Ghostbusters licensing was crazy. The animated series was called "The Real Ghostbusters" because there was already an animated series called Ghostbusters. I seem to remember it had a haunted car and a scarecrow dude and it was something like Scooby-Do but with monsters doing the investigating.
Also, did anyone else ever play the original Ghostbusters game on the ZX Spectrum? I loved that when I was a kid and sunk so many hours into it.
Game of the year so far for me. Absolutely stunning execution on all fronts with an evident love of the source material (both films and games) from the devs.
It's perfect so far. Definitely recommend to anyone who liked Blackthorn or Rolling Thunder and the 80's vibe is played to perfection. It's got a sense of humour but it's never laughing at the source material, just making the same sort of jokes they made in the classic 80's films that inspired it.
The soundtrack is also a slice of synth perfection.
I'd really like to hear some goods news about Beyond Good & Evil 2. There was a rumour a couple of years ago that Nintendo had invested and it was coming to Switch (possibly as an exclusive) but that looks less likely now.
@SeasickPlatypus But it's free on mobile because that uses a different funding model. And that funding model (thankfully) doesn't translate well to Switch. I'd much prefer to be able to buy the game for pennies (I think it's about 89p currently, the sequel is) than be stuck with a game that springs ads on me or wants more and more money for virtual objects. IAP can be done well, but I'd much rather just pay upfront for the game. Are you saying they shouldn't be able to release their game on Switch? Or that Nintendo should force them to use the same funding method as on other platforms? I'm not sure who would benefit from a policy like that.
And when I called it unfinished earlier I was being a bit harsh. It's a complete game that you can potentially sink hundreds of hours into, but there's no end-game nor really any plot. Some people would, quite rightly, describe it as shovelware but it reminds me of a game I loved 20-odd years ago and the things it does well, it does really well. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that it's on the eshop in its current form.
@ermzzz Agree totally, there's no single right answer to this one. Nothing against Jim Sterling personally but it's very easy for someone to rant on the internet and demand "Something must be done!". Regarding Event Horizon, I loved it but that's because I loved StarCon2. EV has zero plot and just consists of travelling to new star systems, fighting everything there and then moving on. There are loads of parts to the game that have been added in but not used in any meaningful way (like the resources you can collect from planets) and there's no real point to the game apart from improving your fleet and battling more and more enemies. The plus points are that you can completely reconfigure your ships with loads of components that can have a massive effect upon how they play. I thought it was worth it for the price, but you need to accept you're getting a cool battle mode with a barebones game wrapped around it. I haven't tried the sequel, that seems more based on multi-ship fleet battles though.
@sup3Rmint Agree totally, but the actual logistics of searching asset stores/other platforms for evidence of asset flips is going to be a significant piece of work, and as long as no licenses are being breached then it's hard to see on what grounds such games could be rejected. @Agriculture Who decides what counts as a "bad game"? And how "bad" does it have to be in order to be rejected? I think Fortnite is a terrible game, along with all the paedo-bait Japanese games, but does that mean they should be removed? @SeasickPlatypus Value is entirely subjective. I've more than got my money's worth for Event Horizon so have no complaints about the amount I paid for it. It was originally a mobile release so would have been free but ad-supported/in-app purchases. I'd much rather pay a few quid for it than have to to watch ads after every battle or pay for "premium currency". There's no quality control issue there, and presumably Nintendo don't set the prices so have no control over how much is charged.
I'm not defending it, just correcting your statement so people don't get confused about the issue in question.
And I'm not defending it, just pointing out that it's not as easy to stop as some seem to think.
I hate crap games as much as the next person, but everyone has a different definition of crap.
Regarding the game specifically mentioned in the article, I think it looks like utter trash, but other people may enjoy it so who's to say whether or not it should be allowed onto the eshop?
@Sup3Rmint This isn't plagiarism though. The assets are sold and licensed for other people to use in their own games so Nintendo has no grounds to refuse a game because it's using purchased assets.
@Pod That sounds like a reasonable enough starting point, but I'm not sure how workable it is in reality. It would mean you'd need to have someone manually search asset stores to try and match what's in the game. I can't see any easy way to automate that as many games may well contain pre-built assets and a shady producer could just change a couple of items to ensure it's not a 100% match for the store-supplied assets so it would fail automatically. Then you inevitably get into judgement calls of where to draw the line and it gets very messy. Don't get me wrong, nobody likes to see the eshop littered with trash, but defining trash without being subjective is pretty much impossible. Like other platforms, the Switch is somewhat becoming a victim of its own success. The more popular a platform is the more games you're going to see at all quality levels and inevitably it's easier to produce cheap crap.
