VW’s 2016 diesels have a different device that may dupe emissions tests

Just when you thought the Volkswagen emissions scandal couldn't get any worse, it might do just that. The automaker revealed to US regulators last week that its 2016 diesel models may have a different device that could help those vehicles earn high...

Super Hexagon Bot: Bot Plays Twitch

I spent less than a minute on Terry Cavanagh’s Super Hexagon before acknowledging defeat. Now I can take my revenge, albeit vicariously. Georgia Tech ECE postgrad student Valentin Trimaille made a program that can beat the upbeat torture game on all of its difficulty levels.

super_hexagon_bot_by_valentin_trimaille_1zoom in

Valentin’s grabs video from Super Hexagon‘s screen and then uses OpenCV to determine the location of the walls and the player’s ship on a frame-by-frame basis. Then it analyzes the frame to see if there’s enough space to pass through, and finally simulates button presses to actually move the ship. Here’s the bot owning the game on the hardest difficulty:

Yeah! Suck it walls! Now you know how it feels to be beaten by pieces of code.

[via Valentin Trimaille via Waxy]

Pokémon X/Y Online Battle Exploit Reveals Your Team & Move: No Chansey

As with its predecessors, there are lots of tools available to hardcore Pokémon X & Y players, such as the creature map, the guides to hatching – or catching – shiny Pokémon, breeding Pokémon with perfect stats, as well as a slightly shady program that reveals the identity and stats of Pokémon eggs shown to you in trades. Then there’s the “Battle Analyzer”, a program that outright breaks Wi-Fi battles.

pokemon x y battle analyzer 620x357magnify

Apparently the Battle Analyzer is a Windows program that intercepts data from online battles when the despicable cheater uses his PC as a wireless hotspot for his 3DS. As pointed out by NeoGAF forum member UltimateIke, the Battle Analyzer not only shows you the names and stats of the Pokémon on your opponents team, it even shows you the specific move that he selected for the current turn.  If you’re a decent battler, you’ll almost always have a balanced group of Pokémon at hand to cover all threats, but normally you can only react to or at best guess what your opponent will do. The Battle Analyzer effectively removes that challenge.

Hopefully Nintendo can come up with a way to patch whatever hole makes this cheat program work.

[via NeoGAF via GoNintendo]

Cheater Alert: Editable Bottle Label Cheat Sheet

Water bottles are basically banned in most exams I’ve taken, and it’s easy to see why. Students can get so creative at cheating that even a pen itself can be used for that purpose. Case in point? The White Weasel’s editable and printable Aquafina label that lets students create cheat sheets that look like water bottle labels.

water weasel fake label

The only challenge is finding a printer that can print this stuff on shiny plastic. It’ll look way suspicious if you showed up to the test with a water bottle wrapped in printed paper, don’t you think? Especially if you keep staring at it during the duration of the test. Now that’s a dead giveaway.

fake water label

But all kidding aside, we don’t condone cheating in any way, so if you do have a test coming up, get off the Internet and crack those books open. Your future self will thank you for it.

[via Geekologie]

Torchlight II Hack Allows You to Reset Skills Infinitely: Respec My Dodge Mastery

One of the defining features of Diablo III is my utter disappointment with it. Another is its skill system, which lets players shuffle their characters’ learned skills at any point in the game. On the other hand, Torchlight II uses a more traditional skill tree system. Players can only reallocate the last three skill points they used, otherwise they’re stuck with their build. Unless you had an item called a Potion of Respec, which lets you reallocate all of your skill points. This hack lets you have as many bottles of that potion as you want.

torchlight ii potion of respec hack

The hack involves replacing a file inside a folder in the Torchlight II application with an edited version, which was uploaded by Runic Games Fansite member chewtoy. That edited file will fill the player’s Shared Stash with Potions of Respec. That’s 40 potions, but I guess you can re-paste the file if you need more. Here’s a guide courtesy of YouTuber MaguzEx. Skip to 1:10 in the video for the walkthrough:

You can download the edited file on Runic Games Fansite. Note that doing this will essentially replace whatever is in your Shared Stash with the potions, so be sure to move the contents of your Shared Stash elsewhere before doing this hack if you don’t want to lose those items. I highly recommend backing up your saves just in case something goes wrong. Also, other members of RGF seem to be having trouble making the hack work in non-Steam copies of Torchlight II, i.e. the hack might not work if you didn’t buy the game from Steam.

[via GameRanx]


Game Genie Coming to PS3: The Cheat Is on

A while back we told you about the return of the Game Genie for Nintendo DS devices, but now the Game Genie is coming for those of us who use the PS3. As I said back then, many of today’s games just aren’t very hard compared to way back when, but if you do want lots of ways to cheat on your PS3 games, you will soon be in luck.

game genie ps3
Hyperkin’s new PS3 Game Genie will arrive as a USB drive and will allow you to do all kinds of saved game editing. Just transfer saved games to the Game Genie USB, plug the USB into a computer, use the built-in software to write cheats onto your save, and then plug it back into your PS3.

That’s not exactly convenient, but at least you can beat that boss now and have infinite lives. The Game Genie for PS3 will break cover at E3 next week, with an expected release in early July.

[via Kotaku]


Bullshit Button, Just Like the Easy Button but More Crude


Inevitably when there is any sized gathering of geeks talk turns to how fast our computers are or how awesome we are at FPS games. Next time you are chatting with your geeky cohorts and the guy who...