Welcome to the second to last full week of the year of 2024 and hopefully the last week in the office for most of you. This week's major release revolves around Xenomorphs, but unfortunately requires a VR-headset, but if you've been nice, maybe Santa will bring you one? The rest of this week's new releases turns you into an animal detective, being in charge of a pirate ship, being a young car mechanic in Poland in the 90's, a viking adventure in the netherworld and finally trying to solve some late night crimes in the Victorian era.

Alien: Rogue Incursion / This week's major release / Thursday 19 December / VR Game
Experience the universe of the Alien films like never before: in terrifyingly immersive single-player VR. An all-new action-horror entry into the classic franchise, Alien: Rogue Incursion transforms you into Zula Hendricks-the ex-Colonial Marine hellbent on exposing Weyland-Yutani's black-site experiments-on an extremely dangerous mission to the uncharted planet Purdan. With her synth companion Davis 01 for guidance, Zula must infiltrate the infested Gemini Exoplanet Solutions research facility and survive the ever-present threat of the most cunning Xenomorphs ever encountered, with both skilled stealth and serious firepower at her disposal. And when the threat she discovers has extinction-level consequences, Zula suddenly finds herself with humanity's fate on her shoulders. Steam link

Denuvo has taken its fair share of flak over the years for a variety of warranted and unwarranted reasons, but it looks like the company has finally decided to put its foot down, or at least try to. Recently, Denuvo started a Discord server, seemingly in an effort to address the gaming community's complaints about a variety of topics. These include alleged performance impacts and hardware degradation caused by its anti-piracy and DRM software commonly used in modern games. Needless to say the Denuvo Discord server was met with about as much enthusiasm as one might expect, and the Discord sever was shut down just two days after it opened. Although the server has since been resuscitated, the company has muted unapproved community members. Today, however, Rock Paper Shotgun published an interview with Denuvo's product manager, Andreas Ullmann, and in it, Ullmann goes on to defend Denuvo's existence and outright dismiss gamers' concerns about the anti-cheat and anti-piracy software.

Addressing a question about "toxicity" and oft-genuine concerns from gamers over the use of Denuvo anti-tamper and anti-cheat software, Ullmann seemingly implied that gamers are just upset because the software works, robbing gamers of the ability to simply play a game for free instead of paying full retail price. When asked directly about why Denuvo doesn't address the claims of performance hits to games that implement it, Ullmann placed the onus on game developers to perform those comparative tests, again calling the gaming and piracy community toxic in the response. He dismissed the idea of Denuvo or a third party performing comparative analysis of the impact of anti-tamper and anti-cheat software, citing intellectual property concerns and community mistrust for a lack of first-party testing. At the same time, Ullmann admits that Denuvo has had performance impacts on games in the past but remarks that it's "interesting" that there aren't more incidents of reduced gaming performance. These comments were also made in spite of Denuvo's own marketing materials claiming that the software has "No impact on in-game performance."

Welcome to the first week of August and for those of you living in the Nordics, welcome back to work after a month of holiday. This week's major release is based on a manga that became an anime hit on Netflix that involves bouncy things. This is followed by retro fields, a Scottish game that has neither kilts nor bagpipes, a rather different take on Warhammer 40K, a creature centric game, a steamy heist sequel, pirate cats and a kingdom of rats. No huge releases this week either, but still a pretty solid line-up of new games.

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime ISEKAI Chronicles / This week's major release / Thursday 8 August
Spin a new tale of the Jura Tempest Federation together with all your favorite characters from the animated series! Players can enjoy thrilling action battles that combine flashy special moves and powerful combos. Through leveling up bonds with friends, Rimuru will learn Special Attacks, and even have allies join in to back up Rimuru's attack. Finish off formidable enemies that are coming to destroy Tempest with Secret Skills animated in retro 8-bit style! Steam link

Welcome to the 20th week of 2024 and this week kicks off with a huge AAA space saga that some of you have been eagerly waiting for. However, we have a second AAA title this week, which is a few years old Playstation game that, despite the title, doesn't have anything to do with ghosts. The rest of this week's releases involve aliens, rhythms, world wars and pirates.

