gaming – Page 7

How a nephew’s CD burner inspired early Valve to embrace DRM

gaming / Kelly Newman / March 25, 2025

Back in 2004, the launch of Half-Life 2 would help launch Steam on the path to eventually becoming the de facto digital rights management (DRM) system for the vast majority of PC games. But years before that, with the 1998 launch of the original Half-Life, Valve cofounder and then-CMO Monica Harrington said she was inspired to take DRM more seriously by her nephew’s reaction to the purchase of a new CD-ROM burner.

PC Gamer pulled that interesting tidbit from a talk Harrington gave at last week’s Game Developers Conference. In her remembering, Harrington’s nephew had used funds she had sent for school supplies on a CD replicator, then sent her “a lovely thank you note essentially saying how happy he was to copy and share games with his friends.”

That was the moment Harrington said she realized this new technology was leading to a “generational shift” in both the availability and acceptability of PC game piracy. While game piracy and DRM definitely existed prior to CD burners (anyone else remember the large codewheels that cluttered many early PC game boxes?), Harrington said the new technology—and the blasé attitude her nephew showed toward using it for piracy—could “put our entire business model at risk.”

Shortly after Half-Life launched with a simple CD key verification system in place, Harrington said the company noticed a wave of message board complaints about the game not working. But when Valve cofounder (and Monica’s then-husband) Mike Harrington followed up with those complaining posters, he found that “none of them had actually bought the game. So it turned out that the authentication system was working really well,” Harrington said.

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why-anthropic’s-claude-still-hasn’t-beaten-pokemon

Why Anthropic’s Claude still hasn’t beaten Pokémon

AI, Anthropic Claude, Features, gaming, Pokémon / Shannon Garcia / March 23, 2025

Weeks later, Sonnet’s “reasoning” model is struggling with a game designed for children.

Gotta subsume ’em all into the machine consciousness! Credit: Aurich Lawson

In recent months, the AI industry’s biggest boosters have started converging on a public expectation that we’re on the verge of “artificial general intelligence” (AGI)—virtual agents that can match or surpass “human-level” understanding and performance on most cognitive tasks.

OpenAI is quietly seeding expectations for a “PhD-level” AI agent that could operate autonomously at the level of a “high-income knowledge worker” in the near future. Elon Musk says that “we’ll have AI smarter than any one human probably” by the end of 2025. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei thinks it might take a bit longer but similarly says it’s plausible that AI will be “better than humans at almost everything” by the end of 2027.

A few researchers at Anthropic have, over the past year, had a part-time obsession with a peculiar problem.

Can Claude play Pokémon?

A thread: pic.twitter.com/K8SkNXCxYJ

— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) February 25, 2025

Last month, Anthropic presented its “Claude Plays Pokémon” experiment as a waypoint on the road to that predicted AGI future. It’s a project the company said shows “glimmers of AI systems that tackle challenges with increasing competence, not just through training but with generalized reasoning.” Anthropic made headlines by trumpeting how Claude 3.7 Sonnet’s “improved reasoning capabilities” let the company’s latest model make progress in the popular old-school Game Boy RPG in ways “that older models had little hope of achieving.”

While Claude models from just a year ago struggled even to leave the game’s opening area, Claude 3.7 Sonnet was able to make progress by collecting multiple in-game Gym Badges in a relatively small number of in-game actions. That breakthrough, Anthropic wrote, was because the “extended thinking” by Claude 3.7 Sonnet means the new model “plans ahead, remembers its objectives, and adapts when initial strategies fail” in a way that its predecessors didn’t. Those things, Anthropic brags, are “critical skills for battling pixelated gym leaders. And, we posit, in solving real-world problems too.”

Over the last year, new Claude models have shown quick progress in reaching new Pokémon milestones. Credit: Anthropic

But relative success over previous models is not the same as absolute success over the game in its entirety. In the weeks since Claude Plays Pokémon was first made public, thousands of Twitch viewers have watched Claude struggle to make consistent progress in the game. Despite long “thinking” pauses between each move—during which viewers can read printouts of the system’s simulated reasoning process—Claude frequently finds itself pointlessly revisiting completed towns, getting stuck in blind corners of the map for extended periods, or fruitlessly talking to the same unhelpful NPC over and over, to cite just a few examples of distinctly sub-human in-game performance.

Watching Claude continue to struggle at a game designed for children, it’s hard to imagine we’re witnessing the genesis of some sort of computer superintelligence. But even Claude’s current sub-human level of Pokémon performance could hold significant lessons for the quest toward generalized, human-level artificial intelligence.

Smart in different ways

In some sense, it’s impressive that Claude can play Pokémon with any facility at all. When developing AI systems that find dominant strategies in games like Go and Dota 2, engineers generally start their algorithms off with deep knowledge of a game’s rules and/or basic strategies, as well as a reward function to guide them toward better performance. For Claude Plays Pokémon, though, project developer and Anthropic employee David Hershey says he started with an unmodified, generalized Claude model that wasn’t specifically trained or tuned to play Pokémon games in any way.

“This is purely the various other things that [Claude] understands about the world being used to point at video games,” Hershey told Ars. “So it has a sense of a Pokémon. If you go to claude.ai and ask about Pokémon, it knows what Pokémon is based on what it’s read… If you ask, it’ll tell you there’s eight gym badges, it’ll tell you the first one is Brock… it knows the broad structure.”

A flowchart summarizing the pieces that help Claude interact with an active game of Pokémon (click through to zoom in). Credit: Anthropic / Excelidraw

In addition to directly monitoring certain key (emulated) Game Boy RAM addresses for game state information, Claude views and interprets the game’s visual output much like a human would. But despite recent advances in AI image processing, Hershey said Claude still struggles to interpret the low-resolution, pixelated world of a Game Boy screenshot as well as a human can. “Claude’s still not particularly good at understanding what’s on the screen at all,” he said. “You will see it attempt to walk into walls all the time.”

Hershey said he suspects Claude’s training data probably doesn’t contain many overly detailed text descriptions of “stuff that looks like a Game Boy screen.” This means that, somewhat surprisingly, if Claude were playing a game with “more realistic imagery, I think Claude would actually be able to see a lot better,” Hershey said.