How are Nintendo (or any sales platform) supposed to know if a game is just an asset flip? If the terms of the license the assets are purchased under allows it to be released without any substantial changes then there's not much you can do about it. The only way to refuse it would be on "quality" which is a) very subjective and b) a complete nightmare to police. I've got Switch games that other people would consider absolute trash. One that springs to mind is Event Horizon. It's a mobile port of an unfinished game (in that there's no end goal and certain elements are never fleshed out) but I love it because the combat is like a more complex version of Star Control 2. It cost me less than a quid and I've got more than my money's worth out of it but I expect most people would consider it a joke that it's even released on Switch.
Looks like it could be quite a good laugh, although I'm not sure it'll have enough legs to justify the amount they're charging. They also need to lose the on-screen controls, that just makes it look like a lazy mobile port which may well be doing it a disservice.
@Stargazer Yeah, it reminded me of Steamworld and I thought I'd hate that at first but it was really good when I started playing it. That's part of why I don't want to download the demo. I don't need any more [rogue-lite/like] games I can't complete cluttering up my backlog.
Damn. Just when I've sworn off buying random rogue-likes this comes along and looks awesome. Like some FrankenRogueVania. And the main character is totally customisable you say? Bugger. Now I have to download the demo. I hope it's utterly crap because currently I'm fixated on buying Huntdown next week and don't want to impulse buy this in the meantime. I will say, the graphics in the static shots aren't really doing anything for me. They're not bad but they look a bit cheap and cartoony in places. I see that's sort of what they're going for but I'm not convinced they've hit the sweet spot although I'll reserve judgement until I've played the demo and inevitably thrown shekels at a game that I'll probably never get around to finding the time to complete.
I find using a big arcade style stick like that less comfortable than using a thumb-stick. And the button layout is much less ergonomic than a standard controller.
This does look very good. Anna Conda looks like a female version of Snake Plissken which is an awesome idea. There's even a fight with a big fat bloke in a run-down ring, straight out of Escape From New York. I'll wait for some reviews to come in but I'm almost certainly getting this one.
@Drac_Mazoku Fair enough. I don't do social media so my only exposure was this site, and it didn't seem like a big deal to avoid it if you don't want it spoiled.
A new F-Zero as an evolution of GX would be amazing. All the awesome vehicles and characters and tracks plus the chance to build your own personal racer with unlockable parts.
Nintendo have a real chance to produce a next-gen racer that fully realises what they did with GX, and also steals the crown from Wipeout.
I'd even take a cell-shaded version of it, as long as it means they can pack in more sweet content.
Career mode for all characters plus a blank career for your own custom-built character/racer.
Challenge modes with various different win-conditions required to progress.
Loads of unlockable vehicle parts and maybe an option for armed races where everyone gets a main weapon/sub weapon combo and can take out the other racers.
I've seen this pop up on the Eshop a few times, and been interested, but this review definitely makes me want to take another look. Huge Running Man fan, and the old-school aesthetic tickles me the right way. Plus, the review mentioned Spec Ops: The Line, which is one of the greatest games ever made. Even though they said it's nothing like it, I do like the game that starts out cartoony then slowly starts to make the deaths weight upon you. The complete opposite to Blasphemy, which starts of with a metric arseton of murder then tries to make you feel something through particularly poignant deaths, or those that reveal more of the history and lore of the game world. Both methods can work well, with a deft touch, but I'm more interested in this game than I was previously.
@PrettyMuchEveryoneElse It's pretty clearly marked as a guide, though. If I was worried about spoilers the article title would have been enough to stop me clicking it and, even if I hadn't realised it before, the first paragraph would have warned me off.
Question: Does this mean that unlocking the secret levels as a new character means you get to see a 16-bit pixel version of them in these levels? That would be pretty sweet.
@PiXelSteF Watch the trailer, it looks like a reskin of Thousand Year Door. The animation style and battles are almost identical.
I'll definitely keep an eye out for this. I was playing Thousand Year Door again recently with my son (his first time through) and I'd forgotten how enjoyable it is. It helps that the writing is brilliant though.
@DTfeartheBEARD Fair play. I just remember that I was trying to find out something similar and while the Switch eShop wasn't explicit, the little icons on the website make it perfectly clear.
@Darknyht I'll grab Utopia 9 later when my son's off Splatoon.
@Brydontk Most of them are kind of mediocre, but in a good way. There's nothing stand-out about them but nothing terrible either, and the prices are reasonable for what they are.
I've found that checking on the UK eshop website and clicking the details section shows all the different versions of co-op it supports. I find the info there more comprehensive and clear than the actual Switch eShop listing.
