Grand Theft Auto IV Trailer

These City Skylines Prove Just How Far Video Game Graphics Have Come


Wednesday's PlayStation 4 event showed us what next-gen graphics are capable of, so if you had any doubts that game environments could grow even better looking and more detailed, they're probably now gone.


Cities and city skylines in general were always a perfect way to show how beautiful a game is, so we collected some huge and gorgeous cities from upcoming titles—and a few from recent memory as well.



SimCity (SimCity 2013)

These City Skylines Prove Just How Far Video Game Graphics Have Come source: EA




Hengsha (Deus Ex: Human Revolution)

These City Skylines Prove Just How Far Video Game Graphics Have Come source: Deus Ex Wiki




Panau City (Just Cause 2)

These City Skylines Prove Just How Far Video Game Graphics Have Come source: Just Cause Wiki




Vekta City (Killzone: Shadow Fall)

These City Skylines Prove Just How Far Video Game Graphics Have Come source: Killzone.com




Chicago (Watch_Dogs)

These City Skylines Prove Just How Far Video Game Graphics Have Come source: Ubisoft




Los Angeles (LA Noire)

These City Skylines Prove Just How Far Video Game Graphics Have Come source: Rockstar




Los Santos (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas)

These City Skylines Prove Just How Far Video Game Graphics Have Come source: GTAGaming




Liberty City (Grand Theft Auto IV)

These City Skylines Prove Just How Far Video Game Graphics Have Come source: Rockstar




Liberty Dome NYC (Crysis 3)

These City Skylines Prove Just How Far Video Game Graphics Have Come source: Crysis.com




And this is how it looked back then. The neon lights of Moonside in Earthbound are still pretty charming.

These City Skylines Prove Just How Far Video Game Graphics Have Come source: Starmen.net


You should submit your picks with visuals in the comments below!


Kotaku

ChefVille 'This Calls for Cake' Quests: Everything You Need to KnowObservant chefs probably noticed the addition of Cake Batter as an option within the ChefVille Mixers. But we've just learned what the addition was for. Ever since ChefVille first launched, players have been longing to cook desserts, and it's finally that time via the release of the Cake Oven, Cake Display Case, and more. There are two quests series (so far) in this sweet event, starting with the non-timed quests "This Calls for Cake." Here's how to have your cake and eat it, too, through these quests.


An Intro to Cake
• Place and Finish the Cake Oven
• Place the Cake Display Case
• Visit 5 Neighbors


The Cake Oven has an unusual shape, as it's long and narrow, rather than a fat square or rectangle. Whether this helps you organize it into your virtual kitchen remains to be seen. Either way, it must be unwrapped using three energy and from there, you can finish it off by collecting four Round Pans, five Cake Racks, four Serving Sets, and five Battered Bowls. The Round Pans and Serving Sets are earned by posting general news posts on your wall, while the other two items are earned via individual requests sent directly to your neighbors.


As for the Cake Display Case, this is another long, narrow item that comes fully built. It's empty at first, but you'll fill it by baking Cakes. We'll get into the specifics of that in a bit. Once you complete this first quest, you'll receive four Eggs and four Milk. You'll also unlock Cake Batter for crafting inside the Mixer.


ChefVille 'This Calls for Cake' Quests: Everything You Need to KnowLight N Fluffy
• Have a Completed Egg Crate
• Collect 7 Dessert Forks
• Bake 4 Angel Food Cakes


The Egg Crate is purchased from the store and finished using five Corrugated Papers. These Corrugated Papers are earned by posting a general news request to your feed. If you already have one in your restaurant before starting this quest, you shouldn't have to build another one for it to count (in theory). As for the Angel Food Cakes, these are prepared using one Sugar, two Flour, and two Eggs each. The dish takes just 10 minutes to cook. Completing this quest gives you four Unsalted Butter, two Apples, and 20 XP.


Gourmet Gateau
• Tend a Lemon Tree 2 Times
• Bake with 2 Lemons on Angel Fruit Cake
• Earn Gourmet Mastery for Angel Fruit Cake


Now is as good of a time as any to explore how cakes are different than most other dishes we've ever cooked in the game. Instead of only using the dish's basic ingredients, you can also add "Gourmet Ingredients" to earn the chance of creating a "Gourmet Dessert" and "Gourmet Mastery" points. These cake dishes still come with regular Mastery Stars, as Gourmet Mastery is a completely different feature. By adding Lemons to this Angel Food Cake, you'll have a chance to earn a Gourmet Dessert when it's done. Once you earn two "Gourmet" Angel Food Cakes, you'll earn the Gourmet Mastery ribbon for that particular dish. It's a complicated process, but it should be easy to understand once you try it out yourself. After you've finished this final quest in the series, you'll receive four Oranges, two Carrots, and 50 coins.


ChefVille 'This Calls for Cake' Quests: Everything You Need to Know


As we continue to cook desserts in ChefVille, we'll continue to be required to earn Gourmet Mastery by using "Gourmet" ingredients. Stick with us for more on this feature, and good luck completing these quests in your own restaurant!


Play ChefVille on Zynga.com >


More ChefVille Coverage from Games.com

Caterer to the Stars Catering Order
Appe-Thaizers Quests Guide
Once Upon a Thai Quests Guide


What do you think of this new Cake and Gourmet Mastery system in ChefVille? Will you only focus on earning regular Mastery Stars, or will you try to earn Gourmet Mastery on all of these cakes as well? Sound off in the Games.com comments!


Republished with permission from:
ChefVille 'This Calls for Cake' Quests: Everything You Need to KnowBrandy Shaul is an editor at Games.com


KotakuSocial is your one-stop shop for all of Kotaku's browser, Facebook and mobile-based social game coverage. Follow @KotakuSocial on Twitter and stalk us on Facebook.
Kotaku

The Lack Of Women Presenters At The PS4 Event Is Bigger Than Sony The consensus on Wednesday's post aboutthe lack of women presenters at Sony's PS4 event was rather uniform: there were no women at the PlayStation 4 reveal, because obviously there aren't women in high positions and the project leads just happen to be male.