“It’s one of those funny things about humans that we can squint at these eight-by-eight pixel blobs of people and say, ‘That’s a girl with blue hair,’” Hershey continued. “People, I think, have that ability to map from our real world to understand and sort of grok that… so I’m honestly kind of surprised that Claude’s as good as it is at being able to see there’s a person on the screen.”

Even with a perfect understanding of what it’s seeing on-screen, though, Hershey said Claude would still struggle with 2D navigation challenges that would be trivial for a human. “It’s pretty easy for me to understand that [an in-game] building is a building and that I can’t walk through a building,” Hershey said. “And that’s [something] that’s pretty challenging for Claude to understand… It’s funny because it’s just kind of smart in different ways, you know?”

A sample Pokémon screen with an overlay showing how Claude characterizes the game’s grid-based map. Credit: Anthrropic / X

Where Claude tends to perform better, Hershey said, is in the more text-based portions of the game. During an in-game battle, Claude will readily notice when the game tells it that an attack from an electric-type Pokémon is “not very effective” against a rock-type opponent, for instance. Claude will then squirrel that factoid away in a massive written knowledge base for future reference later in the run. Claude can also integrate multiple pieces of similar knowledge into pretty elegant battle strategies, even extending those strategies into long-term plans for catching and managing teams of multiple creatures for future battles.

Claude can even show surprising “intelligence” when Pokémon’s in-game text is intentionally misleading or incomplete. “It’s pretty funny that they tell you you need to go find Professor Oak next door and then he’s not there,” Hershey said of an early-game task. “As a 5-year-old, that was very confusing to me. But Claude actually typically goes through that same set of motions where it talks to mom, goes to the lab, doesn’t find [Oak], says, ‘I need to figure something out’… It’s sophisticated enough to sort of go through the motions of the way [humans are] actually supposed to learn it, too.”

A sample of the kind of simulated reasoning process Claude steps through during a typical Pokémon battle. Credit: Claude Plays Pokemon / Twitch

These kinds of relative strengths and weaknesses when compared to “human-level” play reflect the overall state of AI research and capabilities in general, Hershey said. “I think it’s just a sort of universal thing about these models… We built the text side of it first, and the text side is definitely… more powerful. How these models can reason about images is getting better, but I think it’s a decent bit behind.”

Forget me not

Beyond issues parsing text and images, Hershey also acknowledged that Claude can have trouble “remembering” what it has already learned. The current model has a “context window” of 200,000 tokens, limiting the amount of relational information it can store in its “memory” at any one time. When the system’s ever-expanding knowledge base fills up this context window, Claude goes through an elaborate summarization process, condensing detailed notes on what it has seen, done, and learned so far into shorter text summaries that lose some of the fine-grained details.

This can mean that Claude “has a hard time keeping track of things for a very long time and really having a great sense of what it’s tried so far,” Hershey said. “You will definitely see it occasionally delete something that it shouldn’t have. Anything that’s not in your knowledge base or not in your summary is going to be gone, so you have to think about what you want to put there.”

A small window into the kind of “cleaning up my context” knowledge-base update necessitated by Claude’s limited “memory.” Credit: Claude Play Pokemon / Twitch

More than forgetting important history, though, Claude runs into bigger problems when it inadvertently inserts incorrect information into its knowledge base. Like a conspiracy theorist who builds an entire worldview from an inherently flawed premise, Claude can be incredibly slow to recognize when an error in its self-authored knowledge base is leading its Pokémon play astray.

“The things that are written down in the past, it sort of trusts pretty blindly,” Hershey said. “I have seen it become very convinced that it found the exit to [in-game location] Viridian Forest at some specific coordinates, and then it spends hours and hours exploring a little small square around those coordinates that are wrong instead of doing anything else. It takes a very long time for it to decide that that was a ‘fail.’”

Still, Hershey said Claude 3.7 Sonnet is much better than earlier models at eventually “questioning its assumptions, trying new strategies, and keeping track over long horizons of various strategies to [see] whether they work or not.” While the new model will still “struggle for really long periods of time” retrying the same thing over and over, it will ultimately tend to “get a sense of what’s going on and what it’s tried before, and it stumbles a lot of times into actual progress from that,” Hershey said.

“We’re getting pretty close…”

One of the most interesting things about observing Claude Plays Pokémon across multiple iterations and restarts, Hershey said, is seeing how the system’s progress and strategy can vary quite a bit between runs. Sometimes Claude will show it’s “capable of actually building a pretty coherent strategy” by “keeping detailed notes about the different paths to try,” for instance, he said. But “most of the time it doesn’t… most of the time, it wanders into the wall because it’s confident it sees the exit.”

Where previous models wandered aimlessly or got stuck in loops, Claude 3.7 Sonnet plans ahead, remembers its objectives, and adapts when initial strategies fail.

Critical skills for battling pixelated gym leaders. And, we posit, in solving real-world problems too. pic.twitter.com/scvISp14XG

— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) February 25, 2025

One of the biggest things preventing the current version of Claude from getting better, Hershey said, is that “when it derives that good strategy, I don’t think it necessarily has the self-awareness to know that one strategy [it] came up with is better than another.” And that’s not a trivial problem to solve.

Still, Hershey said he sees “low-hanging fruit” for improving Claude’s Pokémon play by improving the model’s understanding of Game Boy screenshots. “I think there’s a chance it could beat the game if it had a perfect sense of what’s on the screen,” Hershey said, saying that such a model would probably perform “a little bit short of human.”

Expanding the context window for future Claude models will also probably allow those models to “reason over longer time frames and handle things more coherently over a long period of time,” Hershey said. Future models will improve by getting “a little bit better at remembering, keeping track of a coherent set of what it needs to try to make progress,” he added.

Twitch chat responds with a flood of bouncing emojis as Claude concludes an epic 78+ hour escape from Pokémon’s Mt. Moon. Credit: Claude Plays Pokemon / Twitch

Whatever you think about impending improvements in AI models, though, Claude’s current performance at Pokémon doesn’t make it seem like it’s poised to usher in an explosion of human-level, completely generalizable artificial intelligence. And Hershey allows that watching Claude 3.7 Sonnet get stuck on Mt. Moon for 80 hours or so can make it “seem like a model that doesn’t know what it’s doing.”