This game looks awesome although I was always more of a Final Fight man, back in the day. Definitely going on the wishlist for a sale though.
Some of their games are pretty good (Rekt, Akane, Manaspark). Others less so. But they're all at decent prices. I've had my eye on Utopia 9 for a while, looks pretty fun. Can't afford to pass it up at 49p.
As others have noticed, this looks a lot like Lost Vikings with the serial numbers filed off. The 3 characters' abilities are even the same.
EDIT: Thinking about it, there are worse games to crib from, and the price is pretty good so I may have a look at this. I'd prefer it if they'd done something different with the character abilities though.
@NEStalgia Totally agree about the flaws with cloud computing, it's putting all your data on somebody else's computer and trusting their security. Not to mention the associated problems with vendor lock-in. However, that's not an argument against MFA. The Adobe one is a good example. MFA would have mitigated the risks to end-users of having their passwords breached in plaintext (or encrypted with obsolete hashing mechanisms). It won't do anything about CC details or similar being stolen from the central servers, but if they're stored in transit or at-rest in plaintext then that's a massive PCI-DSS violation which result in the company in question losing the ability to handle CC transactions. MFA is purely to stop the end-user's account being accessed by another user. It won't stop anything else, but then it's not designed to. And yes, phones can be lost/stolen/compromised but that's why you rely on multiple factors. Defence in depth is at the basis of all security, physical or otherwise. MFA makes it harder, not impossible. In the same way that the lock(s) on your front door act as a deterrent, but nothing else. A crowbar will get you straight in if you don't mind being noisy and obvious. Also, and this is a big point, MFA acts to protect against users reusing the same credentials everywhere. So many people do it that something like MFA becomes necessary. A company can put the most stringent security imaginable in place (ISO compliant stuff) and yet if a user writes their credentials on a post-it note it's all for nothing. MFA helps mitigate that. It's not a panacea, but anyone claiming that is a snake-oil salesman anyway. At the end of the day, you have to weigh up security vs convenience and that's an individual decision. It's a mistake to write off MFA just because you find it inconvenient though.
@crossmr
All that tells is is that it's likely NNID isn't the source. As to repeated breaches, if people are using a compromised device to change the password they'll remain compromised. Likewise, if they're doing stupid things like just incrementing the number at the end of their password then it won't help either. I've got software here for cracking admin credentials on database files. There's an option to try common variants of passwords built in to it.
Anyway, I'm not married to the theory of credential-stuffing, it just made most sense based on available information. With any breach you've got to be prepared to re-evaluate as more information becomes available.
@NEStalgia
Do you have anything you can cite that shows Japan lagging on data security? It's not something I've heard of before so I'd be interested if you can supply any corroboration for that statement.
Not that interested though, as you clearly don't understand MFA.
The onus for securing your own data is always on the user. Whether that means not giving it to dodgy sites or ensuring you use strong passwords or enabling MFA.
MFA reduces the risk of a centralised breach affecting users. The password is useless without the additional authentication factor.
Also, phone apps aren't the only available authentication factors. USB dongles have been around for years.
Security always has to be balanced against convenience. For a site like this one, MFA is pointless because it's not securing anything particularly sensitive or valuable. For an online account that handles cash transactions it's much more imperative to secure it properly.
Also, I feel for you if your job requires you to use overly onerous authentication, but that sounds like they're doing security wrong.
If you're having authentication problems I feel bad for you son,
I've got 99 problems but MFA ain't one.
@NEStalgia
I think it's a bit of stretch to claim that because Sony had bad security it's a Japanese thing. Sony happen to be a Japanese company, but bad security is all over the place.
The reason I'm leaning towards it being a credential-stuffing breach is because of the limited number affected (that we know of so far) and because it's more common and easier to implement than sophisticated hacks.
EDIT: Also, your comments on MFA are pretty ridiculous. The entire point of MFA is to ensure that you're not relying simply on a username/password combination. Using an authentictor app (or phonecall) means that any attacker needs to compromise your local device as well as hacking the central system. That makes it orders of magnitude harder to carry out at scale. The only way MFA is a threat is if it's badly implemented but that's like saying that because there are bad builders out there nobody should ever build anything.
@RiasGremory Putting numbers in your password doesn't make it any safer, nor harder to brute-force. A secure password is all about length, nothing else. Also, if your password gets breached because someone stored it in plaintext and then got hacked (or your device is hit by a keylogger) it's completely irrelevant how "strong" your password is.
@nab1 Yeah, it's ridiculously common because breached lists of username/e-mail + password combinations are all over the place. Also, it doesn't require much in the way of technical knowledge to set it up. I've not looked but I bet there are loads of open-source autologin software available on GitHub, for instance.
