Hacked - Gaming Chatty Chat

Episode Date: April 15, 2024

Bonus Chat Episode. We both love (and make) video games. Thanks to our supporters, alongside our typical two episodes this month, we’re excited to drop this bonus episode where we chat about hacking games, making games, and playing games. If you want to support Hacked too, check out hackedpodcast.com to subscribe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. Select start. Scott, do you know what time it is? Time for Hacks' first gaming episode? I think it's time for Hacks' first gaming episode, where we talk about people hacking games, people playing games, and games we've been playing. Does that sound like a plan? It sounds plausible.

We'll see if the audience likes it or if people yell at us online, but I'm into it. Blow the dust out of your cartridge, boot up your old tube television. it's the hacked gaming special. Let's get into it. And we're back. And we're back. Every time we start making a pot, I feel like we make a morning show. And I'm like, and we're back.

And we're back. And we're back. It's like we're always back. We never kind of really go anywhere, but I guess we are back. It's back for us. If you're listening to these in a row, we haven't gone anywhere. But if you're us, welcome. Welcome.

Just going to have an episode dedicated to gaming today. That's it. A little bit of fun. We kind of talk about it passively in the pod and we thought, you know what? Why not? Why not make a hack gaming episode? So it's going to be some traditional hack content, but we're also just going to talk about gaming a bit. If you have feedback on the concept in the episode, if you did like it, didn't like it, liked parts of it, please let us know. Hit us up on our Patreon, hit us up on our Discord, hit us up on social. that we rarely visit, but we'll still visit them if you add us or DM us. So there's this Twitch clip that I think we're going to, we should maybe talk about. Oh, definitely. And it shows a apex legends player, Noyan Jen Burton Oskose, a member of the team Dark Zero. He's playing the game. It's the North American Finals for the Global Series Championship.

I think that had a $1 million prize pool in the global series is five. So a bunch of money is on is, you know, at stake right now. He's playing the game. And out of nowhere, he starts, he shouts, I'm getting hacked. He throws his hands up in the air to show he's no longer in control. And on the screen, we see the UI interface for an aim bot. Appear on a screen at the same moment as this message shows up, Apex Hacking Global Series by Destroyer 2009 and Random.

This message just starts spamming the chat. And all of a sudden, this $5 million E-sports tournament is being hacked. I think we got to talk about that, Scott. I think we have to talk about that. The clip's pretty nuts. As a first-person shooter as an FPS player, it's fascinating.

There's been a lot of conspiracy around what happens, and I think we'll dive into that. So we'll see. We'll have the discussion. We'll have the discussion. We'll teach the controversy. Yeah. So it was two very prominent players, Jen Burton and Imperial Hall.

Imperial Hall. Imperial Howl. Can you tell that I'm like wading into a part of gaming that I'm, it's like I play a lot of video games. I make video games. I'm not any sports guy. I am out of my element. Imperial Hal is probably the most notorious, most renowned. I think he might be the leader in like championships.

and he, you know, he's kind of the leader of team TSM, and he has one of the largest Twitch followings, massively successful player, big personality in the scene. Jen Burton, again, big Twitch following, massive, like, streamer. Also, like, a very notorious player, very respected, plays for Dark Zero, the team. So it was two, two of, like, the, two of the biggest audience players in the ALGS. which is the Apex League Global Series, which is what they were playing in the tournament. So you can tell that I might follow it.

You sure can. So admin shut down the game lobby when players realize this aim bot has been applied to this game that is in progress. Random, kind of one of the two purported hackers, not much is known about them, but Destroyer 2009 is sort of recognized as being involved.

some questionable stuff that's been targeting Apex Legends players, like Imperial, Hal, and... Hal? Hal. Got it. Nailed it. I'm hip to it, dude. Destroyer 2009 is a known variable.

Friend of the show, Lorenzo Franceschi Bickory, over at TechCrunch, interviewed Destroyer 2009, who talked about the hack as being, I think it was, quote, just for fun, and the goal was to highlight a security vulnerability inside of Apex Legends. They didn't want to reveal the exploit details in. full until there had been a patch, but clarified that the hack was confined to the game's process without affecting servers or players' computers. There's been no details provided about the cooperation with respawn entertainment who makes it electronic arts regarding a bug banning program.

We haven't really heard much from Apex Legends other than they have apparently pushed a series of layered updates that they say addresses this, though, whether that is the case remains to be seen. Yeah, so this is where a lot of the conspiracy early on came on. Amazing. People immediately jumped to the fact that it was a remote code exploit, so they were actually injecting code and executing it through the apex or through the anti-sheet itself. A more likely scenario is that there was malware on the computers for GenBurd and Imperial Hal. Oh, interesting.

But the fact that through the interviews with Lorenzo, as well as the fact that Apex and our EA, I was going to say Activision, but we're talking about a different game here, EA haven't said that there wasn't an RCE is kind of indicative to me. Kind of indicative. So there's been a lot of discussion, a lot of interviews. Thor, kind of a well-known hacker and YouTuber at Pirate Software, did an interview and a breakdown on this good YouTube watch if you want to go watch that. Say he has the same kind of theories.

Like when it initially happened, it kind of looked like, like there's this massive, I don't know if you know about this and you probably don't because you don't play in the FPS world, but there's a massive subculture of people that think that pros and streamers and anybody that's super good at the game is a cheater. Sure. And there's been enough confirmations of that to kind of make it from being a wild conspiracy to a potential probability. Like there have been a lot of streamers and people get caught cheating. Nobody of like the, the Imperial Hald Jen Burton levels. But in the small, smaller kind of upstarts people looking to make a name for themselves.

Right. So there's this whole subculture of people that just, you know, get, you know, owned in these games and immediately think that everybody's cheating, especially the people that are good at it. So I think this really leaned into that where it's like the second the cheat menu popped up on his screen. Hmm. It looked like he accidentally triggered his cheat menu in the middle of a game.

