Zero is a customer service representative for one of the biggest video game cheat providers in the world. To him, at first, I was just another customer. He told me that the site earns approximately $1.25 million a year, which is how it can afford customer service representatives like him to answer questions over TeamSpeak. His estimate is based on the number of paying users online at any given time, the majority of whom, like me, paid for cheats for one game at $10.95 a month. Some pay more for a premium package with cheats for multiple games.

As long as there have been video games, there have been cheaters. For competitive games like Counter-Strike, battling cheaters is an eternal, Sisyphean task. In February, Reddit raised concerns about lines of code in Valve-Anti Cheat (VAC), used for Counter-Strike and dozens of other games on Steam, that looked into users DNS cache. In a statement, Gabe Newell admitted that Valve doesn't like talking about VAC because it creates more opportunities for cheaters to attack the system." But since online surveillance has been a damning issue lately, he made an exception.

Newell explained that there are paid cheat providers that confirm players paid for their product by requiring them to check in with a digital rights management (DRM) server, similar to the way Steam itself has to check in with a server at least once every two weeks. For a limited time, VAC was looking for a partial match to those (non-web) cheat DRM servers in users DNS cache.

I knew that cheats existed, but I was shocked that enough people paid for them to warrant DRM. I wanted to find out how the cheating business worked, so I became a cheater myself.

That s how I found Zero. After we finished talking, he reminded me to send him the $25 I promised him. I did not at any point say anything that could possibly even suggest that I would pay him for any reason. I asked him if he meant that was something I promised him or something that I should just do. Both, he said. I also advise you not to use this information against me. That wouldn't be wise.
How I became a cheating scumbag
Bohemia Interactive (Arma, DayZ) believes that only 1 percent of online players are willing to spend money to cheat on top of an already expensive hobby. Even by that estimate, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive alone had a potential 25,000 cheaters out of a total of 2.5 million unique players last month. Put on your green accountant visor, add up the player-bases of all the other popular multiplayer games cheat providers are servicing (Call of Duty, Battlefield, Rising Storm), and you ll see a massively profitable market.

I wanted to cheat in CS:GO. I was good, once, when I had a high school student's endless free time to pour into Counter-Strike 1.3. These days, if I can play with friends, it s fun. If I jump onto a random server I m cannon fodder.

I Googled Counter-Strike: Global Offensive cheats, and quickly ended up at a user-friendly cheat provider. Based on the size of its community and traffic, it s one of the biggest. I'm going to call it Ultra Cheats, a fake name, to protect the anonymity of the sources I talked to. Those sources, like Zero, have also had their online handles altered.



Ultra Cheats didn't accept credit (other sites did), so I used PayPal to buy a one-month subscription for CS:GO cheats for $10.95. This gave me access to the site s VIP forums where I could talk to other members, administrators, cheat coders, and download Ultra Cheats cheat loader, which checks in with its DRM server. It also gave me access to around-the-clock technical and customer support via TeamSpeak.

I followed a simple list of steps, including disabling Windows default anti-virus protection. I launched a new copy of CS:GO on a fresh Steam account belonging to Perry C. Gamble, loaded the cheat using the cheat loader, and entered a match. For the first time, I wasn't just another player, but a kind of god.

The most obvious of my new superhuman abilities was spying on other players through walls. In CS:GO, wallhacking is incredibly useful. Faceoffs around corners come down to millisecond reactions. My ability to see exactly when the enemy was coming, or to know exactly where he was hiding when I was coming, was unfair to say the least.

It was also super fun. Maybe the most fun I've had with Counter-Strike in years. I was finally getting kills, more than one in a round, but I wasn't crushing everyone else. It was like a little boost that got me back into my high school fighting shape.

I wanted to see how far I could push it. I was paying for this. I wanted to feel powerful and get my money s worth. I turned on auto-aim, and auto-trigger, which fires your weapon automatically when you point your cursor at an enemy.

I played with these options and others for a handful of matches. They didn't seem as useful as wallhacking, or they simply didn't work as well, but I was vote-kicked out of a match before I could make an educated decision. Halfway into my next match, two hours total since I started cheating, I was VAC-banned from CS:GO.




