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We’re always being told that piracy is killing the media we view, from television to films to video games. Now it seems that one piracy group has decided to call the video game industry’s bluff on that.
Chinese group 3DM were in the news last month talking about how it’s getting harder to crack video game anti-piracy software and have pledged that for a year they will not crack any single-player game starting February 8th, just to see what sort of an effect it has on legitimate sales of the game. Instead they will focus their efforts on localising games for their local market.
“We just had an internal meeting. Starting at the Chinese New Year, 3DM will not crack any single-player games. We’ll take a look at the situation in a year’s time to see if genuine sales have grown.” a representative of the group said on the group’s blog on TorrentFreak.
Piracy debates have raged for years, and just gotten worse since the advent of the Internet and its growth. There’s certainly been arguments on both sides of the debate so it will be interesting to see if this does have any effect on sales.
Mark February 8th 2017 down in your calendars, that’s about when you can expect to see 3DM’s results made public.
In terms of games, one of the genres I seem to have a particular love for is the rogue-like. Runs through levels worth of creatures, dispatching them and grabbing loot is right up my street. With that in mind, how does indie Dungeon Souls compare to others I’ve tried?
Dungeon Souls is set within a titular dungeon and has a range of different Hero characters to play as, with their own set of strengths and weaknesses and stats. A number of them are available to play right from the start, with the others all as unlockables for completing certain tasks. Whatever your preferred style of play, you enter each level on top of the deactivated portal to the next floor, and you must seek out and activate the ‘marks’ on the level to turn on the portal. Loot comes in the form of gold/gems; potions; keys to the silver and gold chests and most importantly – the upgrade items. These items give you stat boosts, special abilities or add on something that will just make your time in the dungeon seem a lot less of a hassle. They can be found in the chests, in Shops you can find in the levels and mostly especially in the giant Boss chest you get for defeating the area boss after 3 levels of that area have been completed. They can also be upgraded themselves if you so happen to find a second spawn of the same item you have already and pick it up.
Play-wise the game is responsible and flows well, with your character gaining experience that allows you to use skill points to level up a stat each level, and there will be times when you’ll be able to stop and apply these level ups, as well as to heal if you’ve got health potions or an upgrade item that allows for healing. However, monsters do respawn so you can’t stay still too long lest you get taken by surprise. You also need to get a move on once you’ve activated all marks on a level because after a short amount of time the Redeemer creature will spawn, and he will drain your HP dry. The only way to escape is to take the portal to the next level.
The game does have a few different level difficulties and playing as the same character multiple times will contribute towards an experience tally that will let your character rank up, applying passive bonuses to their stats from the start of the run. You’re also able to purchase passive buffs before you do a run to help out more.
The game is currently in Early Access so there are a few things still not implemented, like multiplayer, and the game is still being updated. This means that you can expect things to still change and for even more content to be added. This could include new playable heroes, new mobs, new loot or anything else. The game itself right now is pretty stable though, and I only managed to encounter one crash which occurred when so much was going on that the game said “Nope!” and fell over.
I’d rate this game pretty highly over all. I had an awful lot of fun with it when streaming and continue to do so. It is one of the nicest rogue-likes I’ve played, and with the price set at £6.99 for the UK and $9.99 for the US I’d say it’s worth the money. When Dungeon Souls gets a proper release, developer Mike Studios have said they’ve thought about bumping the price up a little bit so I’d advice you to get in now if you’re into good indie rogue-likes.
In one of the slightly funnier stories heard today, it seems that one CS: GO player decided to take the matter of hackers into their own hands like some virtual vigilante. By releasing a bunch of false multihacks over the course of two weeks, they’ve managed to get around 3,000 cheating players banned.
The multihacks extended the in-game viewing angles as well as supplying a constant stream of ammo and health for the players who applied them. However, they also did some behind the scenes stuff that to the anti-cheat system made them completely obvious that something fishy was happening.
“The first two releases had a “timer” in them which meant the features that instantly VAC banned them would only be activated after a certain time (e.g. 10 PM on the day after the release),” writes Redditor AndroidL, who is behind the honeytrap hacks. “the final hack (with over 3.5k downloads) just instantly VAC bans them as soon as they open the hack and join a game.”