@GamerDad66 Brute-forcing 160K+ accounts would take far too much compute time. It's far more likely they're trying to log into each account once with a password scraped from another breach. That's harder to block because you have to monitor for login attempts against multiple accounts from a single IP address. There's also a question about how you police that. What is an unreasonable number of accounts to be accessed from a single IP address? If you and a few friends are all at your place, using your wi-fi, you'll all have the same external IP address (as your router will handle NAT internally so you all get the correct traffic). There's a risk of annoying legitimate users if you start blocking everyone in the same house. Also, the scammers can easily set up proxies to ensure they're regularly switching the IP address they're using.
@Bobobiwan There's no indication so far that Nintendo have been breached. As I said earlier, it's more likely due to credential stuffing. There's nothing Nintendo can do if people are re-using passwords across sites so it doesn't point to a failure on their part. The reason I suspect cred stuffing is because it's so prevalent at the moment and if they've got passwords then that's unlikely to have come from Nintendo's internal systems being hacked. Storing passwords in plaintext is a rookie error I wouldn't expect them to make. Using Google Authenticator isn't ideal, but there are alternatives that can handle it without involving them.
It's more likely to be credential stuffing than an actual hack. Credential stuffing is ridiculously easy and it's fairly trivial to write a bot to automate the process. Just feed it lists from pastebin or wherever and set the target site(s).
For me, Burnout 2 was the pinnacle of the series. 3 overcomplicated itself and ruined Crash-For-Cash by adding powerups and requiring track knowledge for the best score.
I fondly remember sitting with all sorts of random mates, smoking and seeing who could get the biggest crash. It was pure fun and everyone had a pretty much equal chance of stacking their motor gloriously.
I think I played Paradise for about 10 minutes. Really didn't get on with how it played, even though I like the open-world idea when I first heard about it.
Comments 142
Re: Feature: The Game That Starred Mickey Mouse, Ghostbusters Or Garfield, Depending On Your Region
Ghostbusters licensing was crazy. The animated series was called "The Real Ghostbusters" because there was already an animated series called Ghostbusters. I seem to remember it had a haunted car and a scarecrow dude and it was something like Scooby-Do but with monsters doing the investigating.
Also, did anyone else ever play the original Ghostbusters game on the ZX Spectrum? I loved that when I was a kid and sunk so many hours into it.
@Roam85
Ren and Stimpy get my vote.
Re: Review: Huntdown - A Gloriously Gory Run 'N Gun Blaster
@andyc777
That's "female Snake Plissken".
She's TFU.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkZoPBO7i2A
Re: Review: Huntdown - A Gloriously Gory Run 'N Gun Blaster
Game of the year so far for me. Absolutely stunning execution on all fronts with an evident love of the source material (both films and games) from the devs.
Re: Old-School Arcade Side-Scroller Huntdown Explodes Onto Switch Today
It's perfect so far. Definitely recommend to anyone who liked Blackthorn or Rolling Thunder and the 80's vibe is played to perfection. It's got a sense of humour but it's never laughing at the source material, just making the same sort of jokes they made in the classic 80's films that inspired it.
The soundtrack is also a slice of synth perfection.
Re: Immortal Realms: Vampire Wars Brings Flashy Turn-Based Combat To Switch This August
@PortablexombieV2
Random comment. But I'm in the same boat as you.
Re: Ubisoft Forward Announced - A Brand New "E3-Style" Showcase Airing On 12th July
I'd really like to hear some goods news about Beyond Good & Evil 2. There was a rumour a couple of years ago that Nintendo had invested and it was coming to Switch (possibly as an exclusive) but that looks less likely now.
Re: Nintendo Accused Of Hosting Asset Flip Game On Switch, And Fans Aren't Happy
@SeasickPlatypus
But it's free on mobile because that uses a different funding model. And that funding model (thankfully) doesn't translate well to Switch.
I'd much prefer to be able to buy the game for pennies (I think it's about 89p currently, the sequel is) than be stuck with a game that springs ads on me or wants more and more money for virtual objects. IAP can be done well, but I'd much rather just pay upfront for the game.
Are you saying they shouldn't be able to release their game on Switch? Or that Nintendo should force them to use the same funding method as on other platforms?
I'm not sure who would benefit from a policy like that.
And when I called it unfinished earlier I was being a bit harsh. It's a complete game that you can potentially sink hundreds of hours into, but there's no end-game nor really any plot.
Some people would, quite rightly, describe it as shovelware but it reminds me of a game I loved 20-odd years ago and the things it does well, it does really well. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that it's on the eshop in its current form.