"The reason there were no women on-stage is because the presidents and developers who happened to develop the software being presented happened to be male," wrote commenter hsuadfhaspodhf on Kotaku. "It is not part of some sexist agenda, it just so happens that the people behind the creation of the content being presented happened to be men."


To add to that, a common perception seems to be that there aren't women in high positions like the project leads that were featured, so that's why it happened. That's just the reality, some people said, while ignoring why things like that happen in the first place and what it has to do with gender.


Yesterday, noted developer Kellee Santiago—formerly of Thatgamecompany, behind recent PlayStation indie darling, Journey—tweeted these things:




Hmm, that doesn't quite gel with the common perception, does it? I reached out to Kellee to see if she'd be willing to elaborate on the subject. Here's what she said:


I think it's time for us as an industry to tale some responsibility in how we represent ourselves. Like the DICE awards had one woman....not even proportional to the industry itself, much less any attempt to be more inclusive! And I got weary with many of the comments to your article that it's just because there don't happen to be women in these positions, and we should get over it. Someone on my FB said it well, that as small as it still might be, there IS much more diversity in game development now, but the representation remains the same, and I think that speaks to why we feel more frustrated this year than in the past.


The truth is, some percentage of the people that tuned in yesterday to get excited about the new console were women. And yet again, we were told "Not by you, not for you." It feels like the industry should be past this by now, no?


Emphasis mine.


I've reached out to Sony for comment on the situation, but in the meantime, it seems worth saying that the conversation—for me at least—isn't so much to say Sony or PS4 developers are sexist. That's an easily derailed conversation that will revolve around disputing what type of companies these are.


There were no women presenters. You can argue to hell and back over what type of company Sony or developers for the PS4 are, but the reality remains the same: there were no women presenters and it wasn't for a lack of having women executives. A cursory LinkedIn search can show you that much.


Noticing this fact isn't a call for affirmative action, and it's not about getting enraged about sexism.


It's about opening up an conversation as to why this happens at events like the PS4 unveil—perhaps, to talk about women in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math) and the issues they face. Because whether or not there are some women working in these fields, there still aren't enough, and it's an issue. There are entire programs created by educational institutions and the government to get more women in these fields-because yes, it's a problem. EDIT: including programs made by Sony itself, yes.


There are fewer women in these field than men, and they earn less, to boot. Recent years have seen a decline in female representation, according to a survey Harvey Nash.


Writing about that survey for Forbes, Meghan Casserly says:


Just 9% of U.S. chief information officers (CIOs) are female, down from 11% last year and 12% in 2010. According to Reuters, 30% of the 450 American tech executives polled said their IT groups have no women at all in management positions. What's more, when the same group of executives was asked whether women were underrepresented, roughly one half said no.


The reason why this happens is not clear, though there are many theories. The study by the ESA here postulates the following:


The underrepresentation of women in STEM majors and jobs may be attributable to a variety of factors. These may include different choices men and women typically make in response to incentives in STEM education and STEM employment


For example, STEM career paths may be less accommodating to people cycling in and out of the workforce to raise a family or it may be because there are relatively few female STEM role models. Perhaps strong gender stereotypes discourage women from pursuing STEM education and STEM jobs.


While this report does not and cannot explain why gender differences in STEM exist, it does aim to provide data and insight that will enable more informed policymaking. The findings provide definitive evidence of a need to encourage and support women in STEM with a goal of gender parity.


Given the high quality, well paying jobs in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math, there is great opportunity for growth in STEM in support of American competitiveness, innovation and jobs of the future.


You might note that, crucially, one of the factors the ESA lists is a lack of role models. And as the PS4 event shows us, the role models that do exist? They're less visible thanks both to smaller numbers, and in some ways, outright erasure.


Because what else would you call wrongly saying there are no women in high positions in game development except erasure?


Kotaku

If You Like JRPGs, It's Time To Start Speaking UpI spent my Wednesday night sitting in Kotaku's office, gulping down coffee and furiously typing as I watched Sony announce their new PlayStation, a revolutionary device that will let you play games where you shoot people with guns.


And as they banged out one announcement after the other, my mind kept roaming to a single thought: This isn't for me.


I get no enjoyment out of Killzones and Driveclubs and other portmanteaus revolving around guns and cars. I don't play games based on how realistic they look or how many people they let you kill. And as developers gleefully took the stage Wednesday night to talk about polygons and teraflops—a word I'm still not convinced is real—all I could think was: why am I supposed to care about this?


Maybe you felt similarly. Maybe you were pleased to see game promises from the likes of Atlus and Falcom, but you couldn't get excited about much else. Or maybe you were psyched about The Witness, which looks like an excellent, Myst-like adventure, but still bummed to see that there were no role-playing games.


For JRPG fans, or RPG fans of any kind, the PS4 event was a whopping disappointment. Short of a sizzling Capcom demo of a maybe-RPG that may never actually exist and Square Enix saying "yes, we've got a new Final Fantasy coming!" there was very little in Sony's conference for people who like the type of games that have lovely stories and sweeping adventures. There were no new RPGs.


(Square Enix's showing, by the way, was an absolute joke. Here they had an opportunity to impress the world or even just prove that Final Fantasy Versus XIII actually exists; instead they sheepishly showed off a demo that we all saw last June, then made promises for the future. The slow death of Final Fantasy is very hard to watch.)


This isn't unusual. Of last year's five major E3 press conferences, there was a single role-playing game showed: South Park: The Stick of Truth, presented by the show's creators at Microsoft's dull presentation. Outside of rare exceptions, like Dark Souls II making waves at the VGAs a few months ago, Japanese role-playing games almost never make appearances at these big industry shindigs.


The common response to this might be: well, most people just aren't interested in JRPGs. They're niche. The world is waiting to be impressed by Sony's Next Big Thing: how do you do that with games that can't even sell 100,000 copies?


You don't. I don't expect Sony to spend presser time showing off the new Etrian Odyssey or teasing the next Persona with the same fervor they throw at Destiny or Killzone.


