CS:GO is more famously known for the massive cosmetics market that’s grown up around it in recent years, but now plans have been announced that will allow long-time players to gain some real-life loot. Players who have been around for five years have earned the in-game Five Year Veteran coin, and now they will be able to buy an actual physical coin to display somewhere in their rooms and prove to everyone just how much of a gamer they are.

To be eligible players must sign into the Valve Store with their Steam account that has the coin in their inventory. Once it has confirmed that the player has the in-game item, the gaming veteran will then be allowed to order the coin for $45. An account does need to be in good standing to receive this option as well, so cheaters will not be eligible no matter how long they were playing before they were caught. Worldwide shipping is free, but there might be a charge for import duty or VAT for the gamer to pay when their coin reaches them. A few places are also not open for orders including Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines, Burma, Syria and Sudan; otherwise you should be good.

The coin comes with a fancy looking wooden box, a display stand and a box sleeve with the Five Year Veteran logo stamped upon it. Orders will begin shipping in mid-June and Valve are planning to manufacture more once more players reach the Five Year mark.

Who knows? Maybe in another few years when the first Ten Year Veteran players get their in-game coin, we’ll see Valve releasing a Ten Year physical coin for purchase.

Besiege was one of those games that released that was very good to play with friends sat next to you or by yourself. It was a game with a set of engineering rules that made perfect sense, but at the same time weird and wonderful things (usually explosions) would happen and it was just funny.

Now Spiderling Studios have announced that they will be releasing the Besiege Multiverse in Q3 of this year. This is a mode that will combine the two most wanted features for the game into one – multiplayer and map creation. Which means said friends no longer need to sit by you, they can now join you in the game to construction contraptions that will eventually end up on fire or exploding! Wonderful!

Multiverse will allow players to work together to build not only the weapons and vehicles Besiege is known for, but also new levels that can be simulated mid-construction to make sure everything’s working correctly and nothing like a moving platform will get stuck somewhere. Spiderling Studios are going to be keeping fans up to date with the development of the Multiverse with regular videos, as well as guides to help players make the most of the new toolset. The game will increased slightly in price when the new mode comes in (by about $2), but players who already own the game will experience no extra charge for it.

As well as this upcoming mode, Besiege has just received two new Valfross maps for players to play on, the first being an abandoned mine and the second a great fortress to break down. The localisation system is also almost done, which means soon players can help the game’s language support on launch by contributing their own custom translations of the game to Steam Workshop for others to use before they get put into the game properly.

Malware is thoroughly unpleasant stuff, and one of the nastiest pieces of malware to exist is the sub-group of ‘ransomware’. Ransomware works by getting into your computer and holding your files hostage, usually by encrypting them or corrupting them in some way – which can only be reversed if you pay the ransom fee and sometimes even then you don’t get 100% of your files back. The Internet can bring some very scary things to your computer, and not always in the way we generally expect it to.

However, recently the people over at Malware Hunter Team came across a ransomware program that was a little bit… different. How so? Well, it too held your files hostage but the price of the ransom was to get a high score on the Lunatic difficulty of an anime shoot-em-up game. No, seriously.

Found a surprising ransomware today: “rensenWare”.
Not asks for any money, but to play a game until you reach a score – and it’s not a joke. pic.twitter.com/Pu53WZFALA

— MalwareHunterTeam (@malwrhunterteam) April 6, 2017

Rensenware, named after the game it wanted you to get the high score in (Touhou Seirensen – Undefined Fantastic Object), challenges unfortunate users who get the malware on their machines to rack up 200 million points on a really hard difficulty level, or lose their access to their files for good.

In case you’re wondering why any malicious person online would set that particular ransom, the story is much simpler than that. The program was created by a Korea-based undergraduate student as a joke, and he then placed the source code onto GitHub – this is how it’s managed to essentially ‘escape’ and get into people’s computers for real. For what it’s worth they’ve quickly managed to build a program to bypass the locks Rensenware sets and have even issued an apology for letting it get out in the first place.

So, the creator of rensenWare created a tool which writes the values to memory which are needed for the decryption.
Also wrote an apology… pic.twitter.com/LrapKv5Dm3

— MalwareHunterTeam (@malwrhunterteam) April 7, 2017

Sometimes reality really can be stranger than fiction. You literally couldn’t make this up.