Counter-terrorists win?
VAC bans are usually irreversible. Perry C. Gamble would never play another match of CS:GO unless he opened another Steam account and bought another copy of the game. That s where the charm of cheating wore off for me. It was fun while it lasted, but I couldn t imagine paying another $15 for a new copy of CS:GO plus the ongoing $10.95 a month Ultra Cheats membership just to get easy kills.

John Gibson, president of Tripwire Interactive (Rising Storm, Killing Floor) told me plenty of cheaters feel differently. We see a spike in hackers after we have a sale on one of our games, he said. Their last 10 Steam accounts have been banned, and the game is on sale for $3, so they ll buy 10 copies for $30 on 10 different accounts and they ll keep cheating.

I told Gibson that I found that behavior mind-boggling. He isn t confused by it. He s just angry. Give me five minutes alone with a hacker or a hack writer, he laughed. That s what I think about that mindset.

Newell called cheating a negative-sum game, where a minority benefits less than the majority is harmed. It s obvious Valve and other developers take the issue seriously, but talking to Gibson made me realize it s also personal. Before he would even talk to me, I had to prove that I wrote for PC Gamer. He s been burned before. One of his first experiences with a hacker was someone who pretended to be a journalist with a fake, up-to-date gaming blog. He leveraged his early access to Tripwire and other developers games to provide hacks and pirate games.

He s in jail now for stealing credit card data, not cheating.



 

Gibson told me that, legally, it s not worth going after sites like Ultra Cheats. Most of them are based out of Russia, China (Ultra Cheats is registered in Beijing), or other places where extradition is, in Gibson's words, questionable. At the very least, Tripwire would have to pay another lawyer in that country, making it prohibitively expensive and complicated.

Criminal justice systems, perhaps understandably, aren't preoccupied with people cheating in online games. Especially when it s international, Gibson said. Then you re talking about the FBI and Interpol. If someone stole $10 million in diamonds, call them. If someone is hacking your game, they don t care.

If Tripwire, Valve, or other developers want to reduce the number of cheaters, they have to do it themselves. Note that it s reduce and not eliminate. Like Newell, Gibson knows that this isn't a battle he can finish. It s like the Wild West, he said. It s more about managing the risk and hacks without inconveniencing your legitimate players too much.

Tripwire s anti-cheat strategy is three-pronged. The first is technical, using both VAC and Punkbuster. This is one topic Gibson was secretive about, but he said Tripwire uses both because they handle things in different ways.
"If Tripwire, Valve, or other developers want to reduce the number of cheaters, they have to do it themselves."
The second is being a proactive developer. When Tripwire notices a loophole, it closes it as fast as possible. When Red Orchestra 2 first launched, it didn't do a whole lot of server-side validation on hit detection. The game was plagued by hacks that allowed your machine to tell the server you shot someone in the head even when you were clear across the map. Very quickly we put up an update that basically verified, within a reasonable margin of error, that they kind of have to be where you say you shoot them at, Gibson said. If they re not, then we know that it s a hack and we ignore that shot.

The third is having an engaged server admin community and giving them the tools to be the third line of defense. That s a huge thing for us, Gibson said. Hackers come in, it s obvious fairly quickly that they re hacking, the server admin bans them from the server and problem solved.

Punkbuster also allows server admins to take screenshots of what players see. If the server admin captures evidence of cheating, he or she can submit the proof to PBBans, a global database of hackers, making it very difficult for that hacker to join any Punkbuster servers.

This also allows server admins to pass along evidence of cheating to Tripwire, which can use the information to close more loopholes.

Overall, Gibson thinks this strategy works very well. I have over 1,275 hours in Red Orchestra 2 and Rising Storm, he said. I ve been on a server with about two hackers in all that time. I asked him if Tripwire downloads paid cheats as part of its efforts to prevent them. We re a proactive dev, he chuckled. Infer from that what you will.


Gross Income
After being banned from Counter-Strike, I spent several weeks poking around the Ultra Cheats forums hoping that someone would talk to me about how the site was managed. I only got real attention once I admitted that I was writing a piece for PC Gamer. I bounced from admin to admin until I got to Slayer, Ultra Cheats manager and lead coder.

