Over the weekend, Ars Technica wrote a great feature on hackers who abuse remote administration tools (RAT) in order to gain access to the computers of strangers. The purpose of using a RAT in this case is to gain control of computers featuring webcams—these allow the hackers to spy on their targets, which they call "slaves."

What the hacker might do once he gains control of someone's computer depends on the hacker. Some are content merely to watch. Some go through files, hoping to find compromising footage or pictures. Some steal personal information, like Steam accounts. Some like to mess with the target "slaves," and that can be done in a lot of ways—maybe they'll force people to watch porn, or they'll hide the start menu (just as a couple of examples).

Targets of interest are often women—most of the hackers tend to be male according to the article.

"I seem to get a lot of female slaves by spreading Sims 3 with a [RAT] server on torrent sites," wrote one hacker on a forum.

The Sims is a franchise that boasts a high female userbase, so it's not surprising that a hacker would use a torrent of the latest Sims game to acquire more women "slaves." This is but one of the methods listed to acquire more targets, though.

It's crazy to think there might be someone out there watching you through your own webcam, no?

Meet the men who spy on women through their webcams [Ars Technica]

Last October, we saw a listing for Star Wars: First Assault, an unannounced Xbox Live Arcade game developed by LucasArts.

Today, Kotaku can reveal that Star Wars: First Assault is a downloadable multiplayer shooter that was originally slated for release this spring. The game supports up to 16 players—one eight-person team of rebels and one eight-person team of Stormtroopers—as they face off on Star Wars worlds like Bespin and Tatooine.

And according to one person familiar with the project, First Assault is "step zero" to the heavily-rumored, highly-anticipated Star Wars: Battlefront III. If First Assault sells well—assuming it is released at all—the third Battlefront could be next.

A few weeks ago, Kotaku reported on the status of Star Wars 1313, a game that could be in trouble thanks to unrest and uncertainty at LucasArts, the storied studio that has developed or published every official Star Wars video game to date. We mentioned a Call of Duty-style first-person shooter codenamed "Trigger."

That's First Assault. And according to our source, who is familiar with the project but says he is "no longer familiar with the goings-on" at LucasArts, this game is a downloadable "predecessor" to Battlefront III—part of the studio's strategy to show that there's a market for Star Wars shooters running on the Unreal Engine.

The story of Star Wars: Battlefront III is long and well-documented. Commissioned as the third game in the Battlefront shooter series, Battlefront III has bounced from developer to developer over the past few years. Although LucasArts has yet to officially announce the game, leaked footage and images show what could have been, and development studio Free Radical has claimed the game was 99% finished when LucasArts killed it.

Star Wars: First Assault, our source says, would lead up to Battlefront III. This new Battlefront would use nothing from the Battlefront III that has already been in production at studios like Free Radical and Slant Six, our source says. Instead, LucasArts would build Battlefront III based on code from First Assault.

According to our source, a small team has already been prototyping vehicles for Battlefront III. Current code allows you to fly a TIE Fighter or ride an AT-ST walker.

There are no vehicles in First Assault, nor are there Jedi. LucasArts intentionally decided not to use the Battlefront name so expectations wouldn't be too high, our source says. And the game is almost done.

But Star Wars: First Assault may never actually make it out of the studio.

Last September, when executives at LucasFilm—the parent company of LucasArts—found out that Disney had signed an agreement to purchase the company, things got murky. LucasFilm froze all hiring and new game announcements, our source says. They had planned to announce First Assault and launch a closed beta by the end of September—which explains the Xbox listing leak on October 1—and First Assault was supposed to be out this spring.

So since September, employees at LucasArts have been working on the game with no knowledge as to whether or not it will actually come out. According to our source, LucasArts is "bleeding talent" as employees wait to see what executives at Disney and LucasFilm want to do with First Assault and other games the studio is working on.