The hacks recieved over 26,000 views and around 5,500 downloads in all, resulting in the 3,000 account ban. In case you’re wondering what that looks like, there’s a nice chart available as well as an Imgur album with some responses from those caught out (including an ex-staff member!):
No matter what you think of AndroidL’s actions, you’ve got to admit it’s just a little bit funny. I’m hoping that Valve won’t throw the book at them, or if they do not too hard. After all, the cheaters got hit because they broke the rules and tried to game the system.
Welcome to your weekly look into the world of Kickstarter gaming projects.
There’s no big news to report on ongoing projects that I’ve covered in the last few weeks, only that none of them are really mounting up the money too fast. This just proves that this time of the year might not be one of the best to launch a Kickstarter campaign in. However, with at least two weeks to go on all of them there is still plenty of time for them all to make up ground.
Obviously I’ll keep you all updated on their progress in the weeks to come.
Starting off with a card game this week, one made to be teamed with that popular game of young adults – Beer Pong.
For those unaware, Beer Pong is the game of throwing a ping pong ball into your opponents’ cups to make them drink so much that they can’t really aim straight. However, not everyone wants to get so drunk so Penalty Box has kind of been devised with that in mind. The game sees teams of two competing against each other and whenever their opponent lands a ball in one of their cups they must draw a penalty card. Then they either perform/take that penalty OR drink the number of cups indicated on the bottom of the card. So really, it fits into the same spirit as original Beer Pong.
Penalty Box has made $2,769 of its$29,000goal with 58 days still to go.
Next up we have a single-screen multiplayer game with a topdown format and a big twist – everyone on screen including yourself are invisible.
Grid-based movements enable you to keep track of yourself, but finding your opponent will require you to carefully watch the screen for signs that someone has brushed past an obstacle or possibly for a footprint. Firing off your weapon will make you temporarily visible though, so be sure of your shot before you take it!
With 19 days to go, Invisigun Heroes has made $15,322 of its $32,000goal.
This is another card game, but more based around asking questions and discovering how well you know your friends.
Played with a number of good friends, questions will be asked of the group and the point of the game is to vote with the majority of people on an answer. The maker of the game says that the point of Which Friend is to get people to share old stories, talk about memories of good times and to just generally get to know each other better while having a laugh.
With a target of $5,000 Which Friend has made $882 with 32 days to go.
Lastly we have a game that focuses on the developer’s beloved pet dog and the story of how he won his trust.
Elliott in real-life is a mixed up dog that takes a while to trust new people, and with that in mind the developer has come up with a somewhat unique idea for a little virtual pet game. Rather than the day to day care being the sole goal of the game, you must also do your best to win over the nervous and untrusting virtual Elliott by accurately guessing his needs.
With 29 days to go, Project Elliott needs £5,000 and has made £15 of it so far.
Back in July, Valve went around to the operators of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive servers asking them to “stop providing services that falsify the contents of a player’s profile or inventory” – which basically meant to stop providing players with access to items that aren’t in their inventory or they weren’t skilled enough to have access to yet. They noted that they’d be watching to see if further action would need to be taken. Now it has.
A few days ago server operators began to notice surprise bans of server login tokens and led to a large Reddit thread where July’s message was recalled and people began to wonder if the warning had included custom weapon models, which had been thought to be allowed. Some of the servers did report that they had left some of the forbidden plugins sitting in directories, but they were inactive and disabled ones. Valve seems to have decided to draw a line in the sand.
“In January 2016, we permanently disabled Game Server Login Tokens belonging to server operators that were providing free or paid services that falsified the contents of a player’s profile or inventory. The Steam user that generated the tokens is now also permanently restricted from creating new GSLTs,” it wrote. “A new Steam user account associated with a new qualifying phone number will be required to create new GSLTs. To avoid future disruption game server operators are best advised to comply with CS:GO server operation guidelines described above.”
Valve has since clarified that custom weapons are allowed, only those plugins that allow players access to things they shouldn’t have have been disallowed.
“Innovation is awesome and almost every mod we see is fine,” the rep said. “Our only concern, as the community correctly understands, is with mods that specifically misrepresent a player’s skill group/rank or the items they own.”