Slayer didn't want to talk at first. I don t think any good for Ultra Cheats would come from this, he said. I promised him I wouldn t use any real handles or even the site s real name, and that I wanted him to respond to quotes from developers like Gibson. I suspect the notion that he d get a reaction from a game developer is what got him on board.

Like Gibson, he needed confirmation that I was really writing for PC Gamer, and he was more thorough about it. I gave him my real email address and name (not Perry C. Gamble s), Twitter, and an email confirmation from an editor.

Gibson was worried about hackers posing as journalists. Slayer was worried about giving legal ammunition to parties that want Ultra Cheats gone, and competing cheat providers.

We set a date to talk over Skype, but when the time came Slayer wouldn t agree to a voice call, just text, because he was worried about me recording him as well as other reasons. To my surprise, he brought along another Ultra Cheats administrator, Prophet, and they d only talk to me together. I guessed that this was to keep one another from saying anything they might regret.



They said part of Ultra Cheats money comes from a different site that it operates in Brazil (a huge gaming market) and reseller sites, which sell Ultra Cheats product under a different brand in exchange for a cut of sales.

Slayer said that Zero s $1.25 million a year was a little inflated, but that I could come up with a rough estimate of Ultra Cheats annual revenue by gauging the size of the community.

On March 20, over 2,500 members logged into the Ultra Cheats forums, almost all of whom are plainly listed as paying for standard or more expensive cheat packages. At an average of $10 per user a month, Ultra Cheats makes $300,000 a year. Add to this the fact that the forum has almost 150,000 members overall (though we don t know how many are active, paying users), the Brazil site, and resellers, and it s not hard to imagine Ultra Cheats breaking a million dollars a year. Slayer declined to share the exact number of their active users.

He said coders supply cheats on the site in exchange for a cut of the sale. These vendors, as Slayer calls them, take in about half the profits of the whole operation. Both Prophet and Slayer said that they get paid enough, but not enough to quit their day jobs. More than minimum wage, they said. Customer support, technical support, and other people like Zero who help run the site get paid as well, but less. Zero didn t want to say how much he makes, but admitted that he has a day job and that free cheats attracted him to the position.

I do this because I really think of the community and staff as a big family, Prophet said.

The rest of the money goes to the ownership entity, which Slayer and Prophet refused to talk about in any way. All they would say is that the entity controls the PayPal account I paid (and hence all Ultra Cheats' money) and that only Slayer knows anything about it. Anything between this ownership entity and the rest of Ultra Cheats goes through him. For all I know, this ownership entity doesn t even exist and Slayer and Prophet were the actual owners.


Rage cheaters and closet cheaters
Gibson said that if you cheat, you always get detected eventually. After talking to cheaters, I m not sure that developers are as effective at preventing cheats as they think. According to Slayer, there are two kinds of cheaters: rage hackers and closet hackers. A rage hacker is someone who uses cheats to their fullest potential, even employing features that kill everyone on the server instantly. They're the ones you notice and hate.

Zero said that if it wasn't for hacking, games wouldn't be fun. He said cheating is a rush, similar to the one he got when he used to deface websites. In life, you re always going to have rebels, he said. It s like coming up to someone and asking, 'Why do you rape or kill?' But in this case it s cheating.

Since he compared cheating to the worst crimes a human can inflict on another human, I asked him if that means he thinks it s a bad thing. He didn't answer. I asked him how he would feel if he was in a game with another player who was using cheats against him. Doesn't matter to me because he s probably one of our customers, he said.

Slayer agrees with Gibson that anti-cheats like VAC and Punkbuster, which work similarly to anti-virus software, are effective at catching ragers and detecting public cheats quickly. But their methods are so reverse-engineered it s not even funny, he said. Punkbuster's signature scans are easily dumped using public knowledge available on public forums. If you re smart enough and you know the methods they employ, you can get around it easily.
"In life, you re always going to have rebels. It s like coming up to someone and asking, 'Why do you rape or kill?' But in this case it s cheating.' "
Punkbuster is basically defeated, Slayer said. If I write cheats and give them away on a public forum I can have my cheat up and running in 20 seconds because I found out exactly what they detected. If I was smart I would build that into my cheat and have my cheat fix itself on the fly, which isn t a stretch. Call of Duty dropped Punkbuster for a reason.