But Hershey is still impressed at the way that Claude’s new reasoning model will occasionally show some glimmer of awareness and “kind of tell that it doesn’t know what it’s doing and know that it needs to be doing something different. And the difference between ‘can’t do it at all’ and ‘can kind of do it’ is a pretty big one for these AI things for me,” he continued. “You know, when something can kind of do something it typically means we’re pretty close to getting it to be able to do something really, really well.”

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

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Hands-on with Frosthaven’s ambitious port from gigantic box to inviting PC game

Board games, frosthaven, gaming, gloomhaven, hands on, isaac childres, julian gollop, steam, Tabletop / Mike M. / March 21, 2025

I can say this for certain: The game’s tutorial does a lot of work in introducing you to the game’s core mechanics, which include choosing cards with sequential actions, “burning” cards for temporary boosts, positioning, teamwork, and having enough actions or options left if a fight goes longer than you think. I’m not a total newcomer to the -haven games, having played a couple rounds of the Gloomhaven board game. But none of my friends, however patient, did as good a job of showing just how important it was to consider not just attack, defend, or move, but where each choice would place you, and how it would play with your teammates.

I played as a “Banner Spear,” one of the six starting classes. Their thing is—you guessed it—having a spear, and they can throw it or lunge with it from farther away. Many of the Banner Spear’s cards are more effective with positioning, like pincer-flanking an enemy or attacking from off to the side of your more up-close melee teammate. With only two players taking on a couple of enemies, I verbally brushed off the idea of using some more advanced options. My developer partner, using a Deathwalker, interjected: “Ah, but that is what summons are for.”

Soon enough, one of the brutes was facing down two skeletons, and I was able to get a nice shot in from an adjacent hex. The next thing I wanted to do was try out being a little selfish, running for some loot left behind by a vanquished goon. I forgot that you only pick up loot if you end your turn on a hex, not just pass through it, so my Banner Spear appeared to go on a little warm-up jog, for no real reason, before re-engaging the Germinate we were facing.

The art, animations, and feel of everything I clicked on was engaging, even as the developers regularly reassured me that all of it needs working on. With many more experienced players kicking the tires in early access, I expect the systems and quality-of-life details to see even more refinement. It’s a long campaign, both for players and the developers, but there’s a good chance it will be worth it.

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Developer’s GDC billboard pokes at despised former Google Stadia exec

gaming / Beth Washington / March 19, 2025

It has been nearly two years now since game industry veteran Phil Harrison left Google following the implosion of the company’s Stadia cloud gaming service. But the passage of time hasn’t stopped one company from taking advantage of this week’s Game Developers Conference to poke fun at the erstwhile gaming executive for his alleged mistreatment of developers.

VGC spotted a conspicuous billboard in San Francisco’s Union Square Monday featuring the overinflated, completely bald head of Gunther Harrison, the fictional Alta Interglobal CEO who was recently revealed as the blatantly satirical antagonist in the upcoming game Revenge of the Savage Planet. A large message atop the billboard asks passersby—including the tens of thousands in town for GDC—”Has a Harrison fired you lately? You might be eligible for emotional support.”

Google’s Phil Harrison talks about the Google Stadia controller at GDC 2019. Credit: Google

While Gunther Harrison probably hasn’t fired any GDC attendees, the famously bald Phil Harrison was responsible for the firing of plenty of developers when he shut down Google’s short-lived Stadia Games & Entertainment (SG&E) publishing imprint in early 2021. That shutdown surprised a lot of newly jobless game developers, perhaps none more so than those at Montreal-based Typhoon Games, which Google had acquired in late 2019 to make what Google’s Jade Raymond said at the time would be “platform-defining exclusive content” for Stadia.

Yet on the very same day that Journey to the Savage Planet launched as a Stadia exclusive, the developers at Typhoon found themselves jobless, alongside the rest of SG&E. By the end of 2022, Google would shut down Stadia entirely, blindsiding even more game developers.

Don’t forgive, don’t forget

After being let go by Google, Typhoon Games would reform as Raccoon Logic (thanks in large part to investment from Chinese publishing giant Tencent) and reacquire the rights to the Savage Planet franchise. And now that the next game in that series is set to launch in May, it seems the developers still haven’t fully gotten over how they were treated during Google’s brief foray into game publishing.

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New Portal pinball table may be the closest we’re gonna get to Portal 3

gaming, pinball, portal / DJ Henderson / March 19, 2025

A bargain at twice the price

The extensive Portal theming on the table seems to extend to the gameplay as well. As you might expect, launching a ball into a lit portal on one side of the playfield can lead to it (or a ball that looks a lot like it) immediately launching from another portal elsewhere. The speed of the ball as it enters one portal and exits the other seems like it might matter to the gameplay, too: A description for an “aerial portal” table feature warns that players should “make sure to build enough momentum or else your ball will land in the pit!”

The table is full of other little nods to the Portal games, from a physical Weighted Companion Cube that can travel through a portal to lock balls in place for eventual multiball to an Aerial Faith Plate that physically flings the ball up to a higher level. There’s also a turret-themed multiball, which GLaDOS reminds you is based around “the pale spherical things that are full of bullets. Oh wait, that’s you in five seconds.”

You can purchase a full Portal pinball table starting at $11,620 (plus shipping), which isn’t unreasonable as far as brand-new pinball tables are concerned these days. But if you already own the base table for Multimorphic’s P3 Pinball Platform, you can purchase a “Game Kit” upgrade—with the requisite game software and physical playfield pieces to install on your table—starting at just $3,900.

Even players that invested $1,000 or more in an Index VR headset just to play Half-Life Alyx might balk at those kinds of prices for the closest thing we’ve got to a new, “official” Portal game. For true Valve obsessives, though, it might be a small price to pay for the ultimate company collector’s item and conversation piece.

New Portal pinball table may be the closest we’re gonna get to Portal 3 Read More »

Why SNES hardware is running faster than expected—and why it’s a problem

gaming / Kelly Newman / March 15, 2025

gotta go precisely the right speed

Cheap, unreliable ceramic APU resonators lead to “constant, pervasive, unavoidable” issues.

Sir, do you know how fast your SNES was going? Credit: Getty Images

Ideally, you’d expect any Super NES console—if properly maintained—to operate identically to any other Super NES unit ever made. Given the same base ROM file and the same set of precisely timed inputs, all those consoles should hopefully give the same gameplay output across individual hardware and across time.