But if you know anything about how streamers set up their streams and stuff, I'm sure if you were a cheater that are a streamer that's cheating, you would make sure that your cheats would never have the ability to be visible on stream. Like you're not going to do a desktop capture, but you'll do a window capture for your stream, et cetera, et cetera. So I think, and not to mention the fact that instantly in the chat log, Destroyer started taking credit for it. That to me seems like the best argument that this wasn't a slip of the finger.

revealing, you know, this professional player's cheating rig on the same computer that they were playing in a multi-million dollar tournament for. Totally. Interesting. Yeah. There was also, I'm curious for your take on this because there's another theory that I've heard floated for the attack vector. Apex, we've talked about these on the show before, these different, you know, multiplayer

games employ different anti-cheating software. Apex Legends employs one of the most popular. ones, which is called easy anti-cheat. It is designed to prevent cheating. There's been a lot of speculation that it could also have been the potential attack vector for an RCE type vulnerability attack, whatever you want to call it. Does that seem plausible to you? I guess it's, you can't rule it out. Yeah. Like easy anti-cheat is going to have essentially root level access to memory and all the rest of those things, as well as easy anti-cheat is pretty good at identifying cheats and removing them. Like it's been proven.

We'll talk a bit more about that later, but like it's been proven that it's quite good. So if easy anti-cheat is going to not notice something reading the memory, there could be a chance that it's a sub-process of easy anti-cheat. That could, I wouldn't rule that out. Interesting. I don't know nearly enough about it. And by no means would I make a libelous statement and say that it's a strong potential. But I think if you're analyzing it and going through the data, you can't rule that out.

The thing that I find interesting about this was that the second the aim bot appeared on screen, the thing that gave this all away, if you rewatch those Twitch streams, and I highly recommend everyone does, because even to a layperson like me, they're very entertaining. It's almost like watching a track runner in the middle of the race have someone sprinting towards them with steroids threatening to, it's like, no, I didn't take the steroids, get those away from me. I will be disqualified and my career will be ruined.

It is interesting. It was interesting to watch that the moment these exploits started working, the aim body appears everyone watching can see. So you can't really argue that this was a, this obviously wasn't someone attempting to cheat. This was someone using cheating as basically a prank. Yeah. A troll.

In the middle of this very, it's a troll in the middle of this super high stakes tournament. And that's just, that's a different. interpretation of cheating or a different use of cheating in that space. So you're talking like almost specifically about Jen Burden's dream where he realizes he's cheating. Yeah. He see the cheat menu pops up and then something called walls. It's not aimbought. He obviously has aimbought too. And there's actually an interesting breakdown of how he has aimbaw because he actually shoots the bow and arrow at a player directly kind of downside from him. But that's behind like a like a pillar. And the arrow hits somebody. like way over in the other side of the map and like 45 degrees to his left.

Sure, he just hawk eyes someone through a wall around a corner. So at this moment and then the cheat menu pops up and then bang, all of a sudden he has walls and you can see the positionality and the health of everybody on the map. And he like his, if he was a cheater and this was like an accidental thing, his performance of selling that he is like anxious. concerned and afraid of what's going on is is like Oscar worthy if he's actually a cheater

because he it looks like a deer in headlights as you said a track runner getting sprinted at by a guy with a needle full of steroids it's like it's like no I don't want them it's not me and the funny thing is is so like the imperial how one is more subtle which is actually like it's such a it's such a it speaks volumes to how good these guys are at the game because Hal realizes through a shot that he thought should miss when it hits, he goes, I have aimbot. Like he literally, like he knows that he shouldn't have connected with the shot, but immediately is like connects with it. And his is an instant trigger is like, oh my God, I have aimbot.

Huh. So Jen Burton just jumps out of the game. Hal, on the other hand, stays in the game because he doesn't have walls. So he's not like cheating on behalf of his team and doesn't know where everybody is. is and he's just kind of doing something. And he actually goes on to trying to think of the polite, non-first-person toxic way of saying this. He destroys another pro player that, like, pushes in on them using the aim bot.

But it's just like his natural reaction is to like fight because they're being pushed. So he, but, but, but, but it's, it's like, it's just an interesting, it's, it speaks volumes to how good these guys are at the game, but also like how wild it is. that like people have access to these cheats and these cheats do exist in like a lot of lobbies. Like I know apex is pretty good in regards to their anti-cheat, but lots of other first person shooters are just full of cheaters. Yeah, I'm fascinated by how a lot of these cheats,

I mean, there's a lot we can talk about with this. And we have before on the show, but a lot of these cheats require pretty intense access to systems to employ. And that is sort of a response to the arm race of video game developers locking down their games further to prevent cheating. Every, every cheat begets a response, which begets a response from the cheaters and so on and so forth until you end up with cheating software

that has like root level access. And as we'll talk about even custom hardware, another relevant story on that front is a recent, so Activision, big, ginormous video game company. We've talked about them on the show before. You've heard of them. You've heard of them. They're digging into a hacking campaign aimed at

stealing players, credentials, passwords, gaming accounts, even crypto wallets, which is fascinating, rooted in some malware that infiltrates victims' computers and has been linked to the use of column unauthorized third-party tools, which is to say cheating software. So this whole massive hacking campaign that Activision Blizzard has been digging into actively investigating, putting out press releases for, was first identified by a cheating software developer named Zablier, who creates software for the game Call of Duty, who was the first person to notice that gamers, including those using the cheats, were being targeted for their login credentials. Zablier discovers that some of his customers' accounts have been compromised, starts to investigate,

locates a database of stolen credentials, and this sort of discovery prompts them to alert Activision, Blizzard, and all these other affected parties. So it seems as though this third party, cheating software might have been both the vector and the point of discovery of this hacking campaign. I wonder if you got a bug bounty for it. Right. The, yeah, Activision, like Call of Duty, you know, be it modern warfare or any other multiplayer games or war zone, I know it's quite common that cheaters buy stolen accounts. so instead of just creating accounts there is an option to buy accounts that have like everything unlocked

all the camos all the guns all the all the things that people that play the game is put time into hackers can just unlock so they'll steal an account unlock it the account has a track record and a history of not being a cheating account and then you buy that account and it might avoid detection for longer especially because there's probably like I don't know what the active user base on call the duty is, but I know during the pandemic, it got massive. So there's probably a lot of dormant accounts, like piles of them. So there's probably, probably, I could see them going after and targeting accounts that have history and track record, as I'm sure the Activision anti-cheat ricochet probably takes that

stuff into consideration, like age of an account, if it's a new account or old account, things like that. I remember a while ago, if people are interested in this, they should check out the chicken drumstick episode we did a little while ago. But I remember as part of that conversation we were talking about, it's reminded me of a Reddit comment I saw. We were talking about the idea of, you know, it's so strange, the amount of effort you would go to,

the money you would spend, the time you would invest in compromising your own hobby. The idea that like this game is your fun hobby and look at the lengths you have gone to to not have to be good at it. And I saw a Reddit comment while I was doing research for this. It was someone bringing that up

and they used that lens of, you know, all the work you're putting in to not put work into your hobby. And then the first response to it was hacking these games is the hobby. And I like sat back in my seat and I was like, oh, got it. That actually makes a ton of sense to me.