But I also don't think JRPGs are quite as niche as everyone thinks they are. Last week, over 100,000 people were interested in reading about modern JRPGs that are worth playing. And look at Ni no Kuni, the delightful RPG by Level-5 and Studio Ghibli. I thought it would bomb; instead, it's topping charts in the UK and breaking pre-orders here.


There's a question I see asked a lot: "Have I grown out of JRPGs?" It's usually prefaced by "Boy, things sure were great during the Golden Age," and maybe a list of the inquirer's personal favorite RPGs from the late 90s, when the gaming world was trying to emulate Final Fantasy VII instead of Call of Duty.


Today's ex-JRPG fans see mediocrities like Final Fantasy XIII and Infinite Undiscovery, games near-unplayable to anyone without a high tolerance for whining, and they assume that those games are representative of the genre as a whole. It's unfortunate. And the stigma has driven mainstream gaming away from JRPGs.


Maybe we can do something about that.


Let this be a call to action. I want you—you, reading this right now—to get your voice out there. I want you to talk more about the games you love. I want you to make more demands. I want you to swarm Konami's Facebook page for Suikoden news and join petitions begging Square to bring Bravely Default: Flying Fairy to the West. I want you on social networks and message boards and video game publisher e-mail hotlines telling them that yes, JRPG fans do exist, and we want to buy great games: we just need the opportunity.


I want you to make it clear to companies like Sony and Square Enix and Nintendo and everybody else out there that yes, there are JRPG fans out there. A significant number of JRPG fans. Some of us are happily playing games like Ni no Kuni and Fire Emblem: Awakening; others have lost faith in Japanese developers after being burned by recent failures.


I can't be the only one feeling disenfranchised by a gaming world that seems to have largely turned its back on the genre I enjoy most. But maybe there's an easy solution. Maybe we just have to speak up.


Random Encounters is a weekly column dedicated to all things JRPG. It runs every Friday at 3pm ET.


Kotaku

The Incredible Rise and Fall of a Hacker Who Found the Secrets of the Next Xbox and PlayStation—And Maybe MoreThe first thing that ever puzzled me about the man I used to know as SuperDaE was that he didn't sound Australian.


I couldn't detect an accent.


SuperDaE told me back then, during our first long-distance call from New York to wherever he was Down Under, that he got that a lot. He swore to me that he really was Australian. Over the next month he would tell me many, many things that were hard to believe. I'd eventually be able to confirm half of it. I was left to wonder about the rest.


He'd claimed to know about the next Xbox and PlayStation, claimed to really have two prototype versions of the next Xbox. He said he'd had access to next-gen games, that he had Homefront 2 and Sleeping Dogs 2, that he'd played Gears of War 3 a year before it came out and that—after he drunkenly told Epic about it—they'd sent him a poster. He could send me a photo, if I wanted to see it.


A month after we'd first talked, he'd convinced me he'd done many of the extraordinary things he'd said. I'd changed my impression of him from possibly being a disgruntled, anonymous game developer to being a hacker—a really good hacker. "I'm more than that," he told me with a laugh during one of our many calls. "I'm just an image."


Our most recent phone call happened on Saturday, February 16th. We talked for two hours, me trying to confirm things he'd said before. He told me his wildest stories yet. I asked him if he expected to wind up in jail. "Possibly," he told me.


At that moment, he sounded naive. Possibly?


"I try to be optimistic," he said. "But yes."


On Tuesday, February 19, members of the Western Australian computer crimes police force raided the home of SuperDaE, aka Dan Henry, aka Dylan. They had a warrant. Dylan—that's his real first name (he asked that his last name not be used)—said they had an FBI agent with them. They took his computers. They took piles of papers. They took a souvenir cup that was shaped like a penis. He says they took his phone, froze his assets.


"I've lost everything," he told me when I found him again on Twitter a couple of days later. He said his life was in ruins. "Was what I did wrong?" he asked me. "Did I really deserve it? As the saying goes, curiosity killed the cat."



Gears of War 3, A Year Or So Early


SuperDaE really does live in a suburb of Perth in western Australia. He has declined to tell me how old he is and says he doesn't have a job. He blames chronic pain. I never met him in person, and the only image I've seen of him is the one atop this story, which he says is from an old driver's license photo. He says he travels a lot. Over the phone, he sounds young and, up through our last conversation, before the cops came, carefree.


The Incredible Rise and Fall of a Hacker Who Found the Secrets of the Next Xbox and PlayStation—And Maybe More


I first heard of him, of "SuperDaE," in the summer of 2012 when he seemed, quite ridiculously, to be trying to sell a development kit for the next Xbox—codenamed the "Durango"—on eBay. It seemed too brazen to be real, even after images appeared online of his supposed Durango with a piece of paper affixed to it. On the paper was the word "SuperDaE." I have good sources in the games industry, so even though Microsoft refuses to comment on any Durango questions I've ever asked them, my sources told me that, yes, the images were of the real thing.


I pegged SuperDaE as a disgruntled game developer or some other industry insider. Who else could get a Durango? Or at least how else could he know what a unit looked like in order to post a picture that made it seem like he had the real thing?


The eBay auction never went through. SuperDaE would tell me that Microsoft made a copyright claim on it. Microsoft wouldn't comment to me about the auction at all. Dylan now tells me that the eBay thing wasn't exactly what it seemed. Regardless, It wasn't his first strangely bold maneuver.


Back in early 2012, Dylan says, he drunkenly called someone at Epic Games. Epic is the North Carolina-based studio behind the Gears of War games and the Unreal graphics engine which top publishers and developers from around the world use to power their own games.


He spilled the beans and told them he'd had access to some part of their computer system for a long time—since early 2011, he would tell me. But he liked Epic and he was happy to tell them where their security holes were. In an e-mail exchange, an Epic employee thanked him. Dylan asked if he could have a poster.


The Incredible Rise and Fall of a Hacker Who Found the Secrets of the Next Xbox and PlayStation—And Maybe MoreThey sent him one.


