Author: Kyle Orland

It took roughly two years for crackers to put the first dents in Denuvo's surprisingly robust anti-piracy protection for PC games. Now, a Denuvo-protected game has been cracked just six weeks after its release, seemingly presaging an increased pace of efforts against the DRM scheme.

TorrentFreak reports on the new crack for indie critical darling Inside, which hit the scene earlier this week. The crack comes courtesy of CONSPIR4CY (aka CPY), the same group responsible for a crack of Denuvo-protected Rise of the Tomb Raider earlier this month.

While CPY's ROTTR crack came nearly seven months after the game was released, Inside's protection was broken about six weeks after it launched on the PC. This is an important distinction, since the bulk of a game's legitimate sales tend to come in the first few months after release (or during sales much later in their lifecycle). If crackers can manage to get the wait time for a Denuvo crack down to a matter of days, the protection's value to developers and publishers could wither.

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Sony has added support for two-factor authentication to its PlayStation Network accounts, and you really should set it up now, rather than after someone tries to take over your account or steal your password.

To set up the new security feature, turn on your PS4 and go to Settings -> PlayStation Network Account Management -> Account Information -> Security -> 2-Step Verification. You can also set it up through the Web by visiting this page. From there, on-screen instructions will walk you through the process of using a text message to confirm your mobile device as a secondary layer of security for your PSN account. Two-factor support is not available when logging on to older PlayStation systems, so Sony recommends you generate a "device setup password" to help protect the PS3, Vita, or PSP.

The addition of two-factor support comes five years after PSN was hit by multiple, high-profile hacks, which compromised many accounts and led to a $17.75 million settlement with the victims. Two-factor authentication was far from standard back then (though some game companies had it), but even today there are plenty of reports of PSN accounts being compromised, and getting charges reversed and access fixed with Sony is not always simple.

Enlarge / Don't cry, Pikachu. Millions of people still want to catch you!

I went away for a short holiday with family this past weekend and didn't pay much attention to gaming news. Imagine my surprise, then, reading the headlines on Tuesday morning and finding that Pokémon Go, by some measures the most insanely popular mobile game of all time, had already "lost its luster," as the headline from our own UK correspondent put it.

There's definitely some basis for such a summary. Pokémon Go has lost more than 12 million active users since its peak of just above 45 million in mid-July, according to Apptopia data summarized in a Bloomberg report. That month-long, roughly 25-percent drop from peak usage certainly sounds like the beginning of the end for what was recently an unquestionable phenomenon. Projecting things out linearly, you might even expect Pokémon Go to completely lose its user base by winter.

When you look at Pokémon Go's decline next to other mobile games, however, the expected drop-off in players doesn't look so dire or so surprising. While Pokémon Go's popularity peak might already be behind it, there's reason to believe the game's long tail can continue to attract millions (if not tens of millions) of loyal players for a long while.

We came away from last weekend's early Titanfall 2 "tech test" impressed and reminiscing about what we liked about the original mech-and-wallrun-heavy first-person shooter. Not everyone was so enamored with some of the changes on display, though, leading multiplayer game designer Steven DeRose to promise further tweaks to the game before its final launch.

Chief among the coming changes is the game's sense of speed. DeRose says the team toned down "pilot mobility" in Titanfall 2 in an attempt to make flanking feel more "skillful" and close-range firefights less "overly chaotic due to erratic player movement." That said, a few glitches that limited air and wall-running speed are being fixed, and normal traversal will no longer be accidentally impacted by some anti-bunnyhop speed restrictions.

The giant, map-dominating Titans will soon be easier for players to call down, as well. DeRose says that, in addition to gaining points toward a Titan for completing game objectives, players will soon also gain "a small passive amount" of credit toward a new Titan "every few seconds," as they did in the first Titanfall. The goal is to let "every player be... guaranteed a Titan per match."

The virtual reality market is still new enough that we're seeing plenty of experimentation and iterative design work on the hardware itself. So it's not a huge surprise that Samsung and Oculus are out with a new, redesigned version of the Gear VR, even though it has been less than a year since the device was officially launched as a consumer product (and less than two years since the early "Innovator Edition" hit stores).

For the most part, the new Gear VR works like the old Gear VR. You still use certain Samsung Galaxy phones (anything since the Galaxy Note 5 will work) to provide the display and processing guts. The Gear VR headset itself still provides some crucial extra processing for tracking the angle of your head and a touchpad on the side for basic in-app controls (you can also use bluetooth controllers for more complex games). The Gear VR still can't track your head's position in space, though, so when you lean forward in a Gear VR app, the whole world comes with you in a nauseating fashion.

The main reason for the redesign is the launch of Samsung's Galaxy Note 7, which sports a USB Type-C connection that isn't compatible with last year's Gear VR model. The new Gear VR sports a Type-C docking dongle on the front by default, but that can be slid out and easily replaced with an older USB micro dock for compatibility with older Galaxy phones. The pass-through charging slot on the underside of the Gear VR is also USB Type-C now, though the headset comes with a tiny adapter to take a charge through older cables.