It's like, I'm never, it's like, I'm not, trying to be the best in the world at Call of Duty, but I really enjoy breaking Call of Duty. I'm not saying that's good. I'm saying I understand the like root psychology that goes into choosing to spend your time doing that. I think that like, you know, I've made this parallel a lot, but like hacking is problem solving and puzzle solving. A hundred percent. Hacking a game is solving a puzzle. And you know, you've got dynamic participants. You've got anti-cheat software that's trying to catch you and you've got to figure out ways around it. And you've got.

teams of developers and security analysts who are going through and trying to make sure that the code's safe and the memory's secure and blah, blah, blah. But I totally understand it from the cheat creator side. It's the cheater side that I don't understand. It's like I get that lots of these games to be good at them takes time. Like you need to. Yeah. Tons. It's like I was playing truthfully.

I was playing Warzone with my brother the other day. and he is not a big first person shooter player, doesn't really play. Light him up. He's, he, his understanding of the nuances that you have to do in the game just aren't there. Like, like if you're a good player,

like if you're a two plus KD player, and I hope everybody understands what a KD is, kills to death ratio. So like on average, you're getting at least two kills for death, per your death. That you understand that like certain animations add to delays in the game. And like if you are in a tactical sprint, it means that you're going to take longer to be in a state of firing on an opponent. Movement to avoid getting hit by bullets from combatants.

You know, there's like all of this nuance that you like literally need to train and make instinctual. to be good at these games. And there's people and like game, I can't remember, like game awareness, game knowledge. Like I shoot at a person over here and I see them run behind that building.

The likelihood is that they're going to move through the building back towards me to shoot at me using the building for cover. And they're going to pop up in this window three seconds later. So all of a sudden I'm pre-aiming at that window, waiting for them to reappear to shoot them again. And it's like those tactical nuances come from repetition. They come from playtime. They come from understanding how people respond in certain situations.

And people that are pros like Imperial Hal and Jen Burton know those things. Like they're instinctive to them. They're second nature. And it's like, so if you're not willing to commit the time to getting good at the game, like if you don't treat the game like a sport, which is a reference that I made to my brother, It's like you need to train to be good at it. If you're not treating it like that, but you still want to be as good as the best players, then hacks are your only output.

And it's like, to me, it's just like, what's the fun in that? Like, why even bother playing? I don't do either. But I imagine there's something, there's a difference between wanting to beat other players at Call of Duty and wanting to beat Call of Duty. And there's something about like, I'm not saying it's a good use of your time or money to spend $100 a month on some subscription hacking. It's so much, but on some subscription hacking service. But I get that it's different than wanting to be good at the sport. And again, I don't want to do either.

But I'm fascinated by the like psychological fork that happens where you're like, I'm just simply never going to be as good at this. as I want to be. And then you kind of start going down this other rabbit hole. Before we started recording, you were telling me a little bit about. So there's cheats that you can install. There's cheats that you can subscribe to. But all of those are occurring inside of the same computer. And therefore, if the software that you're cheating at requires enough access,

it can detect those. And that's the arm race we were talking about. But there's this other thing you can do, which is rooted in the fact that in order to play these games, you have to plug in external hardware. You have to plug in a mouse. You have to plug in a keyboard. The game has to receive that external input.

And some crafty devils through something called direct memory access have cooked up a way of compromising that fact. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Sure. Yeah. So the, oh, where to start. So, like, software, like, I'll use the term software cheats to just refer to, like, I'm on my gaming PC and I download a cheat. package for call of duty it ties into the memory and pulls the locations of the of the enemy combatants it

renders them onto an overlay that goes over my game so I can see where everybody is you know aim bot soft aim there's like a whole bunch of different pieces that make up these cheating packages now but they all kind of occur inside of the computer and it requires the cheat software to be re-reased the live memory of the game, which is where the anti-cheat kind of comes in and tries to block that and detect things that are doing that. But the DMA stuff, direct memory access cheats, often run on a separate computer and then interface into your gaming computer through hardware, and then that hardware spoofs something and has access at the hardware level. So it's much harder to detect.

It's much more expensive. But like I'll say that if I was a pro big streamer that's cheating, sure, that's making 50, 60, $100,000 a month from my streaming career, if I was to look at cheats, I probably wouldn't care that this was going to cost me thousands of dollars to make sure that I was still the best player. So, so yeah, so there's this, this, it's, I would say it's nowhere near as common, just given the barriers to entry. But it's what these poor anti-sheet teams have to be dealing with.

Like they're going to have to start looking at like hardware signatures and things like that to make sure that there's nothing compromised in the computer, let alone just running in the software side. Yeah, I'm seeing a bunch of posts in different e-sports subreddits of people saying, okay, I'm a Valorant player. And oh, no, DMA cheats are being prevented. They're doing something to try and prevent this. My DMA isn't working anymore.

So it seems like these anti-cheet, like they obviously know that this stuff exists. Oh, of course. But given that it's spoofing external hardware, I'm like, oh, that's just a really fascinating. That's a whole new arms race you're now engaged in. Well, there was, there was an interesting YouTube video that I watched a few weeks ago, was that there's the, so there's a war zone streamer. One of the war zone streamers that got caught cheating. I think he goes by It's Hapa, it's hapta, something like that.

Anyway, he put out a video where he actually had an interview, or apparently had an interview. I'm not going to allege that it's the real person, but where there's a big war zone cheat called Phantom Overlay, which is apparently one of the most popular and has, like, evaded the anti-cheat substantially. So he apparently interviewed the creator of Phantom Overlay. And it's full of really interesting insights and details about how to tune the cheat to make it look like you're not actually cheating. And it's also, he talks about DMA cheats.

