Month: April 2018

Enlarge / Improvisational "Heat Actions" end fights quickly.

Yakuza 6: The Song of Life is not the game I was expecting. The series’ newest numbered release (actually the seventh, after Yakuza 0) has long been billed as the swan song for longtime protagonist Kazuma Kiryu. As such I expected a celebration of the hero’s interpersonal relationships—those key moments of Yakuza storytelling that have propelled the series forward for more than a decade.

Strangely, though, Yakuza 6 feels like yet another solid, introductory jumping-on point after 2016’s prequel and last year’s remake of the first game. It opens with Kiryu enjoying another stint in prison; this time for three years. When he gets out, his adopted daughter is in a coma, his closest allies are in prison, and the Tojo Clan he once served is at war with an entirely new criminal faction. Without these direct ties to the past, Yakuza 6 feels like a fairly self-contained—if not exactly clean—tale of international criminal conspiracy.

I’ll be honest. I wasn’t thrilled about this de facto “reset” at first. Kiryu and company have carried Yakuza through six numbered games, three spin-offs, two full remakes, and a couple of movies. Much of that wealth of history is completely missing this time around. Where were Daigo, Haruka, and the kids from the Morning Glory orphanage? How could Sega send Kiryu off without resolving the violent sexual tension between him and Goro Majima?

Facebook's guidelines visually sum up "offensive things" with this blue text balloon. Meaning, it doesn't resemble a "fully exposed buttock."

Criminals have compromised tens of thousands of Facebook accounts in the past few days using malware that masquerades as a paint program for relieving stress.

"Relieve Stress Paint" is available through a domain that uses Unicode representation to show up as aol.net on search engines and in emails, researchers from security firm Radware said in a post published Wednesday morning. (This query showed the trojan was also available on a domain that was designed to appear as picc.com.) The researchers suspect the malware is being promoted in spam emails.

Once installed, the malware acts as a legitimate paint program that changes colors and line size with each user click. Behind the scenes, it copies Chrome data that stores cookies and any saved passwords for previously accessed Facebook accounts.

Enlarge (credit: Chrome's unsafe content warning.)

Chrome already provides effective protection against malicious sites: go somewhere with a poor reputation and you'll get a big, scary red screen telling you that you're about to do something unwise. But Microsoft believes it can do a better job than Google, and it has released a Chrome plugin, Windows Defender Browser Protection, that brings its own anti-phishing protection to Google's browser.

Microsoft justifies the new plugin with reference to a 2017 report that claims that the company's Edge browser blocked 99 percent of phishing attempts, compared to 87 percent by Chrome and 70 percent in Firefox. The plugin brings Edge's protection to Chrome, so if the theory holds, it should bump the browser up to 99 percent, too.

The new extension doesn't appear to disable Chrome's own checking (or at least, it doesn't seem to be doing so for me), so at the very least isn't likely to make you less safe, and with phishing being as widespread as it is, the extra protection probably doesn't hurt.

Ron Amadeo

The US government is going after another Chinese Android device maker. After shutting down Huawei's carrier deals and retail partners, the government is now pursuing ZTE. The US Department of Commerce has banned US companies from selling parts and software to ZTE for seven years.

ZTE was caught violating US sanctions by illegally shipping telecommunications equipment to Iran and North Korea. The company then made things worse by "making false statements and obstructing justice, including through preventing disclosure to and affirmatively misleading the US Government," according to the Department of Commerce. The company reached a settlement with the government, agreeing to pay up to $1.2 billion in penalties and discipline the employees involved in the sale.

When we got a chance to talk to Hearthstone game director Ben Brode recently, we wanted to go beyond the kind of strategy and card-level gameplay analysis that has already flooded the Internet in the past four years. So, in the tradition of our Unanswered Mysteries of Overwatch video, we took a deep dive with Brode into the behind-the-scenes design process for making Hearthstone's thousands of cards.

We don't want to spoil all of the entertaining anecdotes Brode shared with us during our wide-ranging talk, but keep an eye out for the following as you watch the video (or read the transcript):

• Brode's thoughts on "the optimal state of the game" and what makes it so hard to achieve
• Which popular cards Blizzard never expected to see high-level play
• The never-seen card concept that would have allowed for "a 3-mana 600/600 minion"
• The hidden Lich King vocal tracks that few players ever heard in the course of play
• The secret song that unlocks a volcano explosion on the Journey to Un'goro board
• The design thinking behind mechanics like Fatigue and Echo.

Are there any other games you'd like us to give the Unsolved Mysteries treatment in the future? Let us know in the comments and we'll see what we can do!