The TASBot community relies on this kind of solid-state predictability when creating tool-assisted speedruns that can be executed with robotic precision on actual console hardware. But on the SNES in particular, the team has largely struggled to get emulated speedruns to sync up with demonstrated results on real consoles.

After significant research and testing on dozens of actual SNES units, the TASBot team now thinks that a cheap ceramic resonator used in the system’s Audio Processing Unit (APU) is to blame for much of this inconsistency. While Nintendo’s own documentation says the APU should run at a consistent rate of 24,576 Hz (and the associated Digital Signal Processor sample rate at a flat 32,000 Hz), in practice, that rate can vary just a bit based on heat, system age, and minor physical variations that develop in different console units over time.

Casual players would only notice this problem in the form of an almost imperceptibly higher pitch for in-game music and sounds. But for TASbot, Allan “dwangoAC” Cecil says this unreliable clock has become a “constant, pervasive, unavoidable” problem for getting frame-accurate consistency in hardware-verified speedruns.

Not to spec

Cecil testing his own SNES APU in 2016. Credit: Allan Cecil

Cecil says he first began to suspect the APU’s role in TASBot’s SNES problems back in 2016 when he broke open his own console to test it with an external frequency counter. He found that his APU ran just a bit faster than Nintendo’s specifications, an inconsistency that could cause the console to throw out unpredictable “lag frames” if and when the CPU and APU load cycles failed to line up in the expected manner. Those lag frames, in turn, are enough to “desynchronize” TASBot’s input on actual hardware from the results you’d see on a more controlled emulator.

Unlike the quartz crystals used in many electronics (including the SNES’s more consistent and differently timed CPU), the cheaper ceramic resonators in the SNES APU are “known to degrade over time,” as Cecil put it. Documentation for the resonators used in the APU also seems to suggest that excess heat may impact the clock cycle speed, meaning the APU might speed up a bit as a specific console heats up.

The APU resonator manual shows slight variations in operating thresholds based on heart and other factors. Credit: Ceralock ceramic resonator manual

The TASBot team was not the first group to notice this kind of audio inconsistency in the SNES. In the early 2000s, some emulator developers found that certain late-era SNES games don’t run correctly when the emulator’s Digital Signal Processor (DSP) sample rate is set to the Nintendo-specified value of precisely 32,000 Hz (a number derived from the speed of the APU clock). Developers tested actual hardware at the time and found that the DSP was actually running at 32,040 Hz and that setting the emulated DSP to run at that specific rate suddenly fixed the misbehaving commercial games.

That small but necessary emulator tweak implies that “the original developers who wrote those games were using hardware that… must have been running slightly faster at that point,” Cecil told Ars. “Because if they had written directly to what the spec said, it may not have worked.”

Survey says…

While research and testing confirmed the existence of these APU variations, Cecil wanted to determine just how big the problem was across actual consoles today. To do that, he ran an informal online survey last month, cryptically warning his social media followers that “SNES consoles seem to be getting faster as they age.” He asked respondents to run a DSP clock measurement ROM on any working SNES hardware they had lying around and to rerun the test after the console had time to warm up.

After receiving 143 responses and crunching the numbers, Cecil said he was surprised to find that temperature seemed to have a minimal impact on measured DSP speed; the measurement only rose an insignificant 8 Hz on average between “cold” and “hot” readings on the same console. Cecil even put his own console in a freezer to see if the DSP clock rate would change as it thawed out and found only a 22 Hz difference as it warmed back up to room temperature.

A sample result from the DSP sample test program. Credit: Allan Cecil

Those heat effects paled in comparison to the natural clock variation across different consoles, though. The slowest and fastest DSPs in Cecil’s sample showed a clock difference of 234 Hz, or about 0.7 percent of the 32,000 Hz specification.

That difference is small enough that human players probably wouldn’t notice it directly; TASBot team member Total estimated it might amount to “at most maybe a second or two [of difference] over hours of gameplay.” Skilled speedrunners could notice small differences, though, if differing CPU and APU alignments cause “carefully memorized enemy pattern changes to something else” between runs, Cecil said.

For a frame-perfect tool-assisted speedrun, though, the clock variations between consoles could cause innumerable headaches. As TASBot team member Undisbeliever explained in his detailed analysis: “On one console this might take 0.126 frames to process the music-tick, on a different console it might take 0.127 frames. It might not seem like much but it is enough to potentially delay the start of song loading by 1 frame (depending on timing, lag and game-code).”

Cecil’s survey found variation across consoles was much higher than the effects of heat on any single console. Credit: SNES SMP Speed test survey

Cecil also said the survey-reported DSP clock speeds were also a bit higher than he expected, at an average rate of 32,078 Hz at room temperature. That’s quite a bit higher than both the 32,000 Hz spec set by Nintendo and the 32,040 Hz rate that emulator developers settled on after sampling actual hardware in 2003.

To some observers, this is evidence that SNES APUs originally produced in the ’90s have been speeding up slightly as they age and could continue to get faster in the coming years and decades. But Cecil says the historical data they have is too circumstantial to make such a claim for certain.

“We’re all a bunch of differently skilled geeks and nerds, and it’s in our nature to argue over what the results mean, which is fine,” Cecil said. “The only thing we can say with certainty is the statistical significance of the responses that show the current average DSP sample rate is 32,076 Hz, faster on average than the original specification. The rest of it is up to interpretation and a certain amount of educated guessing based on what we can glean.”

A first step

For the TASBot team, knowing just how much real SNES hardware timing can differ from dry specifications (and emulators) is an important step to getting more consistent results on real hardware. But that knowledge hasn’t completely solved their synchronization problems. Even when Cecil replaced the ceramic APU resonator in his Super NES with a more accurate quartz version (tuned precisely to match Nintendo’s written specification), the team “did not see perfect behavior like we expected,” he told Ars.

Beyond clock speed inconsistencies, Cecil explained to Ars that TASBot team testing has found an additional “jitter pattern” present in the APU sampling that “injects some variance in how long it takes to perform various actions” between runs. That leads to non-deterministic performance even on the same hardware, Cecil said, which means that “TASBot is likely to desync” after just a few minutes of play on most SNES games.