He talks about, you know, how the thing that I thought was most interesting is that the Warzone anti-cheat ricochet didn't pick up on Phantom Overlay. but the apex anti-cheat, easy cheat, actually saw, even though it's on a totally different game, it saw the piece of software was interfering with memory and it literally blocked the apex account without even knowing that it was like a cheat for a different game. So I thought that was an entertaining and odd twist and sadly probably not the best look for Activision.

Jumping a little too quick. Yeah. Yep, people sure. do love to cheat at those online competitive video games. And meanwhile, I'm playing lethal company with my friends. And I don't really get why or how you could cheat at that. Yeah, the sportsification of video games. It's interesting.

Like, I've been playing a decent amount of retro games. And, you know, the developers built the cheats into those. And if they didn't, I don't know, I've got to look this up. Nintendo used to have Game Shark, tell me it's Game Shark. Is that what I'm thinking of? It's the thing where you put the cartridge into it and then it applied cheats to the game.

Was that Game Shark? Yeah, dude. Yeah, man. That thing was... So you know what? I take it all back. I totally know why you would cheat in video games because like 12 year old me being like, listen,

I have a Mew too. And this is kind of a big deal. Game Genie. Yeah. Game Chark and Game Genie. Yeah, Game Genie. Yeah. Back for the game.

Nintendo Entertainment System. They release an external hardware cheat for Ness games. Like, how crazy is that? I don't think, I don't think Nintendo made it. No, they didn't. Made by Madcats. Yeah. I think GameShark was made by Madcats, but GameGeney was code masters.

I remember a friend of mine had one of these, and you used to be able to, like, buy them at the store. Like, they weren't. It was, yeah. I got it for Christmas. It was, you could buy it at the super store. Like, it's just like a, product you could purchase because who gives a shit?

Like, exactly. What's, what does it matter if, you know, I didn't have to do level four in Marvin the Martian on Sega game gear before I did level five because I couldn't beat it because it was very difficult. Like it just didn't matter.

There were no stakes. It wasn't online. It wasn't a shared experience. There was definitely no tournaments and there were certainly no multi-million dollar prizes. So you could sell a product preloaded with thousands of codes. Yeah, it was dope. So as long as there have been...

What a time to be alive. As long as there have been challenges. Yes. There have been people cheating their way around them. It's like script kitties. It's like the script kitties of gaming. Totally. Yeah, 100%.

I'm not going to lie. Like, if I'm playing a first-person shooter and I get owned by somebody who's made their own cheat, I would oddly respect that more than somebody who is paying $90 a month to a cheat provider. Sure. Yeah, yeah. It's different when it's competitive. Like there's something about if I bought a video game and I can't, I've simply reached a point where I'm not going to be able to advance any further because I'm 13.

And I'm just not good enough at it. And it's between cheating to keep going or not playing this video game anymore. And I'm not going to get another one until next Christmas. Like, oh, I'm cheating, friend. But it's just different. I think the modern day cheater and first person shooters is probably considerable. older, has way more disposable income. Yeah.

And maybe this isn't that good at the game and wants to be good at the game. I think actually the entire subculture of people that believe everybody cheats is the creator of the cheating subculture. Because like if you assume everybody else is cheating, you still want to play the game, that becomes your moral justification for why you should start cheating. Sure. I saw that guy sprinting towards my competition. with the needle full of steroids.

So I best take some steroids. Yeah, so I got my own needle full of steroids. Exactly. It's not the best metaphor, but it's working so far. Why don't we kick it over to some ads? And then when we come back, even talking about hacking games, let's just talk about some games. Sounds good.

Scributty, boobo. I brought it up earlier, but I've been playing a lot of lethal company. Are you familiar with this? video game. I am not. Tell me. Give me, give me the goods. Lethal company rules. I highly recommend everyone check it out. It was the like sleeper indie hit, I think, of last year. And it kind of came out of that COVID era, new gaming habits. People want to play co-op. People want social experiences in their games. But a lot of those games are ruthless. They are competitive sports. It's like, I want to learn how to play basketball and just immediately you're playing against like

the hardcoreest people in the world. Lethal company is sort of a response to that. It's this co-op kind of horror game. You're scavenging on an abandoned moon. And it's social. You're embarking with a little crew of three of your friends. You have like kind of a short little day cycle to go out, find a bunch of stuff, bring it back to the ship, try and get it out and try and meet your quota.

And the whole time you're just getting hunted by terrifying monsters. And I can't recommend. it's such a nice twist on co-op gameplay it's it's more collaborative than it is competitive uh and the results you just end up spending a lot of time like cackling and laughing laughing as your friends get picked off by monsters the i just looked it up and it is one of those games that has a wild variation in its reviews yes so steam has a 10 out of 10 yes users 97% like it yeah google play 2.4 out of 5, so I'm assuming it has an Android issue. It's not great.

IGN 7 out of 10. It's like it's all over the map. It's all over the place. I really get that. I could see not enjoying it, especially if you didn't have the right crew of people to play it with. But it also feels like it's feeding into like video game meme culture in a really great way. You end up with all these videos of people screaming and running and laughing.

Yeah. because the kind of core gameplay loop incentivizes that so much. Like you are not a powerful, it is not Call of Duty. You are not a like murked up person with all these guns and stuff. It's like you are extremely vulnerable. And the world is very scary. And the result is just like it's just a different, a different energy. I like I like the big fan of the new co-op game style.

Yeah. Big fan. I don't play a lot of them because I tend to lean more competitive. like the closest thing that I would say that I've been playing recently is ready or not, which is like a SWAT team game where you're... Oh, cool. But it's like, I know a good friend of ours and friend of the pod, Mr. Satchwell, also plays Ready or Not, which should come as no surprise.

