Author: Sam Machkovech

Update, 7/15, 9am EDT: The man who discovered the rare, American 64DD has now posted video proof of his discovery, embedded above from his YouTube channel. The video shows off one surprising quirk: the hardware is region locked—designed to load American 64DD software that was never actually produced! There's also some speculation about what kind of in-development, US 64DD software might be on the blue development disk that was included with the hardware (which isn't currently launchable).

We look forward to Lindsey uncovering more about the hardware, including possibly a BIOS dump, as time goes on.

Original Story

Valve Software is facing potential legal trouble in the form of two recent lawsuits, both of which revolve around the company's games being connected to third-party gambling sites. While the game maker and Steam store operator did not offer a public response when the suits were filed, Valve has finally gone on the record to denounce the gambling issues that have arisen—yet at the same time did not announce definitive action against the third-party sites in question.

Those sites, which include Florida-based CSGOLotto, traffic mostly in the "skins" (meaning, cosmetic items) that can either be earned or purchased for small, non-refundable fees in the game Counter Strike: Global Offensive. These can be traded to the gambling sites via Steam Marketplace features, at which point they essentially become poker chips for those sites' gambling features. In some cases, those skins can then be cashed out for real money.

A Wednesday statement written by Valve's Erik Johnson said that the game maker does not directly profit from these gambling sites' actions: "We have no business relationships with any of these sites. We have never received any revenue from them. And Steam does not have a system for turning in-game items into real world currency." Johnson then explained that the gambling sites work by creating and maintaining their own Steam accounts, through which they conduct virtual item trading on a massive scale.

Pokémon Go's stratospheric launch last week is the stuff of social-scientist dreams, in terms of seeing how millions of people are using a semi-social, map-based smartphone game with little precedent. The results have ranged from adorable to troubling, and while some restaurants and shops are advertising that they welcome Pokémon Go players, other locations are not. In particular, a social-media flare-up highlighted one of the more extreme examples of the app's fallout: when users descend upon a culturally sensitive landmark while wielding a camera- and GPS-powered app.

On Tuesday, representatives for Washington, DC's Holocaust Museum issued a statement to the Washington Post asking visitors to put Pokémon Go away. "Playing the game is not appropriate in the museum, which is a memorial to the victims of Nazism," communication director Andrew Hollinger told the Post.

The statement came following a rash of players who visited the museum with the app turned on, attracted by the fact that the Holocaust Museum counts as a "Pokéstop" and can therefore be seeded with the game's "beacon" items to attract a higher number of the game's collectible Pokémon characters. Since the game also includes a camera function, which projects 3D Pokemon characters into real-world scenes, one image began circulating online of a Koffing Pokémon—as in, a gaseous, poisonous smoke monster—floating inside the museum.

On paper, the pitch for dungeon-delving video game Necropolis sounds pretty off-putting: a roguelike, permadeath-loaded spin on Dark Souls, in which friends can inadvertently kill each other when they team up in co-op. Specifically, its off-putting nature is two-fold. If you're not a hardcore gamer, that sentence is gobbledygook, but if you are a hardcore gamer, you'll look at that pitch with appropriate trepidation. You can't just slam all of those words together and get a fun, functional game... can you?

The bad news is that a single session of Necropolis won't answer those doubts. Harebrained Schemes' first foray into the roguelike genre relies on a few too many random-content-generation tropes that don't all lend themselves well to an action-RPG that revolves around giant dungeons, heavy swords, and surprise monster attacks.

The worse news comes if you let Necropolis infect your brain in a "just one more" capacity. If you give the game enough of a chance, you'll uncover just enough systems that do work to make the dedication worth the pain. But perhaps only barely.

Pokémon Go's Wednesday launch on iOS and Android has proven a rousing success for franchise creator Nintendo and app developer Niantic, with the app rocketing (Team Rocketing?) up every major download and top-grossing chart. With arguably the biggest augmented-reality gaming audience ever in the West, the game is attracting a lot of attention, including good stock-related news for Nintendo—but it has also already proven ripe for exploitation of its players.