The order in which these components start when the SNES is reset can have a large impact on clock synchronization. Credit: Rasteri

Extensive research from Rasteri suggests that these inconsistencies across same-console runs are likely caused by a “very non-deterministic reset circuit” that changes the specific startup order and timing for a console’s individual components every time it’s powered on. That leads to essentially “infinite possibilities” for the relative place where the CPU and APU clocks start in their “synchronization cycle” for each fresh run, making it impossible to predict specifically where and when lag frames will appear, Rasteri wrote.

Cecil said these kind of “butterfly effect” timing issues make the Super NES “a surprisingly complicated console [that has] resisted our attempts to fully model it and coerce it into behaving consistently.” But he’s still hopeful that the team will “eventually find a way to restore an SNES to the behavior game developers expected based on the documentation they were provided without making invasive changes…”

In the end, though, Cecil seems to have developed an almost grudging respect for how the SNES’s odd architecture leads to such unpredictable operation in practice. “If you want to deliberately create a source of randomness and non-deterministic behavior, having two clock sources that spinloop independently against one another is a fantastic choice,” he said.

Why SNES hardware is running faster than expected—and why it’s a problem Read More »

Civilization VII, one month later: The community and developers chime in

2K Games, 4X, civilization, Civilization VII, Firaxis Games, gaming, interview, strategy / Kelly Newman / March 13, 2025

Executive Producer Dennis Shirk talks with Ars about the state of the game.

Civilization VII has a lot of visual polish, and great gameplay systems. A flurry of patches have been improving other aspects, too. Credit: 2K Games

A month ago, Civilization VII launched to generally positive critical reviews, but user reviews on Steam and Metacritic weren’t nearly so positive, at least at first.

Take a look at the Civilization subreddit, and you’ll see a general consensus: The bones of this game are great, and even most of the radical changes to the classic formula (like breaking the game into much more distinct ages) are a welcome refresh.

On the other hand, there’s also a sentiment that players are disappointed that some expected features are missing, some gameplay elements need additional polish, and most of all, the user interface was a bit of a mess at launch.

A month later, developer Firaxis has already released a few patches and has more planned. As the game’s state continues to evolve, this seems like a good time to check in on it.

I spent some time in the Civ community and spoke with Dennis Shirk, the game’s executive producer, to learn how the launch went, how the game has changed since launch, and what its next steps are.

Breaking with tradition

Civilization VII broke with tradition in a few ways—splitting the game into distinct ages that each play like a separate game, allowing anachronistic leader/civilization combinations, and removing worker units, to name a few.

You might have expected those to be the source of any controversy around the game’s launch, but that hasn’t really been the case. In my review, I wrote that those shifts take the franchise in a new direction, bring over the best ideas from competing titles, and address long-standing problems with the Civilization experience.

If you want a more traditional experience, you can go back to Civilization V, Civilization IV, Civilization II, or whichever your favorite was. Those games are infinitely re-playable, so there’s no need to retread with a sequel.

“Our rule that we live by at Firaxis is the rule of thirds. We want to keep one-third of the game the same as previous iterations, one-third tweaked and improved upon, and one-third new,” Shirk told me. “Did we lean farther into the last third than we have in the past? We may have, but it was a risk we were willing to take to deliver a completely new part of the experience.”

A suboptimal starting position

The Civilization subreddit is full of positive responses to those changes, and the large contingent of Civ geeks on the Ars editorial staff are mostly in agreement that they’re good changes, too. (The game has been a frequent discussion topic in the Ars Slack for several weeks.)

The last month has seen players giving critical feedback, and Firaxis has been releasing patches to address complaints. For example, patch 1.1.0 on March 4 fixed some visual problems with the technology tree and made big changes to some victory conditions in the Modern Age, among other things.

Players have noted positive changes that weren’t mentioned in patch notes, too. Reddit user AndyNemmity posted that the “AI is significantly better in Military” after a recent patch a week ago, writing:

I know most of you don’t see the Military AI in the fog of war, but I work on the AI mod, and run a ton of autoplays. I am 10+ autoplays with the new patch, and the base game military AI is VASTLY improved.

Before, the AI would get stuck on the map in tons of different scenarios, often dying because they have an entire army stuck on the map, and can’t use it. This is fixed. Now the autoplays look like actual militaries, warring, attacking, killing independents quickly and efficiently.

The goodwill about the bones of the game and the positive responses to some patch additions are still accompanied by some consternation about the UI.

“Part of launching a game, especially when big changes are made, is figuring out what is resonating with players, and what may be an opportunity for improvement,” Shirk said when asked about the launch challenges. “In this instance, the UI did not meet players’ expectations, and we are committed to addressing that—although it will take time.”

There’s still a fair bit to be done, and modders have been filling the gaps. Modder Sukritact released a UI overhaul that addressed several complaints—including showing the gains and losses players will see if they replace a tile improvement or building with another one in the city view.

Players praised these tweaks, going so far as to call that example in particular a “game changer.” A few days later, it was announced on the Civilization Discord that Firaxis had hired Sukritact as a technical artist.

A panel that shows a detailed explanation of the bonuses affecting a tile improvement — This mod by Sukritact adds much-needed information to the city view. The modder has since been hired by Firaxis. Credit: RileyTaugor

The community has speculated that the game was rushed out the door before it was ready, primarily citing the UI issues.

“In hindsight, our UI team needed more time and space to take the UI where it needed to go, to really expose the level of information our players expect,” Shirk admitted. “Our team has been working hard to address these issues through rapid patching, and players will continue to see support for the foreseeable future.”

That said, debate about the UI is happening in the context of a wider discussion about the scope of Civilization VII’s launch.

A tale of 10 platforms

Every mainline Civilization game in the past launched on just desktop platforms like Windows or Mac, but Civilization VII greatly expanded that. Depending on what counts (we’ll say here that the Steam Deck counts as distinct from Linux, and the Xbox Series S is distinct from Xbox Series X), there were 10 launch platforms for Civilization VII:

Windows
Linux
macOS
Steam Deck
Nintendo Switch
PlayStation 4
PlayStation 5
Xbox One
Xbox Series S
Xbox Series X

That’s a lot to target at launch, and players in the subreddit have speculated that Firaxis was spread a bit thin here, making this part of the explanation for a relatively buggy UI on day one.

Some also speculated that the classic desktop PC platform got a worse experience in order to accommodate console and Steam Deck players. For example, players lamented the lack of a drag and drop feature for views like the policy selection screen.