But yeah, same, same thing. Ready or not, it's like a SWAT team thing. You have a team of SWAT members and then you go through these like puzzle missions that have some dynamicness to them. So like where the enemies were the last time you went through it, you're very vulnerable. You like can die really easy. There's a lot of like puzzly aspects to it. Like when you go into a room, you like want to close the doors behind you so that if the

doors are ever open again, you know if somebody's come through that space, there's movement to the to the combatants. And it's, I don't know, it's a, it's a fun game. I'd say it's not, but it's still competitive in the sense that like you're trying to overcome rather than the fun co-op games where you're just trying to, trying to survive. I'm frantically trying to think of the name of the game that I'm playing, that I'd played a little bit with the same person. And it's not the tournament. It's not the show. It's an online shooter where the conceit of it is that you are being broadcast on like essentially a game

show. Do you know which one I'm talking about? I have no idea. Shooter game show. This is quality content. The finals. Yeah, I was going to say the finals. Yes, the finals is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like the, what's the Hunger Games for? Yeah, like a battle royale. Well, I mean, they're all Battle Royale games, but it is, yeah, it is the, like, film concede of Battle Royale that it is this, like, ruthless game show type thing. Have you played the finals? I have. And I don't normally go for those types of games. And I quite enjoyed it. Not so much that I kept playing it, so I guess I can't say I liked it that much, but it's quite fun. I think a lot of what worked about it had to do with like the aesthetic

wrapper around. It's like the gameplay loop is cool. I don't know enough about those games to know what's different about it, but I really just loved the game show skin they put on top of all of it. I thought that was just impeccably well done. I wanted to spend time in that world. It was great. Really well done. The announcers and all the rest of it. I was part of the open beta for the for the finals. Oh, cool. And let me tell you that was a sweat fest. If you don't know what the term sweaty means, it means that like,

I don't. Good players make your hands sweat when you're playing the games. So your controller is wet because you're like trying so hard. The finals beta was a literal sweat fest. Like it was so hard. And I think it was like, the people that got the open beta and were like, yeah, I'll give this a go. We're like all the hardcore Call of Duty, hardcore hardcore hardcore, hardcore shooter players, we're like, I'll try out this new game and see what it's going to be like.

And I remember like being like, oh my God. Yeah. But it is, it is a cool world. It is a cool concept. And I do dig it. I do dig it. I do have it installed. I will say I don't play it a ton, but I do like it.

A sweat fest. Sweat fest. This is an essential. So I got a steam deck recently. And I've started buying, I've started buying caps to go on the joysticks of new controllers and systems whenever I get them. Because my partner has a tendency when a game gets intense to attack the joystick with her nails, like to sort of plunge the nail into the joystick harder and harder. and it has resulted in me having a bunch of video game controllers where the rubber

but like kind of cap on top of a joy. It's just just gone, man. And on something like Steam Deck, that's not really replaceable. So not quite, not quite a sweat fest, but more of a claw attack fest going on in my household. Like a, so like a scratch fast. Scratch fast. Yeah, scratch fast. Exactly.

That being said, the Steam Deck, that thing rips. I got the OLED one. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. tell me more about it. I've been intrigued by the micro console, the handheld world. Yeah.

Yeah. It's pretty well, I really like it. It has big second gen. It's mid-cycle refresh tech energy rating off that thing. Like it's got this great new OLED screen with the smaller bezels on it. Battery lasts a little bit long. Like it's just all those little quality of life improvements that address all of the stuff I'd heard about the original steam deck as being a bit wanting.

It's still a big, big chunky boy. Like it's a big console. But it's also pretty affordable as those things go compared to some of the like the ROG ally, I think it is. It's pretty reasonably priced. And the Steam OS on it is just lovely. Like it's basically a Nintendo Switch if you want it to be. You crack open the store. Right.

But it's a Nintendo Switch that is plugged into Steam. So say I'm playing Lethal Company. I bought it as a lethal company machine to play social co-op games with pals. And boy, is it good at that. You know, it's like you plug in a pair of headphones and you're gaming with your pals. And it's a pretty great experience. The, it runs SteamOS, right? Like it runs a, I think it's like a version of Unix.

Yeah. I was going to say Linux, but you would know better than I would. Yes, exactly. Yeah. We'll share Linux, Unix, whatever, POSIX, however you want to define it. the uh the roj ally and i think the ms i claw are both windows 11 PCs right like they're essentially mobile PCs with game controllers permanently mounted to the sides of them which is cool and i think that that makes them maybe marginally better for if you want to do mods or if you want to

play i think the big thing is games that have that kind of intense anti-cheat root levely type stuff we were talking about earlier it's like those don't play super well with Steam Deck. They're kind of the only stuff that doesn't play really well with it. So I guess if you're a big cod person, maybe it's not for you. But I think the, I think the reality is, is if you're a competitive gamer, you're probably not going to be playing on a mobile, on a mobile anyway. Your field of view might be wide, but your screen size is limited and latency added between, you know, internet connections and things like that. This is actually an interesting, like just to transition from like interesting,

hardware things is call a duty war zone released their mobile version so they now have an android and ios version of it i saw that which is crazy like they like because i consider war zone to be like as a game developer it's amazing like it's this massive open world level you've got all of these dynamic elements happening like every time somebody on the internet complains about something in some of these games I'm just like you have no idea how much of a masterpiece these things are, given the fact that there's so much complexity in them. Sure. But they released the original Warzone One map for Dansk, for the gamers out there.

I have played that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We actually played. I think you and I played a couple games. Yes, yeah, no, I remember that. Anyway, so they released it from mobile. So now you've got all these like pro-ishy, competitive, sweaty players playing mobile, but like they're not playing it using,

well, there are a group of people that are playing it with the touch interface, but there's a lot of like classic wars of non-mobile gamers that are playing it, and they're buying iPad pros so that they have the best hardware and rendering engines for it. They're to reduce any kind of like on-screen latency. They're pairing up like wireless, you know, Xbox Pro controllers and elite controllers. they're essentially treating it like it's a PC game, but it just happens to be on a mobile interface. They're buying docs so that they don't have to use Wi-Fi.

They can use hard-lined internet so that they have a lower server latency, which is a big deal in first-person shooters. And it's just interesting to watch this competitive world. They built this beautiful mobile game to let people on their mobile phones play these fun games. But then there's a whole co-op of sweaty players being like, okay, how do we metagame this? How do we optimize it from a hardware perspective to make sure that we

have the competitive advantage? Yeah, right. We want to bring our game to all the iPad kid generation players that aren't able to access it. And then you do that. And then the PC players just descend on it like locusts, just optimizing all of the fun right back out of it. That rules. Yeah, yeah. I would say something critical if I weren't one of those people. totally the um oh that's pretty yeah anyway just cool cool things kind of happening i do i do like i i i love that the that triple a world is coming to mobile because i just think from an accessibility perspective it's such a huge thing 100% like the the you know you see these people with their 8000 dollar gaming PCs and it's like not everybody has those like no but like

like i would say in today's day and age like most people have a phone and it's like yeah most people have a tablet. Yeah. And like phones are great. Like the like we were talking and this is I think another great transition is like I've recently bought a retro gaming console like a handheld. I did buy a handheld but instead of going you know, Windows 11 Steam OS I went. Sure. I went retro emulator. But it's an it's like an Android device. It's like an entire Android phone. Yeah. It has an OLED screen. It's got an Android operating system runs Android emulation software that you can get in the Google Play Store. Like it's not locked down, like the iOS stuff.