The status of First Assault—like the status of Star Wars 1313 and other projects that LucasArts is currently working on—remains unclear today. The new direction of LucasFilm is also unclear—just today, the company announced that they would no longer be releasing new episodes of the Clone Wars television show on Cartoon Network.

We've reached out to LucasArts for comment and will update should we hear back from them.

For now, our source says, the only way to get games like First Assault out of carbonite might be for Star Wars fans to speak up.

"Fans should tell Disney/Lucas loud and clear they don't want shitty titles from random developers; they want games to be taken seriously, and they will only pay for quality," the source said. "I believe that if Disney/Lucas lets LucasArts die, it means the death of Star Wars as a storied game franchise is right behind it."

Created by Brian Clevinger's Nikola Tesla in 1923, Atomic Robo is a robotic member of a think-tank of Action Scientists, probing the shadowy outskirts of science. In Second Fiction's Atomic Robo: Violent Science, now available for iOS and coming soon to Windows 8 and Android, he does that too, only gamier.

Atomic Robo is the finest creation of 8-Bit Theater writer Brian Clevinger. Along with artist Scott Wegener, Clevinger has crafted a comic book world filled with supernatural thrills and the magic of science. Also, dinosaurs. It's been nominated for the Best Limited Series Eisner Award twice. That means you should read it (after you get finished reading Umbrella Academy).

The game is an action-platformer with lovely chiptune music. It also has power-ups, some jumping... Atomic Robo is in it, I hear.

Okay, I haven't played it yet, but it's Atomic Robo so I am buying it anyway. It's only $.99 right now on iTunes.

Two years ago, the Cub Scouts offered their version of a merit badge for video gaming. This week, the Boy Scouts of America added the 131st merit badge to its active list: Games Design.

The BSA's program doesn't mean just video games design either, though that is a part of it. (And, this post by Scouting magazine's blog for adult leaders says, "this is not a merit badge Scouts earn by playing video games.")

The work will involve creating a game in one of four areas: electronic, outdoors, tabletop and pen-and-paper role-playing games.

Interestingly, instruction No. 3 for getting this badge requires scouts to "define the term intellectual property," and "describe how intellectual property is protected and why protection is necessary." So remember, a Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and respects copyrights.

Play to win: Game Design merit badge released [Bryan on Scouting]

I play dozens of mobile games a week, at least 24 percent of which are puzzle games. From block-matching to word games; physics puzzlers to good old Tetris clones—I've played them all. The last thing I expected to see in last week's crop of new games was a puzzler unlike anything I'd played before. If I'd paid closer attention to developer Ambient Studios' 'About Us' page I wouldn't have been surprised by Monster Meltdown's ingenuity at all.

Yuri is a janitor at a top-secret Russian lab, the sort of place where deadly monsters escape captivity and they send the custodian to take care of it. Poor Yuri is tasked with guiding 80 levels of man-hungry beasts to capture portals using nothing but his wits, cunning and cleaning skills.

Well, that and a teleportation device.

I love the idea of a world where teleportation is so commonplace that devices utilizing the tech are standard issue for custodial workers. While the scientists are off getting coffee (or maybe they were devoured, but I like the coffee idea), Yuri is popping in and out of existence, swapping places with creatures in order to ensure they not only enter glowing capture portals, but that they do so only after collecting all the strange energy motes on the screen. Capturing monsters, gathering motes and doing it using less than the allotted number of jumps—that's how you get three stars in Yuri's world.

Monster Meltdown is not a relaxing, half-heartedly poking at the screen sort of game. Players have to consider the behavior of the monster on screen—will it chase Yuri? Does it automatically start walking when the level begins? Then they have to figure out the most efficient means of getting monster A into portal B. Sometimes it's as simple as touching the monster and swapping places. Other levels require pinpoint precision and expert timing—'port to shaft of light as the monster passes, swap with monster, port above electrical hazard, swap again—all in the span of seconds. It's as much a strategy and action game as it is a puzzle game.