The developers have made it crystal clear that PC is the top priority, though. “Our core audience is absolutely PC, so we always start there, and work our way outward, adapting UI systems along the way, iterating on different UX approaches,” Shirk said.

He added that the controller support was developed with a partner, suggesting that supporting consoles out of the gate might not have taxed the team working on the desktop interface as much as some feared.

At least in one respect, Firaxis has already publicly walked the walk: at one point it made the controversial decision to temporarily pause cross-save between PC and console so they could push updates to PC faster. Patching games on consoles requires a relatively slow and laborious certification process, but that’s not the case for updating a game on Steam.

The cloud save menu in Civilization VII — Cross-loading cloud saves across PC and console was turned off for a while so Firaxis could iterate faster on PC. Credit: Samuel Axon

Meanwhile, some console and handheld players have complained about their version of the interface.

The most commonly named UI problem on console and handhelds is related to how the camera and hex selector could be moved across the map more efficiently. Currently, moving the camera is easy—you just use the left stick to pan around. But doing this doesn’t move the hex selector with it, so you have to drag that selector hex by hex all the way across the map.

Some similar games have a button you can press to bring the selector to where the camera is. In Civilization VII, the R3 button brings the camera to where the selector is, not vice versa—which isn’t useful.

Shirk talked a bit about the process of developing the controller-based interface and the challenges the team faced:

We’ve been lucky enough to have some great partners help us develop the controller support, which added some strong console specific features like the radial menu. However, when you’re working with different interfaces across different platforms, there are many assumptions that cannot be made like they can on PC. For example, a player using a mouse is not walled off from anything, but switch that to a controller, and a completely different thought process has to come into play.

As for solutions, he added:

We’re working to give all versions the attention they deserve. When it comes to UI updates, we’re having team members continue to look at the community feedback in-depth and see how we can improve the experience for players regardless of system.

When I asked about drag-and-drop on desktop, and R3’s selection functionality on console and handheld, he said “the examples you shared are among features we are tracking and exploring how to address,” and that the March 4 1.1.0 patch that brought some UI changes was just a start. He added that a 1.1.1 coming March 25 will be when “fans will really start to see the results of their feedback.”

“And to answer your original question, ‘R3’ is coming along for the ride,” he said.

Following the legacy path to balanced gameplay

It seems like the UI is on the right track, but some tweaks need to happen on the gameplay front too, as players and critics tell it.

There are complaints about the AI—something as old as the franchise itself, to be fair. Some improvements have already been made, but players continue to report that AI civs keep founding cities close to players’ capitals for no apparent reason, causing frustration.

A small city appears close to the player's capitol — “Ashoka traveled across the entire continent just to settle four tiles away from my capital,” said DayTemporary3369, the Reddit user who posted this screenshot. They weren’t alone in this complaint. Credit: DayTemporary3369

Religion gameplay needs attention, as there’s no way to stop other leaders’ missionaries, leading to unsatisfying back-and-forth conversion gameplay. Similarly, players feel there aren’t enough defenses against espionage.

“If they’re all allowed to target me at the same time, I should be allowed to defend myself from all of them, provided I have enough influence,” said Reddit user Pay_No_Heed on the topic of counter-espionage. The complaint is reasonable, though a working design solution may not be as obvious as it seems.

Players have also complained that ages end too abruptly, and that holds true for the end of the game, which happens when the Modern Age concludes. It’s a quibble I also shared in my review. Many players are maxing out the game’s age length setting to combat this. Past Civilization games offered a “one more turn” option to extend the game past when someone had won. Firaxis has said this is coming to the end of the modern age in a future update.

There’s also the Civilopedia, the in-game database of concepts and help documentation. Players have noted it’s more barebones than expected, with several key concepts lacking entries or explanation. Firaxis acknowledged this complaint and said it’s being worked on.

“Yes, with each update we’re improving what’s exposed in the Civilopedia, including more gameplay data, easier navigation, et cetera. Expect much more to come in future updates,” Shirk explained.

In general, the game needs to have more information exposed to players. The gap is big enough that Reddit user JordiTK posted the heavily upvoted “Ultimate List of Things That Civilization VII Doesn’t Tell You.” It’s almost 5,000 words long, with more than 100 items.

Almost every prior Civilization game has had players complaining that it didn’t explain itself well enough, but the sentiment seems stronger this time. For what it’s worth, Shirk says the team recognizes this.

“Internally, our primary design goal for Civilization VII was to focus and iterate on the new mechanics, to really make sure this design would sing,” he said. “This focus on the new probably led us to work with a few false assumptions about what base level information players would need with our legacy systems, and it wasn’t something that came up as loudly as it should have in user testing.”

It’s not “We Love the Developer Day” just yet

While everyone in the community and within Firaxis agrees there’s still work to be done, the tone has improved since the launch because of these patches, and thanks to frequent engagement on Steam, Discord, and Reddit by the developer’s community manager.

The launch situation was made a little worse than it needed to be because of, strangely enough, confusion around nomenclature. Players who paid for the pricier special editions of the game were given “Advanced Access” a few days before the main launch date.

After it was apparent there were problems, some of the communications to players on storefronts and on Reddit called it “early access,” causing a bit of a stir because until then players hadn’t perceived the special edition advanced access to be the same as early access, which is a term typically used in the industry to let players know a game is incomplete and in a pre-release state.

When asked about this, a spokesperson for 2K Games (the game’s publisher) gave a statement to Ars that read:

Our goal is always to deliver the best product possible, including during Advanced Access periods. With a game the size and scope of Civilization VII there will always be fixes and optimizations once the entirety of the player base is able to jump in. The intent behind the Advanced Access granted to purchasers of the Deluxe Edition and Founders Edition was not to offer a work in progress product, and we take the feedback delivered during that period seriously.

We’re working hard to make sure that players have the best experience in the world of 4X strategy for years to come, and player feedback remains critical in helping us grow and build the future of Civ.

That suggests the use of “early access” was just a misstatement and not an attempt to cover for a rough pre-launch access period, but it wasn’t a great start to the conversation.

Since then, though, some of the most critical problems have been addressed, and the studio shared a roadmap that promised “UI updates and polish” in patches on March 4 (1.1.0, already released), March 25 (1.1.1), and sometime in April (1.2.0). The roadmap lists “additional UI updates & polish” for beyond April, too, confirming this will be a lengthy process.