You slap an SD card full of ROMs in it that you legally attained. And you backed up from the cartridges you own. Of course, yeah, of course. And you go to town. It's like it's amazing how, like, even when I was looking at it and researching and reviewing which one of these handshels to buy, the best version of it is actually just getting a really high quality phone because they actually have the best chipsets. I remember when a couple years ago, I'm not an Android person, but I've always been fascinated

by the emulation that you can do on them. I always thought that was so cool. And I remember a few years ago when the flip, the book style folding phones came out. One of the first use cases someone figured out was that if you turn it on its side, it's just the greatest Nintendo DS emulator ever created because now you have a top screen and a bottom I'm screen. Totally. Totally.

I was like, that is a $2,000 Nintendo DS emulator. And I love it. I couldn't be happy that you, you figured this out. There's four people that are going to get a lot of joy out of this. Totally. Totally.

I did. But like the fact that like in the Android, in the Google Play Store, you can pretty much get the emulators for like every console. For sure. Including. Yeah. Well,

I know there was a bunch of, this is another great topic that we should have added to the list, but we can move to it smoothly through this conversation is, is Nintendo Switch crackdown. They've been cracking down on people making the emulators. Yeah, Yuzu. Because there was, and I believe there still are a few that are available, like, publicly. But, like, I know that Nintendo's been cracking down on people that have been making switch emulators.

Because some of these phones and devices are powerful enough that they can literally just run Switch games, which are relatively recent. No, when I first got that Steam deck, I had a buddy hooking me up with the, I did not end up installing it. That's just true, but it hooking me up with the build of Yuzu for emulating Nintendo Switch on it. And the fascinating thing was a couple weeks later, that emulator gets sued for, quote, facilitating piracy at a colossal scale. And they just like, no one, don't get into a legal fight with Nintendo. They immediately fold and pay out a $2.4 million settlement.

And, you know, that's a wrap on Yuzu. There's still builds of it floating around on the internet, but the project's done. It was a very fascinating aboutface on a product that was very, very popular, this like open source emulator that people really love. The Switch is such a recent, like I consider it to be a recent console, there's not really a new version of it. Like there's the Oled, which is like the same as the Steam Deck. I think yours might have had a bit of a hardware upgrade rather than just a screen upgrade.

But I think the Switch OLED didn't really have anything on the hardware side. I know there is a lot of rumors floating around about the new Switch 2 and about how. powerful it's going to be, which I think is going to be pretty interesting to see. It's going to be a lot of fun. But yeah, the Android's, like, I was shocked at how, coming from the iPhone world where these things don't exist to me, the just simply having a good Android essentially opens that entire retro gaming world up to you. Yeah.

And like you can buy beautiful little controller sets that clip onto your phone, like your phone sinks into the middle and you get a full functioning hardware controller. You can turn your, if you've got a good quality Android device, you can turn it into a retro gaming console for like a hundred bucks, which is pretty cool, pretty cool. Hey everybody, it's Jordan from the future, like five days after this was recorded because the day that we recorded this, no joking, 90 minutes later, Apple puts out an announcement that they are going to be opening up the app store to retro game. emulators, thus rendering the whole thing we were just talking about kind of null and void.

You haven't been able to get retro game emulators on iOS for a really long time. They were banned on the app store. There's a bunch of antitrust cases against Apple right now in Europe and the US. I haven't talked about them a ton, but they were a big part of the argument in Europe that these game amulators are part of why people might want to be able to seek out third party app Marketplaces. Apple is sort of acquiescing on some of these things, and they loosened that restriction, allowing retrogame emulators, you know, pretty exciting.

One of the first ones that went live was called IGBA. And in a funny twist, that first one to go up on the App Store has since been pulled down. It turns out the developer, Mattaya Laspina, didn't actually upload it, and it was a ripped off version. So that's a fun little twist on this whole story. Those are now available. If you're listening to this and you got an iPhone, go give it a check, check the App Store. Maybe there's a good one up. Be careful downloading it because this is a whole new product category,

but it is very interesting and an interesting about face for a company that was previously not very down to have game amulators in the app store. Anywho, let's get back to the conversation. Yeah, I remember when I ordered my, I won't say the name, the brand name of it, but I ordered my small retro gaming handheld. And I order it. It was a little Game Boy, four and factor one.

I'm hanging out, waiting for it to show up in the mail. And while I'm waiting for it to show up, I'm doing all the research of where a person can find, where the ROMs come from, basically, the content. How you pull backups from your cartridge collection.

Precisely. I was investigating a lot of time into that side of things, waiting for it to show up. And I've come up with my plan. I've started figuring it all out. The device shows up. I turn it on and immediately I'm going to go, you know, get my, my legally owned games onto it. And I turn it on and it immediately just has like a felony's worth of ROMs already pre-installed on it from the manufacturer.

Kind of just sat back like, oh, no one's paying attention to this. All right, cool, game on. Totally. Yeah. Thanks, Alley Express. Totally. Literally. I would be lying if I said mine didn't come with the exact same thing.

They all do, which is what makes the user thing so fascinating is that that's a software project. And meanwhile, there's factory somewhere that's just putting Rayman on this, on every single one of these things off the factory floor. You know, it's fascinating to me that you can ship a product with Pokemon on it. and no one's busting that, but you know, you develop some software

that lets a person play Pokemon and the lawyers show up. Well, the thing I found is, I don't know if yours had the same, but mine didn't have any of the Mario games on them. Mine sure did. Mine sure didn't.

And I wonder if, if that's not, again, a little bit of muscle from Nintendo coming out. There's just some lines you don't cross. You don't rock the plumber. Like, it's just like,

don't. It had all the Zelda games. It had a bunch of other, like, key games, but it didn't have any of the like Nintendo, like Mario games, which are, you know, the showcase franchise. Huh. Interesting.