I asked Slayer why Valve, for example, doesn't download his cheats, track the server, block it, and come after him. If it wasn't obvious already, I wasn't a Computer Science major. Slayer is, and my questions amused him. You could do that, but what if I cycle my server IP every day, or every hour? Or I could reasonably and securely move DRM to the client with check on a less regular basis, or I could just spoof what VAC sees :). To be honest Emanuel, I can rent a server using a prepaid credit card via a VPN in another country and you will NEVER find who rented it.

Closet hackers hide the fact that they cheat. I'm proof that cheaters do get caught Steam banned me after a little more than two hours of aggressive, blatant cheating but members of the Ultra Cheats community told me that I was simply doing it wrong. In one of the most friendly, polite exchanges I ve ever had with online strangers, especially in the gaming sphere, they gave me tips on how to cheat without being detected.



Play like you re not hacking, one user who s been cheating in CS:GO with the same Steam account for over 250 hours told me. Play as you would normally, only you re able to see through walls. Act.

That means don t stare at walls, don t use an aimbot (since it moves the camera erratically and results in unreasonable kills), and make sure someone kills you in every match. He also believed you re less likely to get banned if you buy in-game items and get some hours in before you start cheating. He suggested that next time, I should launch the game and let it idle for a few hours before I do anything.

Another cheater suggested I practice cheating in free-to-play games. That s what I love about free games, he said. You can just keep coming back and there s nothing they can do about it.

If you re a good closet hacker you also won t get caught by statistical anti-cheats like FairFight, used in Titanfall and other Electronic Arts games, or Overwatch, another, peer-review layer of CS:GO s anti-cheat strategy, where approved players view flagged replay footage and vote on whether another player was cheating.

Image via free-hacks.com

Tripwire closes loopholes as fast as possible, but Ultra Cheats is fast too. If a vendor s cheat stops working, Ultra Cheats stops selling it and the money stops flowing. Detected cheats come back online within hours, days at the most.

And these are only the cheats that we know about. Anti-cheat can t detect what it can t get its hands on, as Slayer said. Between that and the proficient closet cheaters, I can guarantee that you ve played with way more cheaters than you think.
Supply and demand
If closet cheaters aren't trying to crush other players, why do they turn to cheats in the first place? Prophet started cheating so he could play with his kids. He s over 50, and suffers from a serious visual impairment. He says that without ESP (extrasensory perception), part of the wallhacking cheat that highlights enemy players with bright red boxes, he wouldn't be able to keep up. If I did not use cheats I would not be playing at all, he said.

Slayer said that they've heard from a few other people with disabilities who use cheats this way. It enables them to enjoy a game like you or I would normally, without cheats, he said. But even if there weren't players with disabilities cheating to rise to a normal level of play, as Prophet calls it, the reality is some players will always feel that they want special assistance.

If matchmaking worked perfectly and everyone always felt like a capable player up against equally skilled opponents, maybe there would be fewer of the closet cheaters that make Ultra Cheats a profitable business. When matchmaking works, you won't win every game, but you'll never feel dominated. It s like a friendly neighborhood basketball game. When it doesn't work, it feels like being mercilessly dunked on by LeBron James. That's not fun.

Image via 47r-squad.com

At that point some players dedicate a significant amount of time to get better. Others quit. A small minority turns to cheats. Even Slayer admits that what he does isn t good for games, but as long as there are enough of the latter he ll provide supply where there s demand.

Ultimately, the most effective anti-cheat strategy is to make cheating feel unnecessary. That means either more sophisticated, accurate matchmaking or some kind of handicap system, which some fighting games (Street Fighter IV, Smash Bros.) already implement.

Similar solutions in other games won t stop ragers. Nothing will. But they'll get caught, eventually. For closet cheaters, it might offer a legitimate way to play with others and undercut the paid cheats business.

Until then, this cycle is unstoppable, as Slayer said. If we didn't do it, someone else would.

