Author: Kyle Orland

The administrators behind the recently shut-down Nostalrius server—which ran a popular "vanilla" version of World of Warcraft as the game existed before its many expansions—are currently "scheduling a meeting at Blizzard campus" to discuss the status of what some call "legacy servers" but what Blizzard and others often refer to as "pirate servers."

In a post to the Nostalrius forums late Sunday night, the administrators seemed optimistic about serving as spokespeople for a group of players interested in preserving a playable history of the popular MMO— a group that has now grown to include over 250,000 signatories to an online petition.

"We are very excited to be able to help Blizzard understand the part of their community asking for legacy servers and many other related topics, in the hope that they will eventually make it possible to legally play previous game expansions," the team wrote. "After the answer from Blizzard and the amazing support we received, we feel we are now not only the admins of a private server: We are also the ambassadors of a larger movement for the entire World of Warcraft community that wants to see game history restored. It is a major responsibility. Our top priority and only focus now is to fulfill the needs of this community, by carrying your voice to Blizzard directly."

Less than 24 hours after the rollout of official mod support for emulated Steam versions of dozens of Genesis/Mega Drive classics, the Steam Workshop listing for Sega Mega Drive Classics Hub is a Wild West-style grab bag of total overhauls, useful gameplay, and graphical tweaks—along with legally questionable uses of other companies' copyrighted content.

Of the 163 Steam Workshop Mega Drive mods currently listed on Steam, the vast majority are revisions to the Sonic the Hedgehog series. Those run the gamut from minor gameplay modifications (adding knuckles to Sonic 1 or a homing attack to Sonic 2, for instance) to complete reworkings of the entire game (Sonic 3 Complete, Sonic Thrash), silly sprite swaps (Ring the Ring), and at least somewhat offensive jokes.

Outside of the Sonic series, Japanophiles are using the mod support to offer fan translations of the original Japanese versions of certain games as well as palette swaps that replace Americanized characters and backgrounds with their original Japanese counterparts. Other popular mods include early prototype versions of existing games (as well as unreleased titles) and "Chill Editions" that grant unlimited health and power. There are also a few completely silly mods that are difficult to categorize.

Rainbow Six: Siege players are complaining that the game continues to make their global IP address available to other players, putting those players at risk for DDoS attacks from bitter opponents.

The problem seems to stem from the way the game implements voice chat between players. Back in September, Ubisoft confirmed that while the game uses dedicated servers to host matches, it still uses direct, peer-to-peer connections "strictly to support voice and chat comms for a team." Beta players began noticing almost immediately that this infrastructure decision presents a pretty big security hole when playing with strangers on the Internet. This netcode analysis from January shows how a simple packet sniffer like NetLimiter could easily reveal the IP addresses of all other players in the match, even though voice chat is only available between teammates during a match.

Armed with these IP addresses, unscrupulous players could easily use any number of services to initiate a DDoS attack to remove opposing players from the game. There's a decent amount of evidence that many players were doing just that to gain a leg up in ranked matches, with some managing to climb the in-game ranking ladder despite awful play statistics.

Since the release of The Division last month, Ubisoft has been scrambling to stem the widespread use of hacks, cheats, and exploits that have ruined much of the PvP experience in the online-focused multiplayer shooter. But an analysis of client-side cheating programs by an experienced network gaming developer suggests the game may need a "complete rewrite" to fix major holes in its online security.

Glenn Fiedler is a game-networking consultant with credits on Sony's God of War series, Respawn's Titanfall, and more. In a detailed blog post this week, he lays out what he sees as a core problem of client-side trust in the way The Division's basic networking is structured.

For his analysis, Fiedler makes reference to a recent hacking video that which shows a client-side program modifying local memory locations to give a player infinite health, infinite ammo, the ability to warp around the level and shoot through walls, and more. These kinds of demonstrations suggest to Fiedler that the game is using a trusted client network model, where the server essentially accepts the client-side reports of in-game events like player position, weapon fire rates, item inventory, and even when players are hit with bullets.

Weeks after forcing the shutdown of a popular, fan-run "pirate" server that ran a classic version of World of Warcraft, Blizzard now says it basically had no choice but to go after Nostalrius to protect its legal rights.

"Why not just let Nostalrius continue the way it was? The honest answer is, failure to protect against intellectual property infringement would damage Blizzard’s rights," World of Warcraft Executive Producer and Vice President J. Allen Brack writes in a post on the official WoW forums. "This applies to anything that uses WoW’s IP, including unofficial servers. And while we’ve looked into the possibility—there is not a clear legal path to protect Blizzard’s IP and grant an operating license to a pirate server."