Interesting. You've been playing anything else? Well, I've been playing little touches of things here and there. Mostly first person shooters. That's my bread and butter. Have a good group of friends that I play with. And that's mostly it. So the one game that I have been playing a bit of, I've been playing a little PGA on the place.

I've been playing a little Spider-Man, the new Spider-Man game. Very good. Yeah. Very cool engine. Very nice. A big shout-out to them for that. That's a great game. First one was incredible.

I have. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The PlayStation 5 Pro. You've done any reading on some of the leaks about this thing? No. I saw that they were coming. I don't have a PS5.

So I'm not like on. the, I'm not in Sony for this latest gen, but I'd seen that there was murmurings of it. Is it, did they make it faster? Like, what's the plan? Yeah. Well, like, it's been, because so I have a, you know, professional responsibilities, of course, given that I make games for these things. I have a PS5 and I have an Xbox Series X.

I actually, I've been in the PlayStation world for, like, decades or like since the PS3 and like the starting of the PSN. Like, that's been my principal home. But I think that the Xbox has got a better, like Microsoft disagrees at this, and they've been changing their strategic direction. But I actually bought a Series X because when you work in game development, you see how similar Xbox game development is to PC game development, where the PlayStation development requires more overheads and more,

like it's way more customized. So if you're a AAA studio and you're making a PC game or a game that's going to launch on PC, adding features and functions and things like that for PC are really easy to pour it over to the Series X because it's essentially just a PC where if you need to then add those functions and features and new firmware stuff from the PlayStation, it's more of a development process. So I bought a Series X simply because I wanted to see the difference between updates for the same game across different platforms. So that's a weird hobby, I know, but it's what I choose to do. So I spend my time.

But the PS5 Pro, all hypothetical and all leaks, but they're talking about something like a substantial increase in performance. Like I've seen numbers as high as like 2 to 3X. the performance of the existing PS5, which is wild. That's in one step and one generation of improvement. That's crazy. Not even a mid-cycle refresh. Like, the only thing I've,

I'd read one thing about it, which was basically talking about the only real reason you would need this. Like, it's so much headroom. Is PSBR2. they've got this next-gen hardware and it's still capped with really like it's frame rate stuff it's just trying to optimize the hardware to make the most of you know that peripheral and I was like oh that's that's interesting as we're seeing like Apple reality pro you know sprint past in a couple key metrics just just just a bigger engine you know I think there's going to be an interesting like every time I think that we're done evolving TVs you know I get put in my place by the TV industry Sometimes I'm right, like with 3D TV, but, but, like, I wonder if we're not pushing to a world of 240 frames per second, like 240 hertz TVs. Like, you know, 120 is like a premium TV now, but gaming monitors now see the push.

Like, some of the high-end FPS monitors now are 500 hertz, like they're 500 frames a second. And it's like, you sure your eye can only see, you know, 29 or something, but. I was going to say. But for game smoothness and latency and in-game, you know, everybody that needs a competitive edge seeks out that competitive edge. And like I have a 240 Hertz OLED and it's beautiful like a 1440P 240 Hertz OLED, one of the newer generation of gaming monitors. And it's amazing. And I wonder if we're going to see that same step forward in televisions. Like if you could buy a 85 inch 8K 240.

or its TV and push games at that frame rate and resolution, that would be amazing. I mean, if it's happening PC side, it's going to trickle down a console eventually. Like, it's just, they, they're on this track, it seems like. And it, it almost feels like we used to have the fork of console and handheld. Handheld kind of withered and died for a little bit. It feels like it's coming back. Like I could see we make the box. And the box powers the ridiculous television that kicks out a signal that is 10 times what the human I can perceive.

And that's what we're doing over here in the living room. But then we have, you know, like put out a new PSP. Like give me the handheld version that lets me play the same game. Like we're there. We can do it again. Well, they and they kind of are doing it, but they're doing it in like a weird streaming way. Yeah. Like what's PlayStation's.

Yeah, that thing. PlayStation's got that handheld thing. Yeah. When I saw it initially, when I first saw like a photo of it in like a news feed, I thought it literally was a new PSP. Yeah. That thing was disappointing. Personally, the idea of just like a screen that you beam. The portal.

It's like, okay, that's fine. It's an expensive peripheral, but it's not what I want it to be. I would love it if when the next Xbox comes out, I can decide whether or not I'm probably going to primarily play it sitting on the couch or if I want it to be portable. And it's the switch version version versus the kind of traditional Xbox version. I think that sounds dope. Yeah, that does. But I can't see him going that way. And just because I think that they're probably going to go the other way where they're going to go 8K 240.

And there's no way they're going to be able to pack that kind of power into something that has remote capabilities. It feels like acquiescing a lot of ground as PC, all those PC manufacturers are like coming up at these sick handhelds that are moving units for console. games to just like for them to just not give a shit. I'm curious. Yeah. I guess it's going to come down to a lot of money on market research and market segmentation. Yeah. Totally. The thing for me is if like if we're going to say that consoles are to be TV bound, then we're going to make that the best TV bound experience that you can have. It's like PCs like you can't use a, well, I guess he could, but you wouldn't want to use a steam deck for competitive PC gaming. Like if you're playing things that require, even like MMO RPGs, like if you're playing

like World of Warcraft, like that would be harder to play on a handheld. So like the, I think the distinction between what games get played on what is going to become bigger. Like when I play PGA Masters on my 85 inch TV and have surround sound and all the rest of it, it's amazing TV console gaming experience, even the Spider-Man. But I wouldn't play a first-person shooter on there because I'm not close enough to the screen.

I can't see enough screen in real estate, you know, things like that. The refresh rate's not high enough. The latency is too much, etc., etc., etc. All of the meta things that you hate to love. So I think it's going to be interesting when they start to break up the market segment about who's using what for what.

