Hello, and welcome once again to Replay, WIRED’s weekly roundup of videogame news. This week, we’ve got a hack you should know about, a delay, and some cool new tech. Let’s get to it.
Nintendo Confirms a Pretty Major Hacking Attempt
Earlier today, Nintendo confirmed that a recent hacking attempt on its system compromised the login IDs and passwords of some 160,000 Nintendo Network ID accounts. In the wake of the hack, the company is temporarily disabling the ability to log in to Nintendo Accounts through the NNID system, which, in the labyrinthine world of Nintendo account authentications, is only one method of doing so. We’d explain in more detail, but, honestly, we don’t understand Nintendo’s online infrastructure either.
The important takeaway is that your account might have been compromised. While Nintendo plans to notify affected account holders by email, everyone should probably be taking the step of changing their Nintendo password and setting up two-factor authentication if they haven’t already. Oh, and if you haven’t gotten a password manager, here’s another reminder to do that.
Minecraft Has Ray Tracing Now, Which Is Pretty Cool
The new hotness in high-tech graphics nowadays is ray tracing—a method that crates lifelike lighting effects algorithmically, rendering light and then simulating how it would interact with digital objects (reflections, shadows, etc.). It’s realistic, beautiful, and demanding, which makes any game that can implement the tech automatically a technological showcase. The latest? Minecraft.
Yep: Mojang has just rolled out a beta of the technology, which it’s been working to implement for a while. It’s a major new visual move for the game, and it makes the voxel world look absolutely arresting. If you want to see the ray tracing, you’re going to need a graphics card that supports it—most don’t, at this point—but it’s amazing to play around with. Minecraft seems like an unlikely choice for this kind of a showcase, but the relative simplicity of the world works in its favor here. Without intervening effects, you can see just how impressive this technology really is.
Death Stranding‘s PC Release Is Delayed Until July
Death Stranding is a game about a world ravaged by a strange unknown force, leaving most people stuck inside cloistered settlements while they rely on a group of poorly compensated delivery workers who risk their lives to bring them necessary goods and ensure they have a connection to the outside world. (This is a sentence that has us worried director Hideo Kojima is some sort of weird videogame prophet wizard.) In other words, Death Stranding is a strangely appropriate videogame to play during the coronavirus pandemic. Unfortunately, if you want to play on PC, you’re going to have to wait a bit longer.
As Rock Paper Shotgun reports, the very same conditions that Death Stranding eerily reflects will now cause the game to be delayed. Due to interruptions in the standard workflow caused by transitioning to work-from-home setups, it seems, Kojima Productions is opting to push the release back to July 14. The additional time will allow for more polishing of the final product, which certainly can’t hurt.
Recommendation of the Week: Final Fantasy VII by Square Enix, on PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC
So the remake came out, and it was pretty good. Very good, in fact. But it’s only one part of a much longer story. And while the remake of Final Fantasy VII may not follow that plot precisely, it’s still one worth experiencing and thinking about. Which makes it mighty convenient that there are a lot of solid port options for the original, including a fully-featured Nintendo Switch version that has character boosters and a fast-forward function. The PS4 version has the fast-forward as well, while the PC version only has the character boosters. At any rate, if you want to experience the game without hunting for an original PlayStation, there are lots of ways to do it. And those pre-rendered backgrounds are still pretty rad looking.
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