Gaming
Xbox Live And PSN Lizard Squad Hacker Convicted
Lizard Squad, the hacker group responsible for a truckload of shenanigans over the past couple of years, has had a key member convicted in Finland. 17-year-old Julius “zeekill” Kivimaki has been convicted of 50,700 cyber crimes in relation to Lizard Squard hacks. Kivimaki claimed responsibility for the attacks that brought both Xbox Live and the Playstation Network offline last year.
His punishment will be a 2-year suspended prison sentence. He has also been ordered to speak out against cyber-crime to discourage other young people from taking up the cyber-thug life.
Lizard Squad is an infamous hacking group whose attacks increased greatly over the last couple of years. They were responsible for the distributed denial of service (DDos) attacks that brought both Xbox Live and Playstation Network offline over Christmas last year, preventing children from playing the games they got as gifts. They also reportedly attacked the online anonymity service Tor.
Lizard Squad’s attacks on Xbox Live and PSN sparked a month-long virtual gang war with another hacker group, the Finest Squad. After Lizard Squad announced its plans to take down the gaming networks for Christmas in early December, the Finest Squad announced it would stop them. The two groups spent the month in virtual combat through Doxxing, hacking each other’s websites and Twitter accounts, and even swatting each other. The Finest Squad also began releasing the names of people it claimed to be members of the Lizard Squad.
As well as the Christmas attacks, Lizard Squad also claimed responsibility for hacks in September 2014 on various game servers, such as Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Destiny. They also tweeted a bomb threat that forced the head of Sony Online Entertainment, John Smedley, to have his flight diverted.
The Lizard Squad described their motivation as “chaos is entertainment.”
The Daily Dot reports that one of Kivimaki’s US victims, Blair Strater, is “absolutely disgusted” by the ruling, which he felt was too light. Strater was a victim of swatting, which reportedly involved Kivimaki calling in a fake threat to US authorities, resulting in a SWAT team arriving at Strater’s home. Strater claims Kivimaki had been harassing his family for three years by stealing their identities and messing with their finances. Strater wants US authorities to step in.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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