softmod
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Spin-jump your way to 'Flappy Bird' in 'Super Mario World'
To date, we've seen the infamous Flappy Bird show up either cloned or otherwise in roughly 853 different places. That's a slight exaggeration, but you probably weren't expecting to find it in a game that's rapidly approaching 30 years in age. YouTube user "SethBling" says that by executing a glitch on a standard Super NES with no modifications, he was able to trick the game into letting him upload code for the airborne fowl's namesake game into Super Mario World. Your homage in Super Mario Maker just got even less impressive.
Using 'Dark Souls 2' mods on PC? That's a dealbreaker
The Dark Souls series' relationship with PC gamers has been contentious at best. The vanilla versions of the first two games weren't unplayable per se, but if it weren't for the enterprising community of modders around the franchise it'd look and run kind of, well, crappy. This apparently extends to the recently released Scholar of the First Sin as well. But there's a twist this time: Players installing the popular "DS2fix" softmod that addresses weapons durability glitches and save corruptions have found that they aren't able to easily summon other players into their game for help or adversarial combat. As Kotaku reports, the players aren't hacking in a nefarious way, they're just using a patch that makes the game work better on their platform of choice. Instead of pulling "undead" (how the series refers to its protagonists) from a general population, it's grabbing them from a comparatively smaller pool of other players that've been deemed cheaters for using DS2fix.
Original Xbox thoroughly hacked
Our friend Eliot, from hack a day, has tipped us off to the latest and greatest in the Xbox hacking scene. TheSpecialist, a hacker on the xboxhacker.net forums, has managed to play a backup DVD without using a modchip/softmod. Eliot explains, "He ripped the challenge response data block from RalliSport Challenge and then patched that chunk into the firmware of the drive. So now, no matter what disc is placed into the drive, when the Xbox checks authenticity, the DVD firmware spits out the RalliSport Challenge code instead of checking the disk." Clever!Unfortunately, The Specialist didn't want to release the hack to the public, explaining, "I understand that releasing this hack would have major impact. Althought I serioulsy [sic] doubt that releasing a firmware *patcher* is illegal, I don't want to take my chances on it :-) I think anybody who wants to do something like that should ask himself if it's worth all the trouble he might get into. I feel it's not. That's why I'm not releasing anything."How long before the hack is readily available for everyone to use?[Thanks, Eliot]