Enlarge / It may look similar to the original Analogue Nt, but on the inside, it's completely different.

Last year, the $500+ Analogue Nt sold itself as a high-end, no-compromise alternative to the hordes of "famiclones" and emulator-based aftermarket systems that can play classic NES cartridges. Among Nt's selling points (for a certain class of accuracy-obsessed NES fan): it uses Nintendo's actual CPU and PPU chips, sourced from original Japanese Famicom systems. These chips ensure complete fidelity and compatibility with all existing NES games.

For the follow-up Analogue Nt Mini, announced this morning, the company has done away with those Famicom insides. The new system will instead use a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to directly simulate the workings of those NES chips. This decision comes with its own pros on cons.

In the pro column, the Nt Mini will cost less than the $579 asking price for the original Nt (including the HDMI upgrade). The new smaller unit costs just $449, a price that includes a wireless bluetooth NES controller (and receiver) from partner 8bitdo. The Mini will also be able to output in HDMI as well as the older composite, component, and S-Video standards used by most old tube TVs. This should be welcome news to fans of scanlines and the Zapper alike (on the original Nt, upgrading to HDMI meant doing away with other outputs). The Nt Mini also weighs in about 20 percent smaller and 34 percent lighter than its predecessor.

Back at E3, a mere ten minutes with an early version of Titanfall 2 were enough. We were convinced that the grappling hook was a welcome addition that already felt like an integral part of Titanfall's rocket-pack-parkour-meets-mechs shooting action. Now, we've had a chance to put a few more hours into a "pre-alpha" version of the game during early access to this weekend's "technical test" on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (which is available to the public starting today, running again August 26 through 28).

With the benefit of more time, we can confirm that the grappling hook changes the Titanfall formula for the better. Double jumps and zippy wall running are still nice, but they're not always a feasible way to gain the height you need to clamber on to an enemy mech or gain an advantageous shooting position. The grappling hook is often just a simpler way to scale a multi-story vertical wall or gain a little speed boost while trying desperately to dash to a far off objective (or even to rocket forward toward an unsuspecting enemy to score a quick jump-kick kill).

The hook is so useful that we found ourselves cursing its limitations—after a couple of uses in short succession, you have to wait a few seconds for the hook to recharge. This is a necessary limitation to stop players from simply grappling around the map with nonstop abandon, but... actually, that nonstop abandon sounds like a lot of fun!

When Metal Gear Solid series auteur Hideo Kojima left Konami under extremely strained circumstances last year, many worried about what the corporate parent would do with the storied Metal Gear franchise IP it still controlled. Well worry no longer: the newly announced Metal Gear Survive stays true to the series' long-established roots of stealth action, amazing visuals, and multiplayer, interdimensional battles against zombie hordes.

Wait, what was that last part?

Yes, despite the Metal Gear branding, Survive looks like it couldn't be much more different from the well-known Metal Gear Solid games. Set just after the events of Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes, the online multiplayer game will let four characters from that game's Mother Base fight together to survive against "living biological threats" in "a distorted desert landscape" that's part of "an alternate timeline caused by unexplained wormholes forming in the sky," according to a press release.

Back in 2014, Hello Games' Sean Murray acknowledged in a Game Informer interview that official modding tools were practically a must for No Man's Sky. "I almost feel like we need to give them the [modding] tools; otherwise then they're just going to start making them, tearing apart your game," Murray said at the time. "That's what I have more of a fear of."

Fast forward to today, and some PC No Man's Sky players (who can manage to get the game running) are indeed just tearing apart the game to make their own mods. Despite the current lack of official mod tools, players are extracting game files and tinkering with them to create unsupported mods just days after the game's PC release.

This short video outlines the basic process used to create these unofficial mods. Interestingly enough, the PC version of the game seems to be built on top of a host of files in the PlayStation Archive format, though they've been renamed to the more generic PAK extension for Windows. Regardless, these files can be uncompressed using a PSARC decompiler tool, and then edited and recompiled to get a modified version of the game up and running.

(credit: Intel)

The still-young virtual reality headset wars have a new competitor, though it's being sold as more of a "mixed reality" solution than purely VR. At the Intel Developer Forum today, the company announced Project Alloy, an untethered headset that packs everything into a single head-mounted display without the need for a PC or a mobile phone.

In addition to the battery, display, and computing resources needed to run the headset, Project Alloy will also include Intel's Real Sense motion tracking system, which will use cameras and sensors to map the world around you and track your hands without the need for gloves or handheld controllers. The system can also see real-world objects and integrate them into the virtual world, as shown in a demo where the user opened a real door and saw his boss' face appear in the virtual world (hence the "mixed reality" moniker Intel stressed in its presentation).

Alloy will be integrated with Microsoft's Windows Holographic platform, which will itself be available on all Windows 10 PCs next year. Intel also said it plans to release the Alloy hardware specs under an open source license at some point, letting others essentially use it as a reference design for their own hardware.