Look, I don't want to waste your time here: this is not the most revelatory game trailer you will ever see. Across the thirty seconds of Mad Max footage, we get cars, crashes, swirling cameras and big text saying things like "THIS IS MORE THAN A MACHINE," while doing little to back up that statement.

It does have a few things going for it. Firstly, it's a brief chance to catch a glimpse at Avalanche's next game something I have high hopes for given their work with Just Cause 2. Secondly, if you play the video and then start tapping the number keys on your keyboard, the time-stamped sound effects make for a great industrial music soundboard.



Try it now! Here are some highlights to get you started:


Tap 2: A short-sharp metallic thud. Think Broken-era Nine Inch Nails.
Alternate 5 and 6: An energetic refrain with a high-pitched percussive smash. Definitely Pitchshifter-esque.
Tap 8: A full cacophonous assault of drones, scrapes and smacks. KMFDM would be proud.


Mad Max is due out next year, which is probably why we're only getting a thirty-second segment of some cars.

I've got it! The only explanation for Battlefield 4's ongoing campaign of unfortunate bugs, glitches and miscellaneous issues: the game was cursed by a wizard. I've arrived at this conclusion because as part of the blog post announcing the end of the "Death Shield" bug DICE also revealed a console based Rent-a-Server program. Then, soon after, they updated to say it wasn't working properly. Seriously, who has that luck?

The important thing is that one of the game's stranger quirks is now fixed. As discovered only a few weeks ago, but potentially present much longer, the Death Shield would block projectiles from passing over the bodies of incapacitated soldiers.



"We d also like to inform you that with today s server update," DICE wrote, "we are deploying a fix for the issue being referred to as Death Shield, where an invisible shield would appear around killed enemies, blocking weapons fire. Thank you for being patient as we worked to get this resolved."

That server update also deployed with the now traditional BF4 refrain, "General stability improvements".

Last week, DICE announced that they'd found the cause of a rubber-banding that had emerged around the release of the Naval Strike DLC. "We are already seeing performance improvement with 64-player matches and expect this to continue," they wrote.

"While the process took longer than we would ve liked," DICE continued, "we wanted to be 100% sure it was done right and that the long-term solution was properly in place."

In the UK, most arcade machines are gaudy, flashing money-sinks, designed to trap the arms of extra-strength-beer-swilling drunks as they attempt to pry loose change from the coin return slot. They are places of hellish despair, rich with unique smells and suspicious stains. In other countries, they also contain the promise of fun, friendship, and not stepping in a puddle of sick. Nowhere is this more the case than in Japan, where an array of popular arcades can still attract the interest of developers. Valve, for instance, are now collaborating with arcade specialists Taito on an arcade port of Left 4 Dead.

An informative trailer has surfaced on the port's official site:



Titled Left 4 Dead: Survivors, the concept will likely be similar in scope to Valve/Taito's previous collaboration, Half-Life 2: Survivor.

That's right, there was a Half-Life 2 arcade game, and it looks amazing. Terrible, sure, but also amazing.





In fairness, those are modes designed for arcade. The game's story mode is... sort of Half-Life 2. If you squint a bit.



If we're all very lucky, Left 4 Dead: Survivors will be similarly terribrilliant.

Valve has announced the teams that will participate in its third championship for our eSport of the year 2013, Dota 2's The International.

11 teams automatically qualify for the event, including the three prior champions:

Alliance
Titan eSports
Evil Geniuses
Fnatic
NewBee
Vici Gaming
Natus Vincere
Team DK
Invictus Gaming
Cloud9
Team Empire

These teams will compete against four regional qualifiers from the Americas, Southeast Asia, China, and Europe, in addition to the winner of the "Play-In" series, which is made up of the four runner-ups from the regional qualifiers. These regional qualifiers begin May 12 at 12:00 PM EST with the Americas series, ending May 27 with the conclusion of the European qualifier.

Valve's description of the qualifier format says that "In the first phase, each team plays every team once to determine which teams make it to the next phase. The top four teams advance and the other six are eliminated. The second phase is a double elimination best of three format with the 1st and 2nd place teams starting in the upper bracket and 3rd and 4th in the lower bracket. Each Regional Grand Finals is a best of five match."