"A hacker compromised our internal network a couple years ago," an Epic spokesperson told me recently, verifying the basics of Dylan's story. "We were able to start a conversation and work with him to make it more secure. As thanks, we sent him a signed poster from the team. No social security numbers, credit cards or other sensitive customer data was compromised during the breach." Epic notified their forum users and their licensees that there was a breach. All was taken care of.


But when I told Dylan about this, he displayed what I'd come to know as his penchant for icing one tale with a wilder one. He told me he got access to the computer of former Epic star game designer Cliff Bleszinski and found his social security number. He said he got access to usernames and passwords of Epic forum users and "to an extent, yes, credit card info." When I noted my surprise, he responded: "I had Epic's AmEx for a while." But he says he never charged anything to it. "That would have been a big red flag," he told me.


Dylan said he didn't do much with Gears of War 3. He has consistently maintained that he pirated nothing, that he never put a game on a torrent or tried to sell any as a side thing. "It's unethical," he said of piracy. "I like a lot of those studios. [Piracy] damages them. Developers don't want their games to go out early."


He said he never tried to profit from hacking, though, yes, he seemed to be trying to sell next-gen Xbox development kits on eBay. When I suggested, a couple of weeks ago, that there was an inconsistency there, he laughed. "You can say I was going to give the money away."



If Not Valve, Then Blizzard. If Not Blizzard, Then...


Dylan has maintained that he is merely curious. He says he's not even a huge gamer, that he just liked the challenge of seeing if he could poke around and find things out. That's why, he says, he tried to hack his way into Valve. He claims that a 2011 hack was his, but that Valve described it all wrong. There were no credit card numbers obtained, he said, offering me no proof he really did the hack. He said he was just looking for Half-Life 3—and didn't manage to find anything about it. Valve declined to comment for this story.


Epic, Valve... there was more. He used to brag to me that a list of game companies that he hadn't gotten access to would be shorter than the ones he did.


There was Blizzard, the World of Warcraft people. "I poked around Blizzard because I actually love Blizzard as a company, and I'd imagine working at Blizzard would be a dream job," Dylan said to me in an e-mail. "I accessed Blizzard, because it would have been awesome to play on my own World of Warcraft server or to own the source code—heck, to play their new MMO Titan, the possibilities are endless." He later told me that Blizzard, of all the companies he's tried to access, are the best at spotting intruders and changing their passwords.


A Blizzard rep confirmed to me that a hacker—presumably Dylan—had gained access to an employee's webmail account, as Dylan had told me he'd done, but that access was swiftly denied. No customer information was accessed, or accessible via the intrusion, the company says.


Reps for Square Enix and United Front Games, the presumed publisher and developer, respectively, for Sleeping Dogs 2 did not comment on Dylan's assertion that he had access to their unannounced game—or that it even exists.


As for THQ, that publisher just went out of business and is not around to confirm if he really got Homefront 2, a first-person shooter sequel Dylan maintained was being made for Durango. The game's studio Crytek did not reply to a request for comment.


To convince me he had Homefront 2, Dylan had sent me this, a supposed file directory for the game:


The Incredible Rise and Fall of a Hacker Who Found the Secrets of the Next Xbox and PlayStation—And Maybe More


Easily faked or the real deal? Dylan used to talk about flying to the States and showing me next-gen games running on Durango. If he had a Durango up and running, he easily could have sent me a screenshot of this or any other game. He never did, and yet his access to game company's data, extraordinary as it often seemed, was backed up by proof a lot of the time.



Can You Really Order A Durango Online?


Dylan wanted to know about next-gen systems, and somehow he learned plenty. He got development documentation for the next PlayStation and Xbox. Long before I'd sized him up as a hacker, he'd sent me troves of PDFs and white papers describing the functionality of both the code-named Orbis and Durango. The documentation was loaded with programming code—and with details.


Earlier this week, Sony officially announced the PlayStation 4 (the former Orbis), and it turned out that everything in the documentation Dylan had sent me—the names of the controller's buttons, the specs of its new touchpad, the specs for the console itself—were entirely correct. Sony never commented to me about Dylan's supposed hack, but their PS4 press conference made a strong argument that what he said he'd done, he'd done. His info all checked out.


What he learned and shared with me about Durango—its specs, the vast improvements to the new Kinect sensor, and other notable improvements over the 360—is richly detailed in the documents he found but likely won't be proven until Microsoft finally reveals its new machine in the next few months.


The stuff in Dylan's Durango and Orbis documentation was meant for game-makers and other insiders. I read through it. I checked with sources who were in the industry and could verify if this material was real. It was. Dylan had found a way to get to it. Did he gain access through usernames and logins he grabbed from Epic? Or some other company? It's not clear.


Gaining access to digital paperwork might be hard, but it's not hard to imagine a hacker doing it. The same goes for getting game code. But imagine this scenario: You access Microsoft's internal developer network. You pose as a game developer. You access a shopping page intended for developers, where you can tick off some boxes and, for 7500 Euros, order yourself a Durango development kit. Maybe you claim to be from Rockstar, makers of Grand Theft Auto. You put in any old banking info, to the extent it asks for that. And you put in the address of a "drop" location—some place other than where you live. You track the package, and then you just wait for the FedEx person to arrive, take the delivery and—voila!—you've got a development kit.


That's what SuperDaE says he did. Or at least that's what he told me he did when we were talking last Saturday.


Can you really trick Microsoft into sending something as sensitive as a development kit for their next Xbox to a random Australian address? Can you really trick the payment system since, presumably, you don't have the 15,000 Euros for the two development kits you say you got?


Dylan never gave me a clear answer for any of that, but he did send me a screenshot of the supposed Microsoft developer online store. You or I can't get the URL to work, not without a game developers' password, something I don't have. Microsoft won't comment on any of this, so they're not confirming either. Judge for yourself:


The Incredible Rise and Fall of a Hacker Who Found the Secrets of the Next Xbox and PlayStation—And Maybe More


After the police raided Dylan's house—and that event definitely did happen, according to Australian police—Dylan told me a somewhat different story. Or perhaps I had misunderstood him. He'd never had the Durangos. They'd been sent to his friend in the United States or at least to a drop location his friend had access to. He was just the face for the eBay sales. He hadn't sold them. It became less and less clear to me what role, if any, he played in accessing them—to the extent that he and the hackers he knew really managed to trick Microsoft into sending that sensitive hardware out.


