Tag: hacking

Cogmind
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Roguelikes aren’t done with ASCII art yet

ASCII and the roguelike genre are practically inseparable. ASCII was there at the birth of the genre, bringing Rogue (1980) itself to life—and it’s stayed, with today’s most ambitious roguelikes such as Dwarf Fortress (2006), Ultima Ratio Regum (2012), and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (2013) crafting sprawling worlds and adventures from ASCII’s collection of characters. It’s understandable why ASCII persists even as the roguelike expands into myriad subgenres and aesthetics. The simple abstractions of your @ hero, potions, enemies, items, and so on, as letters and symbols allows for vast potential without having to visually display such complexities. Instead, flavor text,…
Hackmud
News

Hackmud brings back the hacker fantasy of the ’90s

A handful of plucky AIs are looking to escape their virtual prison. They start by making a run on a couple of vaults. They’re not really recruiting, but the player stumbles onto their team. Hackmud is a heist game, but the characters are all teenaged computers. It’s wrapped up in cyberpunk ideas and computer culture of the ’90s—the first place the gang goes for advice is “Faythe’s Fountain,” where an oracle-like AI speaks in twisted riddles. Meanwhile they fear and hate an AI that goes by the name “Mallory the Malicious.” Although it’s missing a finger-wagging Wayne Knight, the code-wrangling of Hackmud feels…
News

One of the most authentic hacking simulators is getting an expansion

The videogame and hacking simulator Hacknet has been praised over and over again for its dedication to realism since it arrived last year. The whole game is viewed through an interface, and the player’s tasks are all as close to actual hacking as possible, using real unix commands. It’s not a game that’s interested in babying you, but that’s all the more appropriate for the subject matter. In the original game, you were tasked posthumously by another hacker to look into his own death, piecing the plot together through careful investigation and lines of code. Now, Hacknet is getting even more…
News

NES hack brings your old Nintendo online, complete with Twitter

Despite being over 30-years-old, and therefore predating public internet access, it turns out that the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) has actually been capable of connecting to the internet the whole time. All it takes is a “modem” and a little bit of hacking, courtesy of Femicom Museum founder and serial videogame tinkerer Rachel Simone Weil. Dubbed ConnectedNes, Weil’s hack brings the NES online in three easy steps. First, it takes a Particle Photon Wifi development kit and hacks it together with bits of a NES controller, then plugs it into a standard NES controller port. Because the kit (which Weil has nicknamed…
News

The world of Else Heart.Break() is yours to hack

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Else Heart.Break() (PC, Mac, Linux)  BY Erik Svedang Life kinda sucks until you find out you can hack the world. That’s been the through line of a lot of cyberpunk and hacker fiction over the years. Else Heart.Break() doesn’t depart from this generalization but it does draw you into it more than ever before. You point-and-click Sebastian around an old European town until you discover its underground subculture of hackers. It’s then that you acquire a tool that lets you manipulate the code of everyday objects. Everything from…
News

Make friends and hack reality when Else Heart.Break() drops on September 24th

Else Heart.Break() makes me want to smoke cigarettes. It’s not that I don’t value my health. It’s that being a smoker seems to be the easiest way to people’s hearts in the game. If you smoke, you can say “yes” when strangers ask if you have either a) a lighter, or b) a smoke. With that icebreaker a whole range of social possibilities open up. “So, what’s your story?” the person might ask as they take their first drag, thanking you between pursed lips. You’ve met someone because you both smoke and now you’re chatting. The alternative is remaining seated…
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Greek artist draws on Euros to send a message about his country’s plight

This, it is fair to say, is not how the European project was supposed to work out. At this very moment, German citizens can walk up to an ATM and withdraw their daily limit. At this very moment, Greek citizens can wait in line near an ATM in the hopes of eventually withdrawing their government-limited 60 Euro daily allocation. (On the bright side, Business Insider observes, “Greece isn’t panicking about capital controls because millions of people are already too poor for it to matter.”) The only thing Europeans at banks in Athens and Berlin have in common is an infinitesimal chance of…