All this action will lead up to the main event beginning July 18 at KeyArena in Seattle, Washington.

As a fellow hacker-warrior in Watch Dogs, T-Bone has a special complementary relationship to gruff nerd Aiden Pearce's vigilantism. Where Pearce douses for critical data within ctOS's sprawling net, T-Bone taps a few keys on his phone and blows up a bunch of cars. When Pearce draws heat from the law and kills power to a city block to sneak away, T-Bone shoots at a bunch of cop cars. Which blow up. I'm sensing a pattern here and I'm sure there's more to T-Bone beyond detonations and dreadlocks but finding out more means nabbing the $20/ 12 Season Pass for the single-player DLC, as Ubisoft's latest trailer reveals.

T-Bone seems like an outcast from a Grand Theft Auto game, ranting to Pearce with the air of someone gripped by conspiracy theory before jumping into a car and wreaking havoc on the streets. As Tyler touched upon in his preview, the Season Pass content looks like it's trying to simultaneously deliver a story-driven episode and another outlet for just running around and causing chaos in Chicago. I'd like to know more about T-Bone and how he got involved with Pearce or I can switch on They Live mode and start zapping disguised robo-civilians. At least that's a bit more subtle than giant spiders.

Watch Dogs and its Season Pass launches on May 27. Until then, take note of its system requirements and reliance on Uplay.

This is a chronicle of our absurd, canon-destroying playthrough of Star Wars Conquest, a mod for sandbox RPG Mount & Blade. Our campaign to ruin Star Wars appears each Tuesday.

Twenty hours into my Star Wars Conquest campaign, I realize that I have no idea what the game s win state is. Is there one? Am I meant to crawl the galaxy until the end of time, endlessly gutting Stormtroopers, endlessly pillaging space farms, endlessly watching planets trade hands like used Toyotas between the immortal commanders of the Star Wars universe? By now, I m positive that it s impossible to actually kill off any of the game s main figures defeating a commander in combat results in either them escaping or being captured and eventually escaping. Hmmph.

But then again, of the main figures in the Empire, I ve only crossed laser swords with Emperor Palpatine and Grand Moff Tarkin, and I defeated neither. Maybe hunting them down will result in some sort of meaningful change in the state of the war.

I continue to roll with the main Rebel fleet, led by Mon Mothma and Han Solo s ships, with the hope that our hilarious swarm of 500-some troops will be able to bulldoze through anything that gets in our way.



Our first fight is on Endor, where I notice a familiar hairstyle fighting bravely alongside me.





Jesus, Leia is vicious. She wades in with a knife, gutting any Stormtrooper in reach. Go Leia! Stab! We re right behind you! Your reckless, unprofessional violence inspires us all.



Well, damn. Leia takes one too many blaster shots (about seven, for the record) to the gown and crumples into the ferns of Endor. She's fine just wounded and rejoins the war effort after our victory. This battle sparks a full-on rampage of defeating and capturing mid-level Imperial commanders. I get my hands dirty.




(Owned.)







I stop to chat up Mon Mothma in between all the victory and killing and glory, hoping she has a high-level assignment for me.



Likewise, Commandress. Oh, what a battle that was! I remember it well. I liked the part where I cut 78 Scout Troopers in half and your army mostly stood around and got shot. So, do you have any dangerous, tide-turning special operations for me to go on? Kidnappings? Assassinations? Any suicide missions for which I'll be celebrated for bravely completing?



Let me make sure I ve got this: you want me, the badass Jedi robot who captured the Death Star last week to shake down your own citizens for money. Does the Rebel Alliance not have TurboTax? Have you heard of direct deposit? It s very convenient.

I run the mundane credit-collection mission for Mon Mothma, then return to the crowd of ships to resume our work of sieging battlestations and minor planets. Everything is going smoothly until a certain, shadowy Sith Lord interrupts our conquest.



Oh my god! You probably get this a lot, but biggest. fan. ever. I mean, my mom named me after you, even despite us being loyal servants of the Rebellion. I m so flattered, Vader.



Well alright then. Let me get my Rancors, we ll be right with you.

I charge Vader s army with my weird menagerie of Baby Rancors and mercenaries. Ever the tactical mastermind, he sits on a ledge in the corner of the map the high ground.