In particular, one major social aspect of the game—its "beacon" function—has already been taken advantage of in the city of O'Fallon, Missouri. That city's police department made a statement on Sunday morning confirming that a group of four armed men had used the app to lure victims to a specific place, at which point they mugged the unknowing Pokémon Go players.

The statement mentioned similar robberies taking place in neighboring St. Louis and St. Charles counties. A Gizmodo report received a statement from O'Fallon's police department, stating that "about eight or nine people" were targeted by these muggings in all.

You'll never encounter a more brutal game than the pen-and-paper monstrosity that is Kingdom Death: Monster. Let's rattle off every one of its negatives:

Its print run is incredibly limited, meaning you can currently only buy the game from eBay resellers. Their insane price hikes make the game's retail ask of $400 seem quaint.

The box is crammed to the brim with enough content to terrify anybody. There's a 223-page book, a series of elaborate play boards, a gazillion minis, and hundreds of cards split into dozens of decks.

After the Wednesday launch of Pokémon Go, the first augmented-reality Pokémon game for smartphones, the worst news had been about the iOS and Android app's frequent crashes and connection issues. That changed on Friday when a Wyoming teenager made a disturbing discovery while trying out the game's real-world features.

According to a Friday report from Wyoming news site County 10, 19-year-old Shayla Wiggins told reporters that she discovered a dead body floating in a river near her home. She only walked to the river because she had loaded Pokémon Go on her phone.

"I was trying to get a Pokémon from a natural water resource," Wiggins told County 10. The game offers visual hints about where its characters are hiding based on users' GPS data. Characters usually hide within walking distance, with small animated "sparkles" on the map for the type of Pokemon (grass, lightning, etc.). In Wiggins' case, that meant seeing a hint of a water-based character (indicated by a splashing-water animation) on her game's map screen. Players cannot start a Pokémon interaction in the app without walking directly to whatever point is shown on the smartphone display.

Two nearly identical lawsuits have been recently filed against the Valve Corporation over an alleged "illegal scheme" that revolves around the online game Counter Strike: Global Offensive, and more defendants have been added to one of those cases.

First came a June 23 filing in federal court in Connecticut, while another July 1 filing in federal court in southern Florida was amended Thursday to also include CSGOLotto.com, a third-party site that facilitates betting of CS:GO items, and two defendants who operate that particular Florida-based website.

Those two defendants' names may sound familiar to anyone following the cases in question: popular YouTube video game streamers Trevor "TmarTn" Martin and Tom "Syndicate" Cassell. Martin and Cassell were recently exposed for endorsing CSGOLotto as a get-rich-quick gambling site... without identifying themselves as the site's owners and operators.

Ars Technica tests Tabletop Simulator VR. Edited by Jennifer Hahn (video link)

You may have spent your youth dreaming of a future with flying cars, two-way video wristwatches, and robotic overlords, but my earliest high-tech dreams went in a different direction. Since I first hatched from my nerd egg, I have hoped for a fully functional, long-distance version of Dungeons & Dragons—one in which friends from all over the world can gather in a single, virtual hub, be bossed around by a game-running "dungeon master," and dork out with dice rolls and detailed mini-figurines.

That game's handlers, Wizards of the Coast, have resisted the modern era for far too long, leaving open-source developers to fill the gap with a mix of webcams and simple character-sheet interfaces. But now we're in the virtual reality era, which seems ripe for something a little cooler. Enter the delightfully weird sandbox experience that is Tabletop Simulator VR.

Ars' Sam Machkovech fakes like an Amazon deliveryman via the Amazon Flex service. Video filmed by Will Lemke, edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

SEATTLE—Late last year, Amazon launched a pilot program in one of its biggest Amazon Prime Now markets to ship more packages within that service's two-hour window. It was a "sharing economy"-styled system where anybody could sign up to deliver Amazon's packages—and get paid $18 an hour while doing so, plus tips.

Anybody, you say?