And even game developers need to look that. Like if I'm, if, if I'm targeting a game principally to a Steam Deck users, how am I going to increase that experience for people on PC and TV console, etc.? Yeah, I know there's a lot of ink spilled about the series S, which is the less powerful version of the series X, Xbox, as being, you know, a lot of people have made the argument that it has, it is basically functioning as a ceiling on all development for Xbox that like, oh, by having to make it run on this kind of almost last gen feeling hardware, last gen and a half call it, you know, we're not getting all of the, you know, advancements we could get if it only had

to run on the Xbox Series X. And I hear that argument. And then I played Alan Wake 2 on my Xbox series S. And I can see the compromises that they've made in order to get it running on that system. And I'm like, those are pretty okay compromises. And it doesn't seem to have affected the sort of flagship marquee version available on the main stretch of consoles. And it makes the game available to a much larger audience of people. I think about these consoles that are these, they're just, they're super computers powering, you know, multi-thousand-dollar televisions. And I'm like, that's dope for people in their 30s and 40s, but like I started playing games when I was a teenager.

Totally. So are you going to make anything that's accessible as like a Christmas present for a kid? Because that sucks if not. Like that's just, that's not great. So I hope there can be a broad spectrum of hardware that games can be deployed to, I guess is what I'm trying to say. When Xbox originally did that,

when I saw the series S and series X and the differences in the hardware capabilities, I thought that was a really odd call for them because they are putting an onus on the developers to then handle conditionals based on what it's running on. But thankfully, like the engines that lots of game developments occurring in, like notably Unreal,

like I'm an Unreal developer, setting the configuration on a per deployment basis for what kind of console and like setting, you know, graphic resolution, et cetera, et cetera, controller layouts, things like that. It's not that hard. and the engine the engine does a lot of heavy lifting like granted it is more work and it does

require extra builds etc etc but it's not it's thank god for engines let's just say that yeah totally it's extra work for extra builds to address a larger audience is the like nice thing about it it's like you you do have to do that work but it's a bigger potential addressable audience because if the console is only available to people that have $600, that's a smaller portion of people that can play your game than if there's a version that's available that costs $400. It's like it just is. So it's an extra burden,

but it's a larger potential audience. Yeah. Which I think is like net positive probably. Because again, if Alan Wake 2, highly recommend, was only available on the Xbox Series X, I wouldn't have given them my $80. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

I'm just thinking about it strictly from a development headache. I guess the, like when you think about a state space for quality assurance, like when you go to game testing side, like during development, having another console adds in another dimension to the state space of testing for the, like you have to test everything on series X,

then you've got to test it all again on series S, and then you got to test it. Yeah, sure. Which I guess would be like one of the bigger headaches, but I do agree with you that gaming, in that sense, is getting less accessible, but also on the flip side, I think just given the fact that

mobile gaming is I wouldn't say so accessible as phones are still very expensive, but I think that the priority of people's spending habits prefers to spend on a phone. So as you're seeing Android

releasing some like key like, there's amazing games, honestly, that have come out on both iPhone and Android. have amazing graphic resolution and gameplay loops. Some of these games are living games. I'm trying to remember what the big RPG on Android is called.

It's like one of the top games, and it's like super, like everybody loves it. I can't remember, so we won't talk about it. No, I think you're probably right that that becomes the way in for a lot of people. and now you can run really powerful, cool experiences, and because of these engines, a lot of the time, these games are pretty transferable. It's pretty remarkable when you can basically outsource

a game to a whole new platform to an external company because they just need to crack open an Unreal or a Unity project and do some... Do some real labor, but like, it's not, you know, it's a different scale of thing that it would have been a generation or two ago. And that rules because it means more people can play dope games. I remember what it's called. And of course, by I remember what it's called,

I mean, I looked it up. Genshin Impact. Oh, yeah, totally. Which is kind of... Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's been kind of referenced as like the JRP version of like Breath of the Wild. Cool. And like I think that they're still literally building out.

Like this is a living game. They're on version 4.5. Like they're adding content to it. They're expanding the game while you're playing it. So it's like a totally different game model. Like it's not just you buy it and play it until you're finished. it's like they're adding chapter and content. Like it's becoming a living kind of live service game, which is awesome, I think.

I want to see more of that. One more thing I wanted to hit. One thing I thought was funny, and then we didn't talk about it in all the conversation about Xbox and PlayStation, but I don't know if you saw the April Fool's joke from Nvidia. No, I did it. What was it? Was it good?

Did someone do a good April Fool's joke on the internet? Because that's tough. I am. I got excited about it until I realized that it was April Fool's Day. Invidia announced that they had taken over the rights for Xbox and that invidia would be the creator of the new Xbox consoles. And I was like, oh, yes. Like if they were to bring...

That was Nvidia's prank? Was that they acquired Xbox? I think it was invidia's prank. Maybe it was somebody trolling Nvidia, but I thought it was... Oh, my God. Invidia's prank. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe I just saw it.

out on a Reddit and gave it more credibility than I needed to. Yeah, because Nvidia, Microsoft, and Xbox, like, they've worked together on stuff. I think there's Xbox games on G-Force now, which is Nvidia's, like, cloud thing. So they do have a relationship as a company. Of course. That's pretty good. Like, I know a lot of the, like, PlayStation 5 generation and Xbox Series X, I think AMD, and again, this is just me going off of memory,

I think AMD is principally the hardware provider for those. But the issue is now is like looking at the performance gains that are coming from Nvidia and their AI research, like they're doing frame generation in real time. They're actually generating frames that look better than the frames that they're rendering sometimes. Like there's insane things going on inside of Nvidia's world. and if they were to bring that insanity from the $7,000 gaming PC world

back to the $700 console world, it would be, I got excited. When I saw the headline, I was like, oh my God, this is going to be amazing. This console will use AI to like optimize weird frame rate stuff that wouldn't have been possible and smoothing. Like, yeah, using it essentially as like really lush filters for games. Yeah.

Interesting. The prank can be traced back to publisher TweekTown. So it was not Nvidia that did it. It was someone else, but it was plausible enough sounding. Huh. So we've just given Tweak Town some free advertising because obviously they did this to get free promo. So you've again baited us and we have taken the bait. We've taken the bait.

We always try to do it at the end of the episode. Fall for a ruse and then catch ourselves right at the finish line. That rules. Interesting. I think that puts a button at the end of the first. hacked gaming episode. Yeah. Save your progress.

You know, I'm trying to think of a gamey way to close this thing back out. Be sure to like and subscribe. Be sure to like and subscribe. Visit hackpodcast.com. Redirects to our Patreon. We love all of our patrons. Not that we don't love all of our listeners.

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