Homeworld 3 / This week's first AAA title / Monday 13 May
Tactical, beautiful, and wholly unique, the GOTY-winning sci-fi RTS returns with Homeworld 3. Assume control and battle through fleet combat in dazzling, fully 3D space while the award-winning story unfolds on a galactic scale. Strategic freedom is yours. Hulking space derelicts called megaliths bring 3D terrain into the classic Homeworld battlespace. Use the crumbling remains of an ancient civilization to funnel foes into a brilliant ambush or hide your fleet from powerful enemies. Fortresses teem with menacing turrets and invite your strike craft into dangerous trench runs deep behind enemy lines. But not everything is in your control. Dangerous space phenomena like particle storms and asteroid fields will test even senior commanders. Steam Link

Game File reporter, Stephen Totilo, has discovered a new Nintendo-filed legal document—the Japanese multinational video game company's North American office is ready to do battle (in court) with Tropic Haze. The latter's Yuzu Switch Emulator is the focus of Nintendo's legal case—initiated on February 26, at the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island. Totilo's social media summary of goings-on stated: "Nintendo is suing the creators of popular Switch emulator Yuzu, saying their tech illegally circumvents Nintendo's software encryption and facilitates piracy. Seeks damages for alleged violations and a shutdown of the emulator." The Dolphin Emulator—a Gamecube and Wii emulation platform—was removed from Valve's Steam store last year, following the sending of a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown order, but its development team was not pursued in US courts. The House of Mario is reportedly fiercely protective of its intellectual properties and technologies—gaining a hard-nosed reputation for engaging in plenty of legal action over decades past.

Nintendo's federal-level lawsuit alleges that Tropic Haze's Yuzu Switch Emulator played a large part in widespread illegal distribution of a 2023 flagship game title. They believe that "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom" was pirated over one million times in a time period prior to its official launch on Switch consoles, while Yuzu's Patreon funding almost doubled within the same cycle. Nintendo stated (through filed documentation): "With Yuzu in hand, nothing stops a user from obtaining and playing unlawful copies of virtually any game made for the Nintendo Switch, all without paying a dime to Nintendo or to any of the hundreds of other game developers and publishers making and selling games for the Nintendo Switch...In effect, Yuzu turns general computing devices into tools for massive intellectual property infringement of Nintendo and others' copyrighted works." They argue that Yuzu is capable of circumventing the Switch console's many layers of encryption—Tropic Haze's software, in their opinion, is "primarily designed" to break Switch software protections.

A boundless sea of adventure and discovery awaits you in Ys X: Nordics! Join Adol Christin and his unlikely ally, the pirate Karja Balta, as they learn to work together to save the people of Obelia Gulf from the mysterious immortal monsters known as the Griegers. Exhilarating, fast-paced combat, a moving story of unexpected bonds, and naval exploration await you! Coming Fall 2024 to Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, and PC!

About Ys X: Nordics
This journey takes place in the northern islands collectively known as Obelia Gulf. In this harsh land, the young adventurer, Adol Christin, encounters the Normans, a seafaring tribe, and is quickly drawn into the conflict between them, the townsfolk of Obelia Gulf, and the Griegr, undying monsters with mysterious agenda. Partnering up with the Norman warrior, Karja, Adol must take to the waters of Obelia Gulf, navigating vast stretches of ocean, consulting maritime maps, and even getting into naval battles with enemy ships. This latest title in the Ys series takes us back to a younger Adol, as he sets out on the open sea. Join him in his pursuit of the thrill of adventure!

As we enter the year of the dragon according to the Chinese zodiac, we have a week full of new game releases to look forward to, although none of them are unfortunately dragon themed. This week's AAA release has a more caribbean theme and has been a long time coming. As for the remaining releases, we're looking at a dash of phobia, banishment, some insight, dwarves, colonisation and a dark town.

Skull & Bones / This week's AAA release / Friday 16 February
Enter the perilous world of Skull and Bones, a co-op pirate open world action RPG experience, to become the most infamous pirate kingpin. Engage in thrilling naval battles, craft a variety of unique ships, forge unlikely alliances as you overcome the odds, and bring mayhem on the seas. Be part of an immersive world that introduces new challenges and features every season

With Black Friday week coming up, we have a slow week of new game releases, although there's at least one bigger release this week (on Steam), compared to all the other games. This week's biggest release has something to do with asteroids and space ships. This is followed by time loops, fewer words, strange syllables, ninjas and co-op backrooms. Make what you want of that, but it's what's on offer this coming week.

The Expanse: A Telltale Series / This week's major release / Monday 20 November
Experience the exciting universe of The Expanse like never before in Telltale's latest adventure, The Expanse: A Telltale Series. Take on the role of Camina Drummer and explore the dangerous and uncharted edges of the Belt aboard the Artemis. From scavenging wrecked ships in a zero-g environment, to surviving a mutiny, to combating fearsome pirates, you make the difficult choices and reveal Camina Drummer's resolve in this latest Telltale adventure.

