Author: Kyle Orland

In a US presidential campaign season full of unexpected moments and petty squabbles between candidates and public figures of all stripes, today's interaction between Donald Trump and Electronic Arts still ranks as one of the oddest. This afternoon, the publisher issued a YouTube takedown notice for a video supporting Donald Trump that uses voices and music from 2010's Mass Effect 2, after the candidate himself tweeted the video approvingly to nearly 7.5 million followers earlier in the morning.

The ad, which appears to have been created by an individual fan with no official connection to the Trump campaign, draws directly from Mass Effect 2's launch trailer, overlaying a speech from Martin Sheen's Illusive Man character with videos and photos from modern America. "We're at war," Sheen intones over scenes of generalized and specifically Trump-related chaos. "No one wants to admit it, but humanity is under attack. One very specific man might be the only thing that stands between humanity and the greatest threat of our brief existence."

The Mass Effect content is roughly intercut with images and messages from Trump supporters, as well as lines from Trump's stump speech about making America great again. It ends with the message that "the American people are DONE with career politicians" and an entreaty to "GO OUT & Vote for Trump." Yet there are some signs the video could be an elaborate, trollish joke against Trump, including an image with the non sequitur purported Trump quote, "No more oreos!"

The teenager who grabbed headlines earlier this week for hacking a fake game listing on to Valve's Steam store says there are "definitely" more vulnerabilities to be found in the popular game distribution service. But he won't be the one to find them, thanks to what he sees as Valve "giv[ing] so little of a shit about people's [security] findings."

Ruby Nealon, a 16-year-old university student from England, says that probing various corporate servers for vulnerabilities has been a hobby of his since the age of 11. His efforts came to the attention of Valve (and the wider world) after an HTML-based hack let him post a game called "Watch paint dry" on Steam without Valve's approval over the weekend.

Once that exploit was fixed and publicized, Nealon quickly discovered a second Steam exploit, which Steam has since fixed. This one took advantage of a cross-site scripting hole to hijack a Steam admin's authentication cookie through Valve's own administrative Steam Depot page. Before it was reported and patched, this exploit could have given attackers unprecedented control of Steam's backend, basically letting them pretend to be a Valve administrator.

Just a few months ago, the unveiling of a new Apple TV box seemed to finally address those seemingly perpetual rumors (and analyst desires) for Apple to make a serious, iOS-style play to shake up the home game console market. Today, the Apple TV's chances of having a serious impact on the market for TV-based games seems remote at best.

The strongest sign yet of Apple TV's gaming struggles comes from Disney Interactive, which revealed in a forum post earlier this month that it was dropping support for the Apple TV version of Disney Infinity 3.0 (which launched alongside Apple TV in November). That means that any new Disney Infinity figures released from here on out simply won't work with the Apple TV version of the game.

"The team is currently focusing on the traditional gaming platforms," a moderator wrote. "We are always evaluating and making changes, but there are currently no plans for further updates to the Apple TV version of the game."

Now that the consumer version of the Oculus Rift has started shipping to the earliest adopters, the good folks at iFixit have torn the headset apart to see how its innards differ from those of the first and second Rift development kits.

While those dev kits used off-the-shelf smartphone displays and generic lenses, the teardown highlights a much more customized solution now that the Rift is a consumer product (with Facebook's billions behind it). The Rift's dual lens and display assembly houses two separate 1080×1200 OLED panels with adjustable spacing between them to allow for easy focus at different interpupillary distances. Those panels measure 90mm diagonally, giving the Rift a final pixel density of 461ppi. That's higher than the "retina display" on Apple's iPhone 6 Plus (401ppi), but downright blocky compared to 1440p display on the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S7 (576ppi), which already powers the Oculus-designed Gear VR headset.

That pixel density is put to a tough test on the Rift, too, since the panels are placed a couple of inches away from the user's eyes at all times (an average user would have to be eight inches from the Oculus display for the pixels to be indistinguishable). IFixit reveals an asymmetric, hybrid fresnel lens system that helps users zoom in and focus on screens that close.

If you were watching Steam over the weekend, you may have been among those to notice an odd game called "Watch paint dry" go up on the popular digital storefront. The "sports-puzzle game that evolves around one mysterious cutscene" wasn't a new low-point in Steam's increasingly permissive attitude toward letting games onto the service. Instead, it was the result of a now-patched exploit that let developers sneak games onto Steam without Valve's approval.

A teenage British Web developer going by the handle Ruby outlined the hacking process in a post on Medium earlier this week. Even before being fixed, this exploit wasn't available to any random Internet user, though, since it relied on access to the Steamworks Developer Program.

With that access secured (through unstated means), Ruby dove into the HTML for the Steamworks backend to look for weak points. By forcing an "editor ID" variable passed through the page to "1" (which Ruby assumed would be "someone who might work at Valve"), Ruby was able to access a new form that revealed the form data she needed to get an "approved" value for Steam Trading Cards, a first step in making her game look legitimate.

Our week or so with the Oculus Rift hasn't provided enough time to do full, deep-dive reviews of all 30 games that launched alongside the hardware (though we did find the time for a full VR playthrough of space station float-em-up Adr1ft). For those early adopters getting their shipments now, here are our early impressions of some of the games that have been filling out Rift's eye holes the most over the last few days.