"I never personally touched the Durango itself," he told me. "I've played through the Durango operating system, but not the original."


And was there a third Durango? Dylan told me he helped order and get it delivered to someone on an island. He says that one sold for $5,000 and that he has the bank receipt. I've never seen it.


As far-fetched as Dylan's Durango devkit tales seem, some things are for certain: the images of the devkit he put online showed the devkit—or at least the shell of one. If he or his friends were faking the sale and never really ordered a unit from Microsoft, they'd still managed to figure out what a Durango development PC looked like and were able to set up a unit that, at worst, resembled one.


Whether the sale was serious or not, Microsoft cared about it enough to send someone to Australia to see what the deal was with the mysterious SuperDaE. Dylan claims that a private eye tracked him down and then arrived at his door with a man named Miles Hawkes, a senior member of Microsoft's IP crimes team. Since Microsoft doesn't comment on anything that involves the word Durango, it's only possible to look at Dylan's account of what happened next. Dylan shared his version of the story with me in an e-mail:


Miles Hawkes and a Private investigator that MSFT hired to track me down came and knocked on my door, long story short, sitting in the living room table with them, Miles and I conversed about the Durango and other units, I did not admit to the legitimacy of the Durango, as that would mean I would have to return it. I did however reveal a list of accounts to access Microsoft's Xbox Developer Program, which they call 'GDNp' (Game Developer Network program). Microsoft also knows I'm not malicious, probably from their research into me and everyone else linked to me to do with Microsoft and Xbox. I however, didn't have much to show Microsoft as I zeroed my hard drives the minute Microsoft was at the door, I only had a Macbook Air with 64GB SSD that happened to have some information. I booted Durango on a Mac, his face, needless to say, was priceless. However, I had an Xbox 360 Development Kit in plain sight, and was asked (or rather, threatened in a nice way) to "forfeit it, or they would come back tomorrow with a court order", I complied, funnily enough, Miles joked about how I could just buy a new one anyway since they don't cost much anymore anyway.


Miles invited me to lunch at the Hyatt in Perth, Western Australia, where he happened to be staying. I just ordered a Coke, and he ordered a Diet Coke. He laid out and asked questions about everything, which I answered to. I mentioned how my "group" was organized, the group being, everyone in the Xbox Scene that I happen to know personally, most of whom seem to be scared about everything that happened recently to do with the FBI's ongoing investigation into me, and a recent seizure and raid that happened on a friend of mine. I mentioned how I was the main guy, how I was the guy behind most everything, and how everyone else simply helped me, etc. Microsoft didn't seem to [sic] phased about me having access to their files, however they didn't appreciate me having access.


Note the reference to an FBI investigation. Dylan told me he believed the FBI were trying to track him down as far back as the Epic breach. He believed they wanted to put heat on those in his hacker "scene" that were much more proficient at hacking Xboxes than he was. A hacker friend was raided in Newark in December. Dylan showed me the warrant as proof and suggested I call the Baltimore office of the Bureau to confirm that they were going after him as well. The national and Baltimore offices of the FBI did not return my requests for comment.


The Incredible Rise and Fall of a Hacker Who Found the Secrets of the Next Xbox and PlayStation—And Maybe MoreThe extent to which Dylan's account of his meeting with Hawkes is accurate is impossible to ascertain. Dylan shared what he said were texts between him and Hawkes during and right after the visit. (I've included one here. Judge for yourself.)


At the time it was happening, Dylan Tweeted about a meeting with Microsoft. Beyond that, the facts are unclear.


The Incredible Rise and Fall of a Hacker Who Found the Secrets of the Next Xbox and PlayStation—And Maybe More


What happened after the meeting with Miles Hawkes seemed similar to what went down with Epic. Dylan told me that he liked Microsoft, as he did Epic. He thought they were a cool company. He liked Durango. It was better than Orbis, he thought. And so, when faced with someone from the company, he figured he'd talk to Microsoft about how they could improve their security. So the hackers and Microsoft started e-mailing each other.


In an e-mail exchange Dylan showed me that seemed to occur between a member of Microsoft's security team and Dylan and a fellow hacker, the Microsoft person seems to be trying to find a way to work together:


The Incredible Rise and Fall of a Hacker Who Found the Secrets of the Next Xbox and PlayStation—And Maybe More


The apparent Microsoft person goes on to ask about vulnerabilities supposedly cited by Dylan or his associate, one of which involves the notion of a hacker being able to glean an Xbox user's "account" info only by knowing their Gamertag.


Dylan's fellow hacker replies in detail about issues with the security of content on the Xbox Live Marketplace—the Xbox 360's online store—but doesn't elaborate on the Gamertag issue. The e-mail ends with a request for the Microsoft person to maybe put in a good word for them. "I don't mean to ask anything of you, and if I denied, I'll still be more than willing to help," Dylan's apparent hacker friend writes, "but do you think it would be possible that me and Dylan, if proved to be useful, could possibly list someone we've spoken to on your end as a reference for resumes or something of the sort?"


I don't know where the conversation went from there nor if any proof for the supposed Gamertag hack was ever given. Dylan said that that kind of hack wasn't his thing. He also says he became disaffected with Microsoft.


"They don't fix security issues," he told me, complaining that he felt like the Microsoft people wanted him to do their work for them. "There's issues where I can log into a powerboard into Microsoft and can switch off 1,000 servers..." He was telling me this last Saturday and I tried to get him to slow down.


Turn off servers? Really? He started typing, said that the trick was to sniff around and look for a certain range of Microsoft IP addresses, load them up, wind up at some server login prompts, type in the default passwords for those servers and... this is what he showed me he found, his mouse hovering over a deactivation option:


The Incredible Rise and Fall of a Hacker Who Found the Secrets of the Next Xbox and PlayStation—And Maybe More


Real? A hoax? He says they wanted to know which IP addresses were involved in this. He says he thought they should be able to figure that out themselves. He also says he has no idea what the servers were tied to. Could have been Xbox Live. Could have been a bunch of coffee makers.