Re: Nintendo Accused Of Hosting Asset Flip Game On Switch, And Fans Aren't Happy
@ermzzz
Agree totally, there's no single right answer to this one. Nothing against Jim Sterling personally but it's very easy for someone to rant on the internet and demand "Something must be done!".
Regarding Event Horizon, I loved it but that's because I loved StarCon2. EV has zero plot and just consists of travelling to new star systems, fighting everything there and then moving on. There are loads of parts to the game that have been added in but not used in any meaningful way (like the resources you can collect from planets) and there's no real point to the game apart from improving your fleet and battling more and more enemies. The plus points are that you can completely reconfigure your ships with loads of components that can have a massive effect upon how they play.
I thought it was worth it for the price, but you need to accept you're getting a cool battle mode with a barebones game wrapped around it.
I haven't tried the sequel, that seems more based on multi-ship fleet battles though.
Re: Nintendo Accused Of Hosting Asset Flip Game On Switch, And Fans Aren't Happy
@sup3Rmint
Agree totally, but the actual logistics of searching asset stores/other platforms for evidence of asset flips is going to be a significant piece of work, and as long as no licenses are being breached then it's hard to see on what grounds such games could be rejected.
@Agriculture
Who decides what counts as a "bad game"? And how "bad" does it have to be in order to be rejected? I think Fortnite is a terrible game, along with all the paedo-bait Japanese games, but does that mean they should be removed?
@SeasickPlatypus
Value is entirely subjective. I've more than got my money's worth for Event Horizon so have no complaints about the amount I paid for it. It was originally a mobile release so would have been free but ad-supported/in-app purchases. I'd much rather pay a few quid for it than have to to watch ads after every battle or pay for "premium currency". There's no quality control issue there, and presumably Nintendo don't set the prices so have no control over how much is charged.
Re: Nintendo Accused Of Hosting Asset Flip Game On Switch, And Fans Aren't Happy
@sup3Rmint
I'm not defending it, just correcting your statement so people don't get confused about the issue in question.
And I'm not defending it, just pointing out that it's not as easy to stop as some seem to think.
I hate crap games as much as the next person, but everyone has a different definition of crap.
Regarding the game specifically mentioned in the article, I think it looks like utter trash, but other people may enjoy it so who's to say whether or not it should be allowed onto the eshop?
Re: Nintendo Accused Of Hosting Asset Flip Game On Switch, And Fans Aren't Happy
@Sup3Rmint
This isn't plagiarism though. The assets are sold and licensed for other people to use in their own games so Nintendo has no grounds to refuse a game because it's using purchased assets.
Re: Nintendo Accused Of Hosting Asset Flip Game On Switch, And Fans Aren't Happy
@Pod
That sounds like a reasonable enough starting point, but I'm not sure how workable it is in reality. It would mean you'd need to have someone manually search asset stores to try and match what's in the game. I can't see any easy way to automate that as many games may well contain pre-built assets and a shady producer could just change a couple of items to ensure it's not a 100% match for the store-supplied assets so it would fail automatically.
Then you inevitably get into judgement calls of where to draw the line and it gets very messy.
Don't get me wrong, nobody likes to see the eshop littered with trash, but defining trash without being subjective is pretty much impossible. Like other platforms, the Switch is somewhat becoming a victim of its own success. The more popular a platform is the more games you're going to see at all quality levels and inevitably it's easier to produce cheap crap.
Re: Nintendo Accused Of Hosting Asset Flip Game On Switch, And Fans Aren't Happy
How are Nintendo (or any sales platform) supposed to know if a game is just an asset flip?
If the terms of the license the assets are purchased under allows it to be released without any substantial changes then there's not much you can do about it.
The only way to refuse it would be on "quality" which is a) very subjective and b) a complete nightmare to police.
I've got Switch games that other people would consider absolute trash. One that springs to mind is Event Horizon. It's a mobile port of an unfinished game (in that there's no end goal and certain elements are never fleshed out) but I love it because the combat is like a more complex version of Star Control 2. It cost me less than a quid and I've got more than my money's worth out of it but I expect most people would consider it a joke that it's even released on Switch.
Re: Prepare For High-Octane Car Combat When Carnage: Battle Arena Smashes Onto Switch
Looks like it could be quite a good laugh, although I'm not sure it'll have enough legs to justify the amount they're charging.
They also need to lose the on-screen controls, that just makes it look like a lazy mobile port which may well be doing it a disservice.
Re: Review: Fury Unleashed - A Gloriously Compelling Cross Between Dead Cells And Contra
@Stargazer
Yeah, it reminded me of Steamworld and I thought I'd hate that at first but it was really good when I started playing it.