Eve: Valkyrie

Developer: CCP Games
Price: $59.99 (free for pre-orders)

Definitely the most impressive Rift exclusive we've played so far, Eve Valkyrie has the potential to be a long-lasting killer app for the headset. Dogfighting in space planes is far from new in video games, but the same old genre manages to feel entirely new in VR.

Headset specs
Display	2160x1200 (1080x1200 per eye) OLED panels
Refresh rate	90 Hz
Field of view	110 degrees
Lens spacing	58-72mm (adjustable)
Controllers	Xbox One gamepad and Oculus Remote (both included)
Head Tracking	3-axis gyroscope, accelerometer, and external "Constellation" IR camera tracking system
Audio	Integrated over-ear headphones with 3D directional audio support and built-in microphone
PC connection	4m custom cable (integrates HDMI and USB connections)
Included games	Lucky's Tale (and Eve Valkyrie with pre-order)

Recommended PC specs
GPU	NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater
CPU	Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
RAM	8GB
OS	Windows 7 SP1 or newer
Outputs	3 USB 3.0 ports (for headset, tracking camera, wireless controller dongle), one HDMI 1.3 port

It took me a few days with an Oculus Rift before I really felt comfortable swiveling my head around while playing a video game. Sure, I’d gotten somewhat used to the idea in years of trade show VR demos or while playing around with my own Oculus Rift development kits and Samsung’s Oculus-powered Gear VR. But those experiences were fighting with decades of gaming experiences where my head generally stayed glued to one spot, pointed at the center of a TV or monitor, and tilted only occasionally to maybe get a better view of something in the corner.

It can be easy to fall back into the “look straight ahead” habit when you first start playing many Rift games. Even when the 3D display showed items flying past my shoulder or out of my peripheral vision, I’d often reach instinctively for the right analog stick or the shoulder buttons on my controller to try to turn the camera. It would take a split second before I realized, “Hey, wait, I can just turn and look for the thing I want to see.”

It might sound hyperbolic, but this is a change that requires looking at and thinking about gaming in an entirely new way. The final consumer version of the Rift now shipping to early adopters shows that Oculus has taken that rethinking seriously, putting years of development and billions of Facebook dollars of careful work toward the problem. But it also shows some early rough edges, especially on the platform software side, and these small blemishes highlight the fact that we’re still very much in the first generation of consumer-grade virtual reality.

The title should have been my first clue. The almost too cute spelling of "Adrift" looks like "Adroneft," and this isn't just an affectation. It hints at the all-encompassing isolation and loneliness that pervades everything about this game.

Adr1ft's introduction is by far the most action-packed part of the game, as your protagonist wakes up clawing her way back to the nearest piece of a massive space station that has just blown apart. Her EVA suit is holding together enough to keep her alive, but an air leak means her survival isn't guaranteed. Worse, the computerized systems that operate the escape pods are offline, and reactivating them requires the usual Metroidvania-style wild goose chase/scavenger hunt through the station's tattered remains.

If you're an avid gamer, this is the kind of setup where you now expect the unexpected—a journey filled with hidden dangers or some sort of sci-fi/fantasy twist. Maybe an alien virus has turned everyone else on the station into bloodthirsty zombies. Maybe the station's AI has gone crazy and wants to eliminate all human life. Maybe the station was the first casualty in an alien invasion, and you have to warn Earth.

Kotaku caused quite a stir late last week when it reported via unnamed development sources that Sony is preparing to roll-out an enhanced "PlayStation 4.5" capable of displaying games at 4K resolutions. Those rumors got a boost in credibility today, as Digital Foundry has "independently established that it's real and that Sony's R&D labs have prototype devices."

The updated console, which is being referred to as the PlayStation 4K by multiple Digital Foundry sources, should be able to play non-interactive Ultra HD media in a variety of forms and offer features like high-dynamic range and expanded color depth that are part of industry-set Ultra HD specification standards. But Digital Foundry is skeptical that a near-term tweak to the PlayStation 4 hardware will be able to output fully 4K games at the same graphical quality as the system's current 1080p titles.

That informed speculation comes from looking at the pipeline for AMD GPU technology. The chip maker, which provides the integrated CPU and GPU inside the PS4, is currently transitioning from a 28nm transistor process introduced in 2011 to a new 3D FinFET process with 14 to 16nm transistors. That could bring about a processor that's twice as powerful as what's currently inside the PS4 (at the same size and power consumption), but such a chip would struggle to push out highly detailed 4K gaming. (Remember, 4K TVs have four times as many pixels to fill as standard 1080p sets.) A new chip architecture could also cause compatibility headaches for games built for an entirely different type of chip.

If you missed out on the lowest-yet official price for the Xbox One during last year's Black Friday and holiday sales, Microsoft has an even better deal going on now as part of its Spring Sale.

All Xbox One bundles have been reduced by $50 at major retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, Target, and Gamestop. But if you buy through the Microsoft Store before March 31, you'll be also get a free copy of Assassin's Creed Unity, Watch Dogs, or The Crew in addition to any other bundled games.

While this price drop is officially a "limited time, while supplies last" type of deal, it could presage a more permanent reduction for Microsoft's console, which is selling slowly relative to its main competition. Back in 2014, many retailers temporarily lowered the price of the Xbox One by $50 well before Microsoft officially lowered the price by pulling Kinect out of the bundle.