According to a report published by Bleeping Computer last week and research conducted by the Doctor Web team, nefarious online organizations are distributing Windows 10 ISO files laced with extremely dangerous clipper malware variants. Microsoft ceased direct sales of licenses for its last gen operating system earlier this year, and a select bunch of folks are resorting to grabbing copies (for free) from pirate sources. The Doctor Web alert states: "(we) discovered a malicious clipper program in a number of unofficial Windows 10 builds that cybercriminals have been distributing via a torrent tracker. Dubbed Trojan.Clipper.231, this trojan app substitutes crypto wallet addresses in the clipboard with addresses provided by attackers. As of this moment, malicious actors have managed to steal cryptocurrency in an amount equivalent to about $19,000 (USD)."

It continues: "At the end of May 2023, a customer contacted Doctor Web with their suspicion that their Windows 10 computer was infected. The analysis our specialists carried out confirmed the presence of trojan applications in the system. These were Trojan.Clipper.231 stealer malware as well as the Trojan.MulDrop22.7578 dropper and Trojan.Inject4.57873 injector, which were used to launch the clipper. Doctor Web's virus laboratory successfully localized all these threats and neutralized them." It seems that hackers are hiding cryptocurrency hijackers within Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) partitions, thus evading detection by antivirus software(s).

Three weeks into the new year and another week without any big game releases, although SEGA/Atlus is about to release updated versions of Persona 3 and 4, which ends up being the most well known game releases this coming week. That said, there are a couple of other potentially interesting games coming out, so check out the full list for more details on those.

WW2 Rebuilder / Monday January 16
It's 1945. It's the end of World War II, the war that left a mark. Now people like you have to leave their hometowns to rebuild their countries. Motivated by different reasons, they get set on the same quest - to repair and renovate places completely destroyed during the war.

After a couple of weeks of very limited releases, new games are starting to trickle out again and we're back to give you a heads up on what's coming. From now on we'll also add a poll, so you can vote on the game you're most interested in each week. Please keep the feedback coming if there's something we can improve in this weekly section.

One Piece Odyssey / This Week's AAA Title / Thursday January 12
One Piece Odyssey transports the Straw Hat Crew to a mysterious new island where they embark on quests and fight powerful enemies and massive bosses in exciting turn-based battles. The game is introducing a new chapter for these famed pirates, with an original story and new characters developed under the guiding hand of series creator Eiichiro Oda.

Star Valor is a Space Action RPG game that puts you in control of your own spaceship and destiny. Explore a vast open-world procedurally generated galaxy as you make your way from a nobody to the biggest name in the galaxy. But be warned, in a universe where the last of humanity is ruled by the alien beings that nearly made them extinct, wealth and power don't come easy.

Carefully choose which factions you join or go independent and make your own friends and foes along the way. Earn credits through a variety of activities such as mining asteroids for valuable materials and minerals, completing various missions, trading goods, salvaging shipwrecks, crafting weapons, claiming bounties on pirates, or becoming a pirate yourself. Gain experience and level up your skills while unlocking new options for subsequent playthroughs.

Today, during the very first Ubisoft Forward Spotlight event, Ubisoft announced that Skull and Bones will release on 8th November, 2022. The open-world pirate multiplayer game with survival elements will be available with cross-play and cross-progression on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X | S, Stadia as well as Windows PC through the Epic Games Store and Ubisoft Store. Players can also subscribe to Ubisoft+ on PC, Stadia and Amazon Luna.

Developed by Ubisoft Singapore in collaboration with other Ubisoft studios, Skull and Bones will invite players to chart their own destiny and rise from an outcast to becoming a pirate kingpin. To do so, they will need to build their Infamy through thrilling naval combat and rewarding expeditions in a treacherous world. Inspired by the legendary tales around piracy, players will get to experience the authentic pirate life. From accepting contracts, gathering resources, to navigating important trade routes and attacking wealthy merchant ships, each decision will influence their journey, with varying levels of risk and reward. As they grow their Infamy, players will be able to fully craft and customise their naval fleet and unlock a variety of new items throughout the game.

Denuvo's protection has rapidly deteriorated in the amount of time it actually is able to protect games' first sales period, which is always argued as the most important in the shelf life for any given game launch. While the first Denuvo-protected games lasted weeks and sometimes even months before ever being cracked, the latest releases have seen rapid-fire hits from pirates.