That's part of why I don't want to download the demo. I don't need any more [rogue-lite/like] games I can't complete cluttering up my backlog.
Re: Review: Fury Unleashed - A Gloriously Compelling Cross Between Dead Cells And Contra
Damn. Just when I've sworn off buying random rogue-likes this comes along and looks awesome. Like some FrankenRogueVania. And the main character is totally customisable you say?
Bugger.
Now I have to download the demo. I hope it's utterly crap because currently I'm fixated on buying Huntdown next week and don't want to impulse buy this in the meantime.
I will say, the graphics in the static shots aren't really doing anything for me. They're not bad but they look a bit cheap and cartoony in places. I see that's sort of what they're going for but I'm not convinced they've hit the sweet spot although I'll reserve judgement until I've played the demo and inevitably thrown shekels at a game that I'll probably never get around to finding the time to complete.
Re: Mortal Kombat 11: Aftermath Revealed, A New Story Expansion Launching This Month
Sheeva looks surprisingly hot a for a giant demon girl.
Re: SteamDolls Is An Upcoming Metroidvania Starring The Voice Of Solid Snake
Dishonoured + Blasphemous = SteamDolls
Does look pretty cool though. I'll keep an eye out for it if it ever escapes Kickstarter and becomes an actual thing.
Re: Introducing The Smash Stick, A Fight Stick Specially Designed For Super Smash Bros.
I find using a big arcade style stick like that less comfortable than using a thumb-stick. And the button layout is much less ergonomic than a standard controller.
I'm not sure who this is supposed to appeal to.
Re: Huntdown Brings 16-Bit Arcade Shooter Comedy Action To The Switch On 12th May
This does look very good. Anna Conda looks like a female version of Snake Plissken which is an awesome idea.
There's even a fight with a big fat bloke in a run-down ring, straight out of Escape From New York.
I'll wait for some reviews to come in but I'm almost certainly getting this one.
Re: Guide: Streets Of Rage 4 Secret Retro Level Locations
@Drac_Mazoku
Fair enough. I don't do social media so my only exposure was this site, and it didn't seem like a big deal to avoid it if you don't want it spoiled.
Re: Review: Ministry of Broadcast - A Grim But Enjoyable Cinematic Platformer
@StuartGipp
If it's that moment when it honestly makes you wonder why you keep playing this game (or a toned-down version of it) then I'm sold.
Re: Soapbox: Switch Really Needs Games Like Excitebike 64, Wave Race, 1080° Snowboarding And, Yes, F-Zero
A new F-Zero as an evolution of GX would be amazing. All the awesome vehicles and characters and tracks plus the chance to build your own personal racer with unlockable parts.
Nintendo have a real chance to produce a next-gen racer that fully realises what they did with GX, and also steals the crown from Wipeout.
I'd even take a cell-shaded version of it, as long as it means they can pack in more sweet content.
Career mode for all characters plus a blank career for your own custom-built character/racer.
Challenge modes with various different win-conditions required to progress.
Loads of unlockable vehicle parts and maybe an option for armed races where everyone gets a main weapon/sub weapon combo and can take out the other racers.
Oh well, I can dream.
Re: Review: Ministry of Broadcast - A Grim But Enjoyable Cinematic Platformer
I've seen this pop up on the Eshop a few times, and been interested, but this review definitely makes me want to take another look.
Huge Running Man fan, and the old-school aesthetic tickles me the right way.
Plus, the review mentioned Spec Ops: The Line, which is one of the greatest games ever made. Even though they said it's nothing like it, I do like the game that starts out cartoony then slowly starts to make the deaths weight upon you.
The complete opposite to Blasphemy, which starts of with a metric arseton of murder then tries to make you feel something through particularly poignant deaths, or those that reveal more of the history and lore of the game world.
Both methods can work well, with a deft touch, but I'm more interested in this game than I was previously.
Re: Guide: Streets Of Rage 4 Secret Retro Level Locations
@PrettyMuchEveryoneElse
It's pretty clearly marked as a guide, though. If I was worried about spoilers the article title would have been enough to stop me clicking it and, even if I hadn't realised it before, the first paragraph would have warned me off.
Question: Does this mean that unlocking the secret levels as a new character means you get to see a 16-bit pixel version of them in these levels? That would be pretty sweet.
Re: Kemco And City Connection Apologise Over New Switch JRPG Revenge Of Justice
Read the article hoping they'd apologised for the utterly stupid name but alas, some people have no shame.
Re: The Paper Mario Lookalike Bug Fables Launches On Switch At The End Of May
@PiXelSteF
Watch the trailer, it looks like a reskin of Thousand Year Door. The animation style and battles are almost identical.
