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Playing through video games as quickly as possible, or “speedrunning”, is one of gaming’s oldest traditions. There’s no better way for one to demonstrate their impressive mastery of a game than by completing it at as fast as possible. An upcoming game called Neon White, developed by Angel Matrix and published by Annapurna Interactive, makes the challenge of speedrunning explicit by asking players to complete levels as quickly as possible. The demo for Neon White features plenty of interesting movement techniques, like being propelled forwards with grenade and rocket explosions....

Celeste is one of my favorite games of all time. In Celeste, you climb Mt. Celeste with the help of a snappy air-dash ability. The bulk of the game consists of navigating from screen to screen, moving ever-upward in your quest to reach the summit of the mountain. In Celeste, you never see the mountain in its entirety other than on the low-poly world map, which was slightly disappointing to me....

Hack The Box is a platform which challenges users to hack machines that are intentionally left vulnerable to certain exploits. Hack The Box provides a great opportunity to apply penetration testing skills in a hands-on environment. In this article, I’ll explain how I was able to hack the Cap machine (now retired on Hack The Box). This machine is certainly one of the easier machines on Hack The Box, but I found it very useful as a learning experience....

The year is 2010. Minecraft has just released its first beta version. I am frantically trying to figure out how to run a Minecraft server on my parents' computer so that I can play the game with my friends, asking Google all kinds of questions in a desperate attempt to figure out what “port forwarding” is. This situation served as a harsh introduction to networking concepts, as well as the command line interface and the Java VM....

In September 2020, Spelunky 2 was released by Mossmouth and BlitWorks. As a fan of the original Spelunky HD, I was immediately hooked on how Spelunky 2’s uncompromising difficulty gave a constant thrill to exploring the game’s randomly-generated caverns. As I learned to play the game, I discovered how Spelunky 2 offers a number of hidden ways to make the game even harder. One of these methods involves obtaining the “True Crown”, a hat with the appearance of a medieval jester’s cap....

Machine learning algorithms have recently been used on social media to create “bot-generated” images and sentences. One fun aspect of this generated work is that the tone of the original work tends to shine through, despite the fact that the generated work is often a jumble of conceptually unrelated words. A great example of generated content is /r/SubredditSimulator, which is an online forum populated entirely by bots creating nonsensical posts....

You may have heard of NFTs (“Non-Fungible Tokens”). The general idea of an NFT is that it is a piece of artwork stored on a decentralized, distributed ledger (the “blockchain”). If you bought an NFT, you could use this blockchain to incontrovertibly prove that you “own” a digital asset. Unfortunately, NFTs have a few flaws. First, the blockchain only stores a link to artwork, rather than the artwork itself. Despite being on a “decentralized blockchain,” that link is controlled by a single, centralized entity: the company that registered (or “minted”) the NFT....

A few months ago, I played Hunt: Showdown, a competitive multiplayer shooter produced by Crytek. Hunt is an unusual game in which teams of one, two, and three players all compete for the same objectives. How can such a design ever be well-balanced for a competitive game? Hunt: Showdown balances asymmetrical teams by ensuring that smaller teams play against worse players to compensate for the disadvantage of having fewer teammates....