While avoiding addressing any of the "Durango"-related aspects of this saga, Microsoft did comment to me about three notions: that they were hacked, had security flaws exposed and that they sicced the Feds on Dylan. "Microsoft did not initiate this FBI investigation with this individual, as has been asserted in some of the articles in the media," a Microsoft spokesperson told me. "We take security very seriously and have no evidence of any compromise of our corporate network. We have no further comment on this matter."



The Raid


Dylan's back and forth with Microsoft was in the fall. The attempted Blizzard breach was in January. He sent me the Orbis and Durango documents around the same time and put a Durango back up for sale on eBay. (That sale has been closed.) Dylan and I last spoke on the phone this past Saturday. And then, last Tuesday, anything Dylan says he was doing—anything he thought he was getting away with—ended.


The cops showed up, and they took pretty much everything. Was it related to our most recent, most detailed call? He would later tell me he thought it was just a coincidence.


By this point, bear in mind, Dylan had his doubters. People who saw the eBay auctions or the Tweets or even the stories we'd written about him—stories in which, admittedly, we said he had possession of Durango devkits that we're no longer so certain he did—wondered if anything this guy claimed was true.


Well something was true. He'd gotten someone's attention. Because it's not likely that the cops show up with a warrant for nothing.


"Technology Crime Investigation Unit is currently conducting a multi-jurisdictional investigation into computer related offences," the Western Australian police told Kotaku in a statement this week. "A search warrant was conducted Tuesday 19 February 2013, in relation to this investigation and items were seized."


The Incredible Rise and Fall of a Hacker Who Found the Secrets of the Next Xbox and PlayStation—And Maybe MoreAccording to an official warrant supplied to me by Dylan, the police showed up at 7:10AM and ended their search around 12:30 in the afternoon. The warrant called for a search for computers, gaming consoles, hard drives, and records related to Microsoft, Microsoft partners, PayPal and eBay. (eBay and PayPal, which are part of the same company, did not return a request for comment about this.)


Dylan told me that he was polite and helpful during the raid, but that "they didn't allow me a lawyer...that's probably the biggest right they took from me." He said that one of the cops told him he was a "pretty boy" who would "most likely be someone's bitch in jail."


The police didn't address these allegations with us, nor has anyone confirmed that the American who Dylan says was present was an FBI agent. Dylan says he was and was told as much by the Australian police. "American accent," he told me over Twitter, "The other police told me he was FBI and, well, he was."


Records of the raid list six pages' worth of items seized by the police. Here's just a sampling:


The Incredible Rise and Fall of a Hacker Who Found the Secrets of the Next Xbox and PlayStation—And Maybe More


Dylan says the police took his phone. He told me he couldn't get to his money after the raid, that the police took his bank cards. The seizure documents list a Blackberry, a Visa and banking records, all confiscated. Shortly after the raid, Dylan hopped on Twitter, apparently from a nearby Apple store.


I tried calling him the next day. After two rings, his phone went to voicemail.


In the days since the raid, Dylan has only been in touch over Twitter and, briefly, over what he said was a borrowed phone. He swiftly sent me the warrant and seizure documents and decided, at that moment, that he was ok with me using his real first name.


"Feel free to use my real name in the article," he said. "At this stage I have nothing to lose, I've lost everything."


***

Over Twitter, privately, Dylan has seemed crushed, telling me a couple of days after the raid that he was "pretty down, flashbacks to the raid are frequent." Publicly on Twitter, he's become a little more animated, and has been retweeting anyone who uses the hashtag #FreeSuperDaE.


"I was treated like a criminal," he complained to me, looking back at the raid.


It seemed to me that it didn't matter if he really didn't pirate or if he really didn't use any stolen credit card numbers. He'd said that he got access to companies' computers by using others' logins. That alone might seem pretty bad.


"No one was hurt from what I did," he said to me. "So it's shocking that they want to ruin me like this."


Dylan says he hasn't been charged with anything yet. He says he's living with family.


"I am a hacker in the eyes of the law," he told me a couple of weeks ago. "However, how I see it is [that] I am someone curious with information and obsessed with owning everything that I otherwise shouldn't."


Some of the tales Dylan told seem too wild to be true, but those Orbis and Durango documents? Real. Epic and Blizzard? They say he got into them, however briefly.


What could he have known? What could he have done? What gaming secrets could SuperDaE have discovered? That depends on which of his claims you choose to believe—claims that, with the police cracking down, he may wish fewer people had believed in the first place.


Kotaku

Digital Storm Bolt - Titan Edition: The Kotaku ReviewThis week Nvidia released its latest high-tech graphics card, the GeForce GTX Titan. The announcement was accompanied by the usual flurry of press releases from boutique PC makers, eager to get their name associated with the next big thing. Normally these me-too systems don't garner more than a passing mention, but Digital Storm's offering is a special case. The addition of the GTX Titan card doesn't simply make the super-thin Bolt gaming PC better at pumping out graphics — it's the ultimate realization of the system's core concept.


The first edition Bolt, as I reviewed it, was an incredibly compact gaming PC. At only 3.6 inches wide and a little deeper than a standard video card, it didn't take up much more room than an original Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. If the red-and-black case design wasn't so striking you'd have hardly noticed it on sitting on someone's desk or in their entertainment center. That is, unless it was on.


The system tore savagely into most PC games I pit it against, but that heated savagery was accompanied by an equally savage roar from the Bolt's power supply fans. Soon after release Digital Storm got hold of a better power supply that significantly dampened the noise, but it still wasn't quite optimal.


So the Digital Storm engineers went back to the drawing board, redesigning the case to improve airflow and address customer concerns over that glossy, fingerprint-attracting enclosure. In December they relaunched the Bolt in a sexy new case with an additional side vent, a specially-designed server-class 500W power supply with a reduced fan profile, and a paint finish less likely to make crime scene investigators weep with joy.