I cut my way through his mob of bodyguards, expecting a tough fight at the edge of the map.



But I slash at his legs twice, and Vader falls easily and clumsily to the ground. Mon Mothma sends her regards, Darth.

Everyone is pleased, particularly the Rancors.



Good work, everyone. Vader escapes captivity, of course, but I chug along anyway, looking for more high-level Imperials to shine my weaponized flashlight at. More of that next week. In the meantime, remember my name (and my fearsome Ewok skin hat).

Ludum Dare 29, the merely days-long game development competition, took place this past weekend. In addition to the usual screenshots, panic, and lack of sleep on display in developer Twitter feeds, this weekend s Ludum Dare hit a record: 2,497 games were submitted to the competition, an all-time high. The theme for this weekend was Beneath the Surface, so most of the games involve mining, digging, or swimming in one way or another. Phil took a look at Beneath The City, but that's just one of the free games to come out of the weekend.

There are two modes in the Ludum Dare Competition and Jam each with slightly different rules regarding submission deadlines, using art from your other projects, and whether you can work in teams. The end result, though, is the same: make a game, make it fast, and give it to the world. From games where you escape an underground troll lair (Beneath the Trolls) to games where you navigate the inner spheres of molecules (Atomical), there s a lot of amazing, free games to check out. Special shout-out to Kill or Kill, a game where you have to manage your inner rage and resist the urge to kill.



Check out the Ludum Dare 29 homepage to scroll through all 2,497 of these free games by amateurs and pros alike. It s a golden age of ideas and video games, everyone: we just get to enjoy the ride. Congratulations to all of the Ludum Dare developers for their record-breaking productivity.

Tamriel's ashy homeland of the Dark Elves is the source for many a Elder Scrolls hero's first memories exploring ancient Dwemer ruins, sticking a spear into Dagoth Ur, or cursing the very words "cliff racer" so it's small wonder a number of large-scale mods focus on overhauling the 2002 RPG. The massive Skywind effort is certainly exciting to look forward to, but some older projects are still steaming along quite nicely. Morrowind Rebirth has been around for a few years, and its latest update adds new areas to the game's already massive world.

Like other revamp mods, Rebirth builds upon the core game with a pile of small tweaks and upgrades noticeable pretty much everywhere. Bandits and the odd cultist roam roadways and trails, a familiar furnish to random encounters transported from newer Elder Scrolls games. Cities have far more citizens and travelers roaming around, and the buildings themselves have sharper textures replacing the older, smudgier visuals. More enemy types appear for vanquishing and looting, most of them hailing from Daedric or undead planes (it isn't an Elder Scrolls game without Draugr!). New and customized weapons and armor also await your possession, and many of them are nicely detailed motifs of Tamriel's various races such as Imperial, Nord, and Argonian.

I'm glad the changes don't go overboard with completely stripping away and replacing everything, but what it does change is a worthy alternative to the stock experience, and it's different enough to merit another adventure through Vvardenfell once more. Grab it off Mod DB, but take note: you'll probably have to start fresh if you're planning on jumping into an old save game with this mod switched on to avoid odd bugs.

Dota 2 hasn't been out officially for even a year, but the most popular game on Steam is getting a host of updates and changes. Titled Spring Cleaning, the update includes dozens of changes to the game s inventory, interface, and heroes.

The changes are too numerous and minuscule to detail individually, but taken altogether they represent a large overhaul to the speed and stability of the world s most popular MOBA. Some heroes will see more utility out of their attacks: Zeus, for example, can shoot lightning at the ground, so you can target the feet of invisible enemies. Others have new abilities: If she dies, Vengeful Spirit now lowers the damage output of her killer out of pure spite. Fun!

The game's interface will also get a refresh in some subtle ways, as well. There's a new screen effect for dead players, which can be turned off in the game's options. Friend requests can be sent from the in-game scoreboard, too. Changes like these show that Valve is still interested in streamlining its popular game.

There are new treasures and a whole slew of bug fixes as well. You can check out the full patch notes to see the full list, and determine how Spring Cleaning will affect your hero of choice when it arrives next week.