These outcomes must seriously hamper developers' expectations on Denuvo's ability to keep their games protected. Either all developers try and move towards an always-online game system (such as Destiny 2 and some other games), or it seems that both relatively old players (Denuvo) and newcomers (Valeroa) will see their marketing departments having to contort into increasingly impossible shapes to sell their product. Read our own impressions on just Cause 4 here.

The launch period of a game is the most important from the sales perspective, and piracy can seriously damage those initial earnings. Several anti-tamper systems have been launched to avoid this, but none seems to be really effective. Denuvo is well know on this front, but its protection has been defeated over and over (and over) again, for example. There's a new anti-tamper technology called Valeroa to fight these issues, and its approach is somewhat different.

As the developers explain, Valeroa "is not a DRM" and it doesn't affect the performance of games because "only a handful of functions are protected by Valeroa". This technique doesn't even require an internet connection, it doesn't read or write the hard drive continuously and "does not limit the number of daily installations or changes of hardware". The most interesting bit comes with its approach to the actual protection, which according to their developers Valeroa "is extremely difficult to crack before and closely after the game release date. The protection becomes a lot easier to crack after a predefined period".

The British High Court has ruled that Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media, nearly every UK-based ISP, must block access to The Pirate Bay. The move will strip access by internet users in the UK, to the notorious bit-torrent tracker. The Pirate Bay responded, saying that they are not concerned with yet another court-ordered blockade, and pointed out that there are just too many ways to circumvent such censorship. British ISPs responded, saying that they will comply with the ruling.

EA and game developer Danger Close have announced the latest installment of the Medal of Honor franchise will debut this October 23. With a rocking trailer and a few screens the game seems to be going a route similar to a style of the classic Call of Duty games which used various Special Forces operators from multiple countries. The synopsis over at Shacknews had this to say about the game, 'Remember when US Navy SEALs rescued hostages from Somali pirates? How many of you thought "that would be a great level in a game?" Apparently, the team at Danger Close also thought so.

Medal of Honor: Warfighter is the studio's second stab at the rebooted FPS franchise from EA. Whereas the previous game was all about the fight in Afghanistan, Warfighter promises a "global fight," one comprised of real-world events that happen all around the globe. At a Game Developers Conference event in San Francisco last night, Electronic Arts showed off a hands-off demonstration of Warfighter's new direction. The demo level took place in the Philippines, where you were in an assault against Abu Sayyaf in an effort to rescue hostages. This mission isn't inspired by fiction. It happened in real life. "Getting inside this kind of real world event is at the heart of Medal of Honor," executive producer Greg Goodrich told the audience.

This is arguably every copyright enforcement group's worst nightmare, The Pirate Bay, which calls itself "the most resilient bit-torrent site in the galaxy", unveiled what is known as its "portable version", meaning, when taken down by an enforcement agency, any person, in any part of the world can restore the site, because it now weighs just 90 megabytes. That's right, the 90 MB copy of the site itself contains all its HTML, script and static images, and Magnet Links to over 1,643,194 torrents spread across all its categories.

A little earlier this year, The Pirate Bay transitioned from being a host for .torrent files to a host for magnet:// links. This transition means that each torrent consisted of a typically 50 KB .torrent file, is now reduced to a <1 KB Magnet link in the resource. The copy of the site itself is there for anyone to copy. Enforcement agencies' worst nightmare indeed weighs just 90 MB.

Next week, Ubisoft will be performing large-scale server maintenance, which could see its DRM-handling go offline. It would directly impact some games that are designed to work with Ubisoft's infamous "Always-Online" DRM, which requires gamers to be connected to the internet when playing games enabled with it. Tom Clancy's HAWX 2, Might & Magic: Heroes 6 and The Settlers 7 will be unplayable during the course of maintenance. Bigger titles such as Assassin's Creed: Revelations and Driver: San Francisco, however, will stay online for the duration of the switch-over. Ubisoft is loathed for its hyper-strict DRM that requires you to ping their DRM servers every few moments to reassure them you're not a pirate. It is even known to limit activations to your graphics card. This is yet another example where DRM only ends up hurting legitimate users more than piracy.

Sweden's Supreme Court decided not to grant leave to appeal in the long-running Pirate Bay criminal trial. This translates to the earlier judgement of the Swedish Court of Appeal being upheld. In November 2010, the lower court had found four of the founders of The Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Carl Lundström, guilty of criminal copyright infringement. Although Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström all had their prison sentences decreased from the levels ordered at their original 2009 trial, they were ordered to pay increased damages amounting to millions of dollars to the plaintiffs in the entertainment industry.