I'll definitely keep an eye out for this. I was playing Thousand Year Door again recently with my son (his first time through) and I'd forgotten how enjoyable it is. It helps that the writing is brilliant though.
Re: Review: Streets of Rage 4 - A Perfect Modernisation Of A Beloved Franchise
@DTfeartheBEARD
Fair play. I just remember that I was trying to find out something similar and while the Switch eShop wasn't explicit, the little icons on the website make it perfectly clear.
Re: Review: Telling Lies - Sam Barlow's FMV Detective Thriller Translates Smoothly To Switch
@Lordplops @dragonslacker1
I spent the first half hour of Upgrade thinking it WAS Tom Hardy. The only thing I couldn't work out was why he wasn't mumbling. Cracking film though.
Re: QubicGames Kicks Off Huge Month-Long Switch Sale, Get Up To 95% Off
@Darknyht I'll grab Utopia 9 later when my son's off Splatoon.
@Brydontk Most of them are kind of mediocre, but in a good way. There's nothing stand-out about them but nothing terrible either, and the prices are reasonable for what they are.
Re: Review: Streets of Rage 4 - A Perfect Modernisation Of A Beloved Franchise
@DTfeartheBEARD
I've found that checking on the UK eshop website and clicking the details section shows all the different versions of co-op it supports. I find the info there more comprehensive and clear than the actual Switch eShop listing.
This game looks awesome although I was always more of a Final Fight man, back in the day. Definitely going on the wishlist for a sale though.
Re: QubicGames Kicks Off Huge Month-Long Switch Sale, Get Up To 95% Off
Some of their games are pretty good (Rekt, Akane, Manaspark). Others less so. But they're all at decent prices. I've had my eye on Utopia 9 for a while, looks pretty fun. Can't afford to pass it up at 49p.
Re: SNES-Inspired Puzzle-Platformer Mushroom Heroes Leaps Onto Switch This Week
As others have noticed, this looks a lot like Lost Vikings with the serial numbers filed off. The 3 characters' abilities are even the same.
EDIT: Thinking about it, there are worse games to crib from, and the price is pretty good so I may have a look at this. I'd prefer it if they'd done something different with the character abilities though.
Re: Nintendo Confirms That Around 160,000 Accounts May Have Been Hacked, Personal Info Possibly At Risk
@NEStalgia
Totally agree about the flaws with cloud computing, it's putting all your data on somebody else's computer and trusting their security. Not to mention the associated problems with vendor lock-in.
However, that's not an argument against MFA.
The Adobe one is a good example. MFA would have mitigated the risks to end-users of having their passwords breached in plaintext (or encrypted with obsolete hashing mechanisms). It won't do anything about CC details or similar being stolen from the central servers, but if they're stored in transit or at-rest in plaintext then that's a massive PCI-DSS violation which result in the company in question losing the ability to handle CC transactions.
MFA is purely to stop the end-user's account being accessed by another user. It won't stop anything else, but then it's not designed to.
And yes, phones can be lost/stolen/compromised but that's why you rely on multiple factors. Defence in depth is at the basis of all security, physical or otherwise. MFA makes it harder, not impossible. In the same way that the lock(s) on your front door act as a deterrent, but nothing else. A crowbar will get you straight in if you don't mind being noisy and obvious.
Also, and this is a big point, MFA acts to protect against users reusing the same credentials everywhere. So many people do it that something like MFA becomes necessary.
A company can put the most stringent security imaginable in place (ISO compliant stuff) and yet if a user writes their credentials on a post-it note it's all for nothing. MFA helps mitigate that. It's not a panacea, but anyone claiming that is a snake-oil salesman anyway.
At the end of the day, you have to weigh up security vs convenience and that's an individual decision. It's a mistake to write off MFA just because you find it inconvenient though.
Re: Nintendo Confirms That Around 160,000 Accounts May Have Been Hacked, Personal Info Possibly At Risk
@crossmr
All that tells is is that it's likely NNID isn't the source. As to repeated breaches, if people are using a compromised device to change the password they'll remain compromised. Likewise, if they're doing stupid things like just incrementing the number at the end of their password then it won't help either. I've got software here for cracking admin credentials on database files. There's an option to try common variants of passwords built in to it.
Anyway, I'm not married to the theory of credential-stuffing, it just made most sense based on available information. With any breach you've got to be prepared to re-evaluate as more information becomes available.
@NEStalgia
Do you have anything you can cite that shows Japan lagging on data security? It's not something I've heard of before so I'd be interested if you can supply any corroboration for that statement.