A roadmap promising updates on March, April, and Beyond — Here’s the updated roadmap from Firaxis. Credit: 2K Games

This frequent communication, combined with the fact that players recognize there’s a good game here that needs some more polish, has meant that most of the discussions in the community during this first month have been pretty optimistic, despite the launch woes.

There was a time years ago when games were marketed leading up to their launch, but then the communication with players was over. In today’s market (especially for complex games like Civilization) there’s often a need to iterate in public. Players understand that and will roll with it if it’s communicated clearly to them. Firaxis stumbled on that in the opening days, but it’s now clear the studio understands that well, and the updates are rolling out.

We’ve seen a lot of rough launches for big games in recent years, and they often turn quite toxic. That said, the core Civilization community seems more patient and optimistic than you typically see in situations like this. That’s a credit to Firaxis’ years of goodwill, but it’s also a credit to the moderators and other leaders in the game’s community.

When I reviewed Civilization VII, I wrote that the core systems were strong, and that the game likely has a bright future ahead of it—but I also said it might make sense to wait a few weeks to dive in because of UI and balance issues.

It’s a few weeks later, and it looks like the game is on the right track, but there’s still a way to go if you’re looking for an impeccably polished product. That hasn’t stopped me from enjoying the dozens of hours I’ve played so far, though.

Samuel Axon is a senior editor at Ars Technica. He covers Apple, software development, gaming, AI, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.

Civilization VII, one month later: The community and developers chime in Read More »

Leaked GeForce RTX 5060 and 5050 specs suggest Nvidia will keep playing it safe

Blackwell, gaming, GeForce, NVIDIA, Tech / Shannon Garcia / March 12, 2025

Nvidia has launched all of the GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs that it announced at CES, at least technically—whether you’re buying from Nvidia, AMD, or Intel, it’s nearly impossible to find any of these new cards at their advertised prices right now.

But hope springs eternal, and newly leaked specs for GeForce RTX 5060 and 5050-series cards suggest that Nvidia may be announcing these lower-end cards soon. These kinds of cards are rarely exciting, but Steam Hardware Survey data shows that these xx60 and xx50 cards are what the overwhelming majority of PC gamers are putting in their systems.

The specs, posted by a reliable leaker named Kopite and reported by Tom’s Hardware and others, suggest a refresh that’s in line with what Nvidia has done with most of the 50-series so far. Along with a move to the next-generation Blackwell architecture, the 5060 GPUs each come with a small increase to the number of CUDA cores, a jump from GDDR6 to GDDR7, and an increase in power consumption, but no changes to the amount of memory or the width of the memory bus. The 8GB versions, in particular, will probably continue to be marketed primarily as 1080p cards.

	RTX 5060 Ti (leaked)	RTX 4060 Ti	RTX 5060 (leaked)	RTX 4060	RTX 5050 (leaked)	RTX 3050
CUDA Cores	4,608	4,352	3,840	3,072	2,560	2,560
Boost Clock	Unknown	2,535 MHz	Unknown	2,460 MHz	Unknown	1,777 MHz
Memory Bus Width	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit
Memory bandwidth	Unknown	288 GB/s	Unknown	272 GB/s	Unknown	224 GB/s
Memory size	8GB or 16GB GDDR7	8GB or 16GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR7	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6
TGP	180 W	160 W	150 W	115 W	130 W	130 W

As with the 4060 Ti, the 5060 Ti is said to come in two versions, one with 8GB of RAM and one with 16GB. One of the 4060 Ti’s problems was that its relatively narrow 128-bit memory bus limited its performance at 1440p and 4K resolutions even with 16GB of RAM—the bandwidth increase from GDDR7 could help with this, but we’ll need to test to see for sure.

Leaked GeForce RTX 5060 and 5050 specs suggest Nvidia will keep playing it safe Read More »

Six ways Microsoft’s portable Xbox could be a Steam Deck killer

gaming, microsoft, xbox / DJ Henderson / March 12, 2025

Bring old Xbox games to PC

The ultimate handheld system seller. Credit: Microsoft / Bizarre Creations

Microsoft has made a lot of hay over the way recent Xbox consoles can play games dating all the way back to the original Xbox. If Microsoft wants to set its first gaming handheld apart, it should make those old console games officially available on a Windows-based system for the first time.

The ability to download previous console games dating back to the Xbox 360 era (or beyond) would be an instant “system seller” feature for any portable Xbox. While this wouldn’t be a trivial technical lift on Microsoft’s part, the same emulation layer that powers Xbox console backward compatibility could surely be ported to Windows with a little bit of work. That process might be easier with a specific branded portable, too, since Microsoft would be working with full knowledge of what hardware was being used.

If Microsoft can give us a way to play Geometry Wars 2 on the go without having to deal with finicky third-party emulators, we’ll be eternally grateful.

Multiple hardware tiers

Xbox Series S (left), next to Xbox Series X (right). — One size does not fit all when it comes to consoles or to handhelds. Credit: Sam Machkovech

On the console side, Microsoft’s split simultaneous release of the Xbox Series S and X showed an understanding that not everyone wants to pay more money for the most powerful possible gaming hardware. Microsoft should extend this philosophy to gaming handhelds by releasing different tiers of portable Xbox hardware for price-conscious consumers.

Raw hardware power is the most obvious differentiator that could set a more expensive tier of Xbox portables apart from any cheaper options. But Microsoft could also offer portable options that reduce the overall bulk (a la the Nintendo Switch Lite) or offer relative improvements in screen size and quality (a la the Steam Deck OLED and Switch OLED).

“Made for Xbox”

It worked for Valve, it can work for Microsoft. Credit: Valve

One of the best things about console gaming is that you can be confident any game you buy for a console will “just work” with your hardware. In the world of PC gaming handhelds, Valve has tried to replicate this with the “Deck Verified” program to highlight Steam games that are guaranteed to work in a portable setting.

Microsoft is well-positioned to work with game publishers to launch a similar program for its own Xbox-branded portable. There’s real value in offering gamers assurances that “Made for Xbox” PC games will “just work” on their Xbox-branded handheld.

This kind of verification system could also help simplify and clarify hardware requirements across different tiers of portable hardware power; any handheld marketed as “level 2” could play any games marketed as level 2 or below, for instance.