Peter Sunde, AKA Brokep, faces 8 months in prison. Fredrik Neij, AKA TiAMO, faces 10 months. Businessman Carl Lundström has the lightest sentence of 4 months. All will have to pay their share of a combined 46 million Kronor (US $6.8 million) in damages. In related news, the operators of Pirate Bay changed the domain name of their site from *.org to *.se to prevent seizure by the US Government.

Origin is the fledgling online download account-based DRM service from Electronic Arts launched last June, that is home to Battlefield 3. To compete effectively against other similar services, the industry-leading Steam in particular, it must offer more content. To this end, Origin has added 11 publishers to its portfolio, reports CVG. These are Trion Worlds, Robot Entertainment, Freebird Games, Recoil Games, Autumn Games, 1C Company, inXile entertainment, Paradox Interactive, Core Learning Ltd, N3V Games and CD Projekt RED. That last one is interesting, because CD Projekt RED owns and runs www.gog.com, the website dedicated to selling DRM-free games.

Yes, that's right, SOPA might have been set back for now, but the vested interests from the big media corporations (music/movies/news etc) that want it implemented unsurprisingly aren't sitting idle and are pushing for ever more draconian measures aka 'SOPA Plus'. A digital music report (PDF) asks for everything that was in the original SOPA and then some, with a wishlist of seven 'fixes':

Famous and very popular media search engine, The Pirate Bay, perpetually in the crosshairs of Big Media to shut it down, is to shift away from torrent files from next month and replace them with Distributed Hash Table (DHT) and Peer Exchange (PEX) technology reports ExtremeTech. They have actually been using these for quite a while now, as this is the technology underlying their Magnet links which have appeared next to the torrent links as an alternative way to download. They have done this, because torrent files are stored centrally on a web server, which makes them vulnerable to aggressive rights holders who want to take them down, while Magnet links are decentralized "trackerless", removing this vulnerability. Also, at the moment, it's impossible for anti-piracy outfits to tell how many files a user is sharing when using Magnet links, or what they are. From next month therefore, only Magnet links will be available. Note that Magnet links are compatible with various anonymizing services, for anonymous downloading, but there can be a significant performance impact on those services. In fact, TPB has been using Magnet links with torrents for some now too, but just did so quietly, without telling anyone.

Popular BitTorrent clients such as uTorrent already use Magnet links as easily as torrent files, so there won't be much difference to the user experience. The main difference, is that they can take a bit longer to get going, but the final download speed isn't any less, due to the cascading exponential pyramid nature of incoming peer connections guaranteed to max out any internet connection, when there are enough peers.

A month ago, we reported that CD Projekt RED, makers of The Witcher 2 had claimed that they could identify '100% of pirates' and had started an RIAA-style 'settlement letter' shakedown (extortion) tactic in Germany. Well, unsurprisingly, this hasn't gone down too well with their customers and the outcry has been loud and strong, especially on gog.com, where their forums have been full of posts from disgruntled customers. Well, it looks like the pressure has gotten too much for them and they have backpedalled furiously on this decision and issued an open letter, published on rockpapershotgun.com. In it, they state that they want people to continue to have faith in them and stressed how they're still totally against 'piracy' of their products and appealed for gamers to refrain from engaging in it:

In early December, an article was published about a law firm acting on behalf of CD Projekt RED, contacting individuals who had downloaded The Witcher 2 illegally and seeking financial compensation for copyright infringement. The news about our decision to combat piracy directly, instead of with DRM, spread quickly and with it came a number of concerns from the community. Repeatedly, gamers just like you have said that our methods might wrongly accuse people who have never violated our copyright and expressed serious concern about our actions.

Anno 2070's Draconian DRM: Guru3D's Graphics Card Review Killed Off (UPDATED)

Hilbert Hagedoorn of well-known PC tech review site guru3d.com recently bought a copy of Ubisoft's Anno 2070 and wanted to use it in one of his graphics card reviews. However, he became badly unstuck. This game comes on the Steam platform and the store page states: "3rd-party DRM: Solidshield Tages SAS 3 machine activation limit". Unfortunately for Guru3D, they found out exactly what this means, which resulted in just one performance graph, an aborted review, an unplayable game - and bad publicity for Ubisoft once again. They have published an article about their experience, pledging not to use their titles again because of this DRM.