Digital Storm Bolt - Titan Edition: The Kotaku Review


Is that pretty? Here I have the case partway off, in order to show you the amazing balance of functionality and space economy Digital Storm's engineers have achieved with this system. Everything component has a place, each is easily removed and replaced when it's time to upgrade. It's not some closed system with proprietary components — it's a high-powered gaming PC with all the goodies in as little space as possible without it melting.


And Digital Storm doesn't skimp on the goodies, either. Along with the aforementioned $1,000 video card there's an Intel Core i7 3.5 GHz quad-core CPU, 16GB of 1600MHz DDR3 memory, 120 gigs of SSD storage along with a terabyte of standard space — they've even included a DVD drive, and that's almost completely unnecessary these days.


Digital Storm Bolt - Titan Edition: The Kotaku Review


All of that, tucked inside this diminutive cage. Here's the back panel and my filthy desk:


Digital Storm Bolt - Titan Edition: The Kotaku Review


Here's the right side and my filthy desk:


Digital Storm Bolt - Titan Edition: The Kotaku Review


And here's the system compared to a unit of measurement that should be familiar to any lazy PC gamer:


Digital Storm Bolt - Titan Edition: The Kotaku Review


I would have used all the empty diet soda cans on my desk, but I wanted you folks to still be able to see the system.


The Titan Edition Bolt is a lot of power (I already ran benchmarks over here) in a small space, but small is only one element necessary to make the system live up to its full potential.


The goal here isn't to just take up a small amount of room. It's being unobtrusive, and there's more to that than physical footprint. If I am under your bed where you cannot see me (and I've bathed recently), my impact on your environment is negligible. If I start screaming at the top of my lungs, which I often do in such a position, I am no longer unobtrusive.


Digital Storm Bolt - Titan Edition: The Kotaku Review


That's where the GeForce GTX Titan comes in. This supercomputer-powering beast has been designed to purr like a particularly quiet kitten under the heaviest loads. Using Nvidia's GPU Boost 2.0 technology, the card's performance is weighed against a temperature target, rather that the power target of GPU Boost 1.0. With the GPU temp remaining at or above a predefined limit, the fans never have to kick into overdrive, so the overall acoustic profile is much quieter than say, Nvidia's other $1,000 card, the GTX 690. Combined with the card's vapor chamber and extended fin stack for physical cooling and heat dissipation, this is one cool-running piece of technology.


Take a card designed for power and temperature control and combine it with a case specifically engineered for cooling components in close proximity, and you've got the best possible marriage of power and profile. The Bolt is right next to me on my desk as I type this, idling in Far Cry 3 at max settings. It's whisper quiet. Hot air isn't billowing forth from the vents. It's just discreetly sitting there, quietly waiting for me to play. Seems to me that's what the Digital Storm Bolt was meant to do.


The Titan Edition Bolt is available at Digital Storm's website starting at $2,499.


Kotaku

Boy does motion capture—the process involved in animating digital characters—looked darned goofy sometimes. This is especially true when you're pretending to eat a human, apparently.


Here's the latest DayZ standalone video blog, which features the mind behind DayZ, Dean Hall, along with other members of Bohemia Interactive. Dean is suited up in a mocap suit, pretending to be a zombie.


It's good stuff for those of you needing to brush up on your zombie acting skills.


Kotaku

PC Tomb Raider Will Be So Much Better Than Console, If Your Rig Is Up to ItRejoice, computer gaming Tomb Raider fans — when Lara returns to her home turf this March she'll be bringing along a treasure trove of PC-centric bells and whistles that'll make the console versions look downright sad in comparison. Let's see if your system has the juice to run them.


Tomb Raider started on the PC, and Crystal Dynamics and Nixxes have every intention of giving the loyal keyboard-and-mouse set their just rewards this spring. PC gamers with the right specs will enjoy high resolution textures with up to 16 times the data of the console versions, detail tessellation to make surfaces pretty, higher quality shadows, some sexy HQ bokeh depth of field effects and improved cloth, SSAO, wetness and post-filter effects.


In short, it's going to be gorgeous, as long as your system falls within the recommended spec range.


Recommended system requirements for PC
• Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8
• DirectX 11 graphics card with 1GB Video RAM:
AMD Radeon HD 4870
nVidia GTX 480
• Quad core CPU:
AMD Phenom II X2 565
Intel Core i5-750
• 4GB Memory


You good? If not you've still got plenty of wiggle room between those lofty goals and the minimum requirements. Crystal Dynamics promises plenty of scalability options for folks with older machines. They even support Windows XP. Talk about raiding a tomb.


Minimum system requirements for PC
• Windows XP Service Pack 3, Windows Vista,7,8 (32bit/64bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics card with 512Mb Video RAM:
AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT
nVidia 8600
• Dual core CPU:
AMD Athlon64 X2 2.1 Ghz (4050+)
Intel Core2 Duo 1.86 Ghz (E6300)
• 1GB Memory (2GB on Vista)


Where do you fall in the system spectrum?


Kotaku

A Mysterious Next-Gen Project Sponsored By Bill Gates, And Other Gaming SecretsIn his LinkedIn profile, a Seattle engineer who joined Activision as vice president of research and development this month states that he is "looking for graphics and systems software developers in the Greater Seattle area," seemingly suggesting that the publisher is establishing an office in Washington. (Presumably this is unrelated to Bungie and Destiny, as Bungie are an independent company with their own proprietary tech base and HR department.)


If Activision were to open a Seattle office, it would be joining a recent trend in the tech world: as The New York Times reported last year, a number of companies—including the likes of Facebook, Zynga, and Google—have set up shop in Seattle in hopes of tapping into the city's talent pool, particularly University of Washington engineer graduates who want to stay in Seattle. These Seattle offices are designed to lure in talent that would likely otherwise head to Microsoft or Amazon.


Additionally, Activision does already have some remote engineering and R&D operations. Activision has a very small tech-focused satellite office in Portland, Maine, and its real-time graphics R&D person works in Spain.