In the narrowest sense, Blizzard's copyright wouldn't suddenly be invalidated if the company decided to look the other way for one popular "vanilla" server; you can't lose a copyright just by failing to defend it legally. Still, failure to go after Nostalrius would have done some damage to the idea that Blizzard is in full control of the World of Warcraft IP and could have encouraged others to think that such unofficial servers were OK. Even now, there are plenty of other pirate servers out there running previous, current, and/or modified versions of World of Warcraft, most of which have yet to draw Blizzard's legal fire.

I do a lot of traveling to various gaming conventions for this job, but PAX East is the show I look forward to more than any other on the calendar. The convention straddles the marketing-heavy vibe of a show like E3 and the geeky/wonky vibe of the Game Developers Conference with aplomb. It then mixes in the passion of actual gamers who don't work in the industry and who have paid hundreds or thousands of dollars for a chance to commune with their fellow fans for the weekend.

Indie games have never been a rare sight at PAX East through outfits like the Indie Megabooth, but this year's show floor showed a marked shift away from massive booths for big publishers toward the "little guy." Everywhere you looked was another practically unknown, two-person developer team with a booth barely bigger than a folding table and a pixel-art aesthetic. Simply spending 10 minutes with every game on offer could easily take an entire week, much less a weekend (and that's without the massive queues of show-goers).

Check out the above gallery to get a feel for some of the best costumes, booths, and random sightings at this year's show.

The shambling, ghostly shell of a company that shares its name with the classic game maker Atari went to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) this week to defend its exclusive rights to video games with Haunted House in the title.

The oral hearing at the USPTO yesterday came about when Atari opposed a proposed trademark for Haunted House Tycoon, an upcoming game that small developer Hazy Dreams of Infinity tried to trademark back in 2011. In its opposition notice, Atari suggested that its 1982 game Haunted House had become "well-known among the public and the trade" due to "widespread and extensive use."

Atari does have some valid current interest in its right to the 35-year-old game name. Haunted House is on iOS as part of the Atari's Greatest Hits collection, and the game became available through Microsoft's Game Room service starting in 2010. Atari also rebooted the franchise in 2010 with a remake of the same name, which it still sells as a Windows download.

For decades now, the only real way to enjoy the many fan-modified versions of classic console games floating around was through the legally questionable method of downloading altered ROM files and running them through a computer emulator (legal cartridge-ripping hardware notwithstanding). Now, Sega is finally lending some official support to what has until now been a very unofficial activity, adding the ability to modify and redistribute certain classic PC-emulated Genesis titles through Valve's Steamworks platform.

The newly announced Sega Mega Drive Classics Hub will serve as a 3D front end for emulated Sega ROMs you already own on Steam, simulating the kind of bedroom a diehard Sega fan may have had in the mid-'90s. The hub comes complete with a virtual CRT TV, graphic enhancement filters, a virtual shelf of cartridge boxes, and a day/night cycle to show you just how much time you're wasting in front of decades-old games.

More than these cosmetic changes, though, "every single Mega Drive [read: the Japanese/European name for the Genesis] game will now feature Steam Workshop support, allowing you to share your modified versions of your favorite retro Sega titles," as an official announcement video puts it.

During my waning years as a Nintendo-only fanboy (just before I bought my first Sony PlayStation in 1998), Star Fox 64 was the rare Nintendo 64 exclusive I could point to with pride. That game’s tight controls helped support simple-but-satisfying fly-forward-and-shoot-what-moves gameplay, with strong, truly cinematic-level design. But that simplicity concealed hidden depth in an elegant, branching mission structure and a skill-based scoring system that encouraged multiple playthroughs.

Star Fox Zero recaptures Star Fox 64’s satisfying simplicity at points, but it spends too much time getting in its own way with half-baked ideas and unneeded complexity. Nearly 20 years after the formula was laid down almost perfectly, Star Fox Zero just can’t seem to avoid mucking up the lessons of the past.

Tilt-based annoyance

The most readily apparent change to the Star Fox 64 formula in Star Fox Zero is the Wii U GamePad and its tilt-based motion controls. While the targeting reticle still moves as you move your ship with the analog stick, it now also moves independently as you tilt the GamePad. The idea is to let you fly your ship in one direction and fire in another without require you to fly directly toward your target.

Sony will be making a major push to let gamers try its PlayStation VR headset starting months before the hardware's planned October launch. In a GameStop Investor's Day presentation last week, which Ars Technica listened in on, PlayStation VP of Marketing John Koller said that the company would start offering in-store demos at GameStop stores in June and plans to show the headset to at least 500,000 potential consumers through the end of the year.

"We have to do this prior to launch, that's critical," Koller said. "We need to be in stores."

This kind of heavy marketing push sets PlayStation VR apart from PC-based competitors like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Before their recent consumer launches, in-person demos for those headsets were largely limited to trade shows, fan conventions, and the odd touring demo truck (as well as very rough development kits, in Oculus' case).