Six ways Microsoft’s portable Xbox could be a Steam Deck killer Read More »

AMD says top-tier Ryzen 9900X3D and 9950X3D CPUs arrive March 12 for $599 and $699

AMD, gaming, Ryzen, Ryzen 9800X3D, Ryzen 9900x3d, Ryzen 9950x3d, Tech, zen 5 / Shannon Garcia / March 9, 2025

Like the 7950X3D and 7900X3D, these new X3D chips combine a pair of AMD’s CPU chiplets, one that has the extra 64MB of cache stacked underneath it and one that doesn’t. For the 7950X3D, you get eight cores with extra cache and eight without; for the 7900X3D, you get eight cores with extra cache and four without.

It’s up to AMD’s chipset software to decide what kinds of apps get to run on each kind of CPU core. Non-gaming workloads prioritize the normal CPU cores, which are generally capable of slightly higher peak clock speeds, while games that benefit disproportionately from the extra cache are run on those cores instead. AMD’s software can “park” the non-V-Cache CPU cores when you’re playing games to ensure they’re not accidentally being run on less-suitable CPU cores.

We didn’t have issues with this core parking technology when we initially tested the 7950X3D and 7900X3D, and AMD has steadily made improvements since then to make sure that core parking is working properly. The new 9000-series X3D chips should benefit from that work, too. To get the best results, AMD officially recommends a fresh and fully updated Windows install, along with the newest BIOS for your motherboard and the newest AMD chipset drivers; swapping out another Ryzen CPU for an X3D model (or vice versa) without reinstalling Windows can occasionally lead to CPUs being parked (or not parked) when they are supposed to be (or not supposed to be).

AMD says top-tier Ryzen 9900X3D and 9950X3D CPUs arrive March 12 for $599 and $699 Read More »

Blood Typers is a terrifically tense, terror-filled typing tutor

gaming / Kelly Newman / March 8, 2025

When you think about it, the keyboard is the most complex video game controller in common use today, with over 100 distinct inputs arranged in a vast grid. Yet even the most complex keyboard-controlled games today tend to only use a relative handful of all those available keys for actual gameplay purposes.

The biggest exception to this rule is a typing game, which by definition asks players to send their fingers flying across every single letter on the keyboard (and then some) in quick succession. By default, though, typing games tend to take the form of extremely basic typing tutorials, where the gameplay amounts to little more than typing out words and sentences by rote as they appear on screen, maybe with a few cute accompanying animations.

Typing “gibbon” quickly has rarely felt this tense or important. Credit: Outer Brain Studios

Blood Typers adds some much-needed complexity to that basic type-the-word-you-see concept, layering its typing tests on top of a full-fledged survival horror game reminiscent of the original PlayStation era. The result is an amazingly tense and compelling action adventure that also serves as a great way to hone your touch-typing skills.

See it, type it, do it

For some, Blood Typers may bring up first-glance memories of Typing of the Dead, Sega’s campy, typing-controlled take on the House of the Dead light gun game series. But Blood Typers goes well beyond Typing of the Dead‘s on-rails shooting, offering an experience that’s more like a typing-controlled version of Resident Evil.

Practically every action in Blood Typers requires typing a word that you see on-screen. That includes basic locomotion, which is accomplished by typing any of a number of short words scattered at key points in your surroundings in order to automatically walk to that point. It’s a bit awkward at first, but quickly becomes second nature as you memorize the names of various checkpoints and adjust to using the shift keys to turn that camera as you move.

Each of those words on the ground is a waypoint that you can type to move toward. Credit: Outer Brain Studios

When any number of undead enemies appear, a quick tap of the tab key switches you to combat mode, which asks you to type longer words that appear above those enemies to use your weapons. More difficult enemies require multiple words to take down, including some with armor that means typing a single word repeatedly before you can move on.

While you start each scenario in Blood Typers with a handy melee weapon, you’ll end up juggling a wide variety of projectile firearms that feel uniquely tuned to the typing gameplay. The powerful shotgun, for instance, can take out larger enemies with just a single word, while the rapid-fire SMG lets you type only the first few letters of each word, allowing for a sort of rapid fire feel. The flamethrower, on the other hand, can set whole groups of nearby enemies aflame, which makes each subsequent attack word that much shorter and faster.

Blood Typers is a terrifically tense, terror-filled typing tutor Read More »

“Literally just a copy”—hit iOS game accused of unauthorized HTML5 code theft

gaming / DJ Henderson / March 7, 2025

Viral success (for someone else)

VoltekPlay writes on Reddit that it was only alerted to the existence of My Baby or Not! on iOS by “a suspicious burst of traffic on our itch.io page—all coming from Google organic search.” Only after adding a “where did you find our game?” player poll to the page were the developers made aware of some popular TikTok videos featuring the iOS version.

“Luckily, some people in the [Tiktok] comments mentioned the real game name—Diapers, Please!—so a few thousand players were able to google their way to our page,” VoltekPlay writes. “I can only imagine how many more ended up on the thief’s App Store page instead.”

Earlier this week, the $2.99 iOS release of My Baby or Not! was quickly climbing iOS’s paid games charts, attracting an estimated 20,000 downloads overall, according to Sensor Tower.

Marwane Benyssef’s only previous iOS release, *Kiosk Food Night Shift*, also appears to be a direct copy of an itch.io release.

The App Store listing credited My Baby or Not! to “Marwane Benyssef,” a new iOS developer with no apparent history in the game development community. Benyssef’s only other iOS game, Kiosk Food Night Shift, was released last August and appears to be a direct copy of Kiosk, a pay-what-you-want title that was posted to itch.io last year (with a subsequent “full” release on Steam this year)

In a Reddit post, the team at VoltekPlay said that they had filed a DMCA copyright claim against My Baby or Not! Apple subsequently shared that claim with Bennysof, VoltekPlay writes, along with a message that “Apple encourages the parties to a dispute to work directly with one another to resolve the claim.”

This morning, Ars reached out to Apple to request a comment on the situation. While awaiting a response (which Apple has yet to provide), Apple appears to have removed Benyssef’s developer page and all traces of their games from the iOS App Store.

“Literally just a copy”—hit iOS game accused of unauthorized HTML5 code theft Read More »