and they find themselves unable to progress.

However, this isn’t an ordinary bug. In fact, it’s an intentional one; programmed into the game by the developers and only occurs if you pirate the game instead of buying it. So once again, we have an example of developers tricking the pirates into revealing themselves. Oops.

The bug itself takes place during a key progression point in the game. You need to ride the elevator down to be able to continue, but pirates will find the elevator grinds to a halt halfway up and won’t open its doors to let you out. At least health and safety is still being observed I guess. The developers even stuck in QR code at the base of the elevator to foreshadow it.

Nuclear Throne is a post-apocalyptic roguelike shooter which has been on Steam in Early Access for over a year at time of writing. Developers Vlambeer have been steadily updating the game since then, slipping out an update most weeks to improve the game. Now they have announced that people who have bought the game before the beginning of the new year will be given an extra copy of the game for free to gift to friends.

Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail praised the game’s community for how adept they had become at the game, and said that they hoped by giving out the second copies the community would spread the love of the game with others and bring in “fresh eyes” for the game’s further development.

The game was originally known as Wasteland Kings before the name was changed just over a year ago to Nuclear Throne. so far no release date for the full game has been set by the developers.

Ubisoft have a companion to the PC version of their recent problematic Assassin’s Creed game Unity, web-based and named AC Initiates. Right now Ubisoft have had to put it into a ‘continued state of maintenance’ for a temporary period of time. It doesn’t affect the playing of the game, but it does hinder their ability to access gold Initiates chests dotted around the Paris map.

Fortunately for once in the Unity story, Ubisoft have foreseen the problem and put into a place a fix for the maintenance period. All the gold Initiate chests have been made accessible to all players until AC Initiates is out of maintenance.

Breaking the news on the Unity forums Assassin’s Creed community manager, EscoBlades said that the reason for the extended period of maintenance was down to an effort to “minimize the effect from outages to your experience during this time, as well as to allow [them] work on ensuring the technical stability of the platform.”

“Although AC Initiates will be in maintenance and thus unavailable to access via the web or console browsers, all gold Initiates chests are now unlocked in game for online players.”

As it says above, you will need to be online to access the chests in game. And be quick too if you wish to reap some rewards, Ubisoft haven’t given a concrete end date for AC Initiates to come back up but have said that they aim to keep it in maintenance for the “holiday period”.

About a week ago I covered the news that Payday 2 was getting a new heist mission, as well as a new character named Clover whom at the time we knew very little about other than she was female, spoke with an Irish accent and had a minor obsession over a certain diamond. Now the character and heist DLCs are out and we know more.

Her class is Burglar, and can do things such as pick locks, answer pagers and bag bodies a lot faster than the other classes. A Burglar is also harder to hit and recovers from wounds fast, although they’re not great as frontline gunners due to their being squishy. Clover comes with a UK-based weapon set to add to the game, an L85 assault rifle and a shillelagh, as well as her own mask which fittingly has clovers on it.

Clover’s Character Pack costs £3.99, and her heist mission, the Diamond Heist, costs £4.99 on top of that. They’re both available on Steam and right now, Steam is in the midst of its Holiday Sale so there are some discounts on both right now if you want to pick them up.