Not that interested though, as you clearly don't understand MFA.
The onus for securing your own data is always on the user. Whether that means not giving it to dodgy sites or ensuring you use strong passwords or enabling MFA.
MFA reduces the risk of a centralised breach affecting users. The password is useless without the additional authentication factor.
Also, phone apps aren't the only available authentication factors. USB dongles have been around for years.
Security always has to be balanced against convenience. For a site like this one, MFA is pointless because it's not securing anything particularly sensitive or valuable. For an online account that handles cash transactions it's much more imperative to secure it properly.
Also, I feel for you if your job requires you to use overly onerous authentication, but that sounds like they're doing security wrong.
If you're having authentication problems I feel bad for you son,
I've got 99 problems but MFA ain't one.
Re: Nintendo Confirms That Around 160,000 Accounts May Have Been Hacked, Personal Info Possibly At Risk
@NEStalgia
I think it's a bit of stretch to claim that because Sony had bad security it's a Japanese thing. Sony happen to be a Japanese company, but bad security is all over the place.
The reason I'm leaning towards it being a credential-stuffing breach is because of the limited number affected (that we know of so far) and because it's more common and easier to implement than sophisticated hacks.
EDIT: Also, your comments on MFA are pretty ridiculous. The entire point of MFA is to ensure that you're not relying simply on a username/password combination. Using an authentictor app (or phonecall) means that any attacker needs to compromise your local device as well as hacking the central system. That makes it orders of magnitude harder to carry out at scale. The only way MFA is a threat is if it's badly implemented but that's like saying that because there are bad builders out there nobody should ever build anything.
Re: Nintendo Confirms That Around 160,000 Accounts May Have Been Hacked, Personal Info Possibly At Risk
@RiasGremory
Putting numbers in your password doesn't make it any safer, nor harder to brute-force. A secure password is all about length, nothing else. Also, if your password gets breached because someone stored it in plaintext and then got hacked (or your device is hit by a keylogger) it's completely irrelevant how "strong" your password is.
Re: Nintendo Confirms That Around 160,000 Accounts May Have Been Hacked, Personal Info Possibly At Risk
@nab1
Yeah, it's ridiculously common because breached lists of username/e-mail + password combinations are all over the place.
Also, it doesn't require much in the way of technical knowledge to set it up. I've not looked but I bet there are loads of open-source autologin software available on GitHub, for instance.
Re: Nintendo Confirms That Around 160,000 Accounts May Have Been Hacked, Personal Info Possibly At Risk
@GamerDad66
Brute-forcing 160K+ accounts would take far too much compute time. It's far more likely they're trying to log into each account once with a password scraped from another breach.
That's harder to block because you have to monitor for login attempts against multiple accounts from a single IP address. There's also a question about how you police that. What is an unreasonable number of accounts to be accessed from a single IP address? If you and a few friends are all at your place, using your wi-fi, you'll all have the same external IP address (as your router will handle NAT internally so you all get the correct traffic). There's a risk of annoying legitimate users if you start blocking everyone in the same house.
Also, the scammers can easily set up proxies to ensure they're regularly switching the IP address they're using.
Re: Nintendo Confirms That Around 160,000 Accounts May Have Been Hacked, Personal Info Possibly At Risk
@Bobobiwan
There's no indication so far that Nintendo have been breached. As I said earlier, it's more likely due to credential stuffing. There's nothing Nintendo can do if people are re-using passwords across sites so it doesn't point to a failure on their part.
The reason I suspect cred stuffing is because it's so prevalent at the moment and if they've got passwords then that's unlikely to have come from Nintendo's internal systems being hacked. Storing passwords in plaintext is a rookie error I wouldn't expect them to make.
Using Google Authenticator isn't ideal, but there are alternatives that can handle it without involving them.
Re: Nintendo Confirms That Around 160,000 Accounts May Have Been Hacked, Personal Info Possibly At Risk
It's more likely to be credential stuffing than an actual hack. Credential stuffing is ridiculously easy and it's fairly trivial to write a bot to automate the process. Just feed it lists from pastebin or wherever and set the target site(s).
Re: Burnout Paradise Remastered Could Be Speeding Onto The Switch This June
For me, Burnout 2 was the pinnacle of the series. 3 overcomplicated itself and ruined Crash-For-Cash by adding powerups and requiring track knowledge for the best score.
I fondly remember sitting with all sorts of random mates, smoking and seeing who could get the biggest crash. It was pure fun and everyone had a pretty much equal chance of stacking their motor gloriously.
I think I played Paradise for about 10 minutes. Really didn't get on with how it played, even though I like the open-world idea when I first heard about it.