Also of note: The Seattle engineer curiously mentions having worked on a "next generation hardware"-related Xbox project in late 2008 called "Project 434." Another former Microsoft employee describes "Project 434" as "a hand-picked, 35+ person multi-disciplinary engineering team incubating a revolutionary gaming platform and strategic initiative sponsored by Bill Gates." In addition to Kinect, yet another former Microsoft employee working on Xbox accessory and platform incubation circa 2008 says he contributed to some sort of "Motion Wand concept"—an interesting prospect given Kinect's hands-free nature.


* * *

Several weeks ago, Swedish PC game publisher Paradox Interactive registered the domains waroftherosesbloodeagle.com, bloodeaglegame, and arcanewars.com. Late last year, Paradox also filed a trademark registration for "Blood Eagle" late last year, as well as one for "Infested Complex.


Paradox recently did announce a new re-release and voiceover DLC for the Fatshark-developed War of the Roses, but registering domains and trademark registrations would seem to suggest something more substantial—a full-fledged expansion pack perhaps?


Infested Complex recently appeared on the Steam registry under the category "Arrowhead New Dev Comp," indicating it is a new title from the developers of Magicka and the forthcoming Showdown Effect. I would guess Infested Complex is the "unannounced third project" alluded to in an interview last year.


* * *

According to an artist's resume, Mortal Kombat developers NetherRealm Studios are working on "two unannounced iOS games and one android game" in addition to the forthcoming superhero brawler Injustice: Gods Among Us. The latter is likely not one of the same as the former two titles: a NetherRealm employee's LinkedIn page mentions a yet-to-be-released Android port of NetherRealm's late 2011Infinity Blade-inspired mobile title Batman: Arkham City Lockdown.


On one of the iOS titles, another NetherRealm artist says on his resume that he "Converted multiple environments from console to mobile in UDK"—an indication that the game is based on an Unreal-based WB console title, perhaps Injustice or a tie-in for the next Arkham title. A NetherRealm designer says that one of NetherRealm's mobile titles features "runner-style minigames" supplementing some form of campaign mode.


* * *

Although IO Interactive has made its name with abrasive, gritty games like Kane & Lynch and Hitman, it seems the studio very nearly went down a rather different path several years ago: a former contract concept artist for the studio writes on his about page of an IO Interactive game pitch called "ChimpKing." The artist says then-IO head and current Square Enix Europe chief creative officer Janos Flosser expressed a desire to "make a game with chimps." Unfortunately, the economic crisis happened as work got underway on the pitch, and the only thing to come from the project is the animatic below.



The clip depicts a very stylized, cartoonish aesthetic not unlike that found in IO's only family-friendly title to date Mini Ninjas, which was a conscious effort for the studio to create a game that developers "could enjoy with their kids." Judging by concept art in the artist's portfolio, it generally appears that IO had the same aims with the "ChimpKing" concept, but there are some storyboards showing animals trying to catch their prey.


Interestingly enough, IO went through the process of <a href="registering domains for the ChimpKing title in early 2008, suggesting a rough timeline of when IO was working on it and that studio leadership were pretty interested in having this project happen. It is likely that "ChimpKing" was one of 14 titles IO's then-parent company SCi cancelled a few weeks after the registrations.


The concept artist also makes a few interesting observations about other IO titles. He describes Hitman Contracts as a "speed product" with an eight-month development cycle "designed from start as a painkiller to Eidos's agonizing deterioration in stocks." Also, the first Kane & Lynch game "started very differently from how it ended up," and there were "quite a few shifts in character" before the game ended up in its final form.


superannuation is a self-described "internet extraordinaire" residing somewhere in the Pacific Time Zone. He tweets, and can be reached at heyheymayday AT gmail DOT com.


Kotaku

What Sonic Might Play Like, If Sonic Were Invented in 2013Magnets, man. They make you go fast.


Major Magnet looks like Sonic a little, even though Sonic is a hedgehog and Magnet's protagonist is a pudgy, big-nosed hero. Major Magnet kind of sounds like Sonic at times, too. As far as I can tell, these similarities are intentional—but, unlike Sonic, Major Magnet is an iOS platformer that revolves around magnets.


The game starts out with Marv, the protagonist, losing his cape. Obviously this means he has to resort to using a giant magnet. You move him around by tapping on other magnets around the level, which he'll stick to provided he's within range. While I found that the game is forgiving when it comes to range, that's not a negative. Not when magnets are your primary means of movement! The alternative is dying a whole lot because you messed up, which doesn't sound fun.


You can also swipe the screen to rocket the Major wherever you'd like, giving the core gameplay a bit of complexity. Sometimes the game requires you to swipe to get somewhere specific, but honestly, most of the time I used the mechanic it was to save myself. Turns out, picking the best trajectory to launch yourself in can be tricky, though you'll get better as it as you go along.


The core gameplay—catapulting yourself to and fro using magnetism—is basic enough, and the game could have easily revolved around that. Thankfully, there is the added challenge of different magnet types (like ones that set off timed switches, or moving magnets) along with different types of environmental things to take under consideration. It's a game that knows how to take something simple and keep it interesting.



Those looking for a challenge will look toward collecting "bakes," which require you to be more flexible and precise with your movement. Where getting to the end of the level normally is often a straightforward affair, figuring out how to collect a level's bake will require more effort and expert maneuvering.


The game moves at a frenetic pace, requiring you to react fast to make sure the Major doesn't fall off the level or run into danger. The obvious influences and fast pace might make this sound like soulless aping, but to me much of Major Magnet felt like a modern reimagining of Sonic; what Sonic might've looked like were it invented today, in 2013, for touch devices. That alone makes Major Magnet worth experiencing.



Major Magnet

What Sonic Might Play Like, If Sonic Were Invented in 2013
  • Genre: Platformer
  • Developer: Iddiction
  • Platform: iOS
  • Price: $0.99
Get Major Magnet on iTunes

What Sonic Might Play Like, If Sonic Were Invented in 2013


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