After playing all weekend I finally wandered over to the Ambient Studios website to see what was up. Aha, founded by folks from Media Molecule, creators of Sony's LittleBigPlanet. I imagine Media Molecule as a rapidly-spinning imagination engine, flinging off great gobs of ingenuity as it rotates. One of those gobs landed right here.

I mean that in a good way, if it helps.

Monster Meltdown

• Genre: Teleportation Puzzler
• Developer: Ambient Studios
• Platform: iPad-Only
• Price: $1.99

Get Monster Meltdown on iTunes

NMA, the wacko Taiwanese animation studio, has become a kind of grim reaper in the world of Internet scandal. If you end up in an NMA video, it ain't good—although I am sure Francis, the YouTube comedian who rants about video games, is happy to cameo here on behalf of the outraged.

That said, NMA is no stranger to crossing lines of tastelessness and insensitivity. Jeff Bezos breathing fire and turning Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw into Foxy Brown is an old-school racist sight gag that American cartoonists stopped doing after the last cigar exploded about 60 years ago.

YouTube video uploaded by NMAWorldEdition

Let the zerg rushing begin. StarCraft II's first expansion comes out tomorrow, and to celebrate, Blizzard is streaming StarCrafty things all day.

The Heart of the Swarm global launch event, which you can watch using the embedded stream below, is hosted by the much-beloved Sean "day9" Plott. They've got cameras at a bunch of the worldwide SC2 launch parties, from Australia to South Korea to Irvine, California.

There will also be a "King of the Beta" tournament and some fanmade videos on the livestream, Blizzard says. The stream will end when the game launches at midnight Pacific tonight.

You can watch it all day here:

It's been a rough few months for folks who bought the Wii U right at launch. Almost none of the third-party games that came out alongside Nintendo's new home console set the world on fire and the first-party offerings made by Nintendo didn't deliver a lightning-bolt success like Wii Sports. It's no wonder that Shigeru Miyamoto wishes that Pikmin 3 had been ready to debut along with the system.

In a recent interview with Time Magazine's website, the guy who made Mario wishes that the little plant creatures in Nintendo's colorful strategy series could have been out back in November:

If you look back at the launch of Wii, we were able to prepare a game like Wii Sports, which at the time was clearly a new game, and launch that alongside a Zelda game. With the Wii U, we took a similar approach by launching Nintendo Land as well as a Mario game—though we're working on Zelda for Wii U, that's going to take us a little big longer.

From my perspective, I think ideally it would have been nice if we'd been able to release Pikmin 3 closer to launch, but the Wii U—though it shares the Wii name—is obviously a brand new system, with new chips and graphical capabilities. It can do a lot more, and in the process of developing a lot of the features and functionality, the resources required to best utilize those features drew on some of the same resources that might have been spent developing games, thus we weren't able to bring quite as robust a lineup initially.

It's been a very slim January and February for Wii U owners, which makes events like the Rayman Legends delay all the more painful. Even though Nintendo has been candid about the bumpiness of its new system launch, it's still pretty rare to see its chief creative architect talk so frankly about what could have gone differently.

Miyamoto: I Couldn't Have Imagined Where We've Ended Up [Time]

With SimCity slowly stabilizing, more and more user-created content surfaces—which means we finally get to have some time to kick back and enjoy the beauty of our creations. YouTube user Calvin Chan put up this melancholic, noir-themed (the music from L.A. Noire fits right in) montage of his city at night.

SimCity - My City of Dreams [YouTube]

I was browsing Reddit casually last night and stumbled on this seemingly well-made Journey hoodie by user volpinazzurra (you can only tell so much from pictures). "It's reversible, too," I excitedly proclaimed to myself and my cat. Quickly check the comments and...oh. Not for sale. Not on Etsy. Probably can't bribe volpinazzurra with cookies and money.

But for those of you with a hand for sewing, she's considering selling the pattern. So there's that. Check the Imgur link below for more images.

Journey Hoodie [Imgur via Reddit]