Merijn

Epic Games will end online services and turn off servers for a handful of its older titles, including many Rock Band and Unreal Tournament games. The company says that the decision arrives as it moves to “solely support Epic Online Services with its unified friends system, voice chat features, parental controls, and parental verification features.” While many of these titles will remain available to play offline, some will not be playable in any capacity.

Epic will end online services for all of the games on its list, including those Rock Band and Unreal Tournament games, on January 24. The full list of titles losing online support can be seen below.

A List of Games That Will End Online Services at Epic Games This January

• 1000 Tiny Claws
• Dance Central 1–3
• Green Day: Rock Band
• Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess
• Rock Band 1–3
• The Beatles: Rock Band
• Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars
• Unreal Gold
• Unreal II: The Awakening
• Unreal Tournament 2003
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• Unreal Tournament 3
• Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition

While Epic notes that Rock Band 4 online multiplayer and Dance Central VR online multiplayer will remain available, many of these titles were removed from digital storefronts today. The announcement also reveals that Mac and Linux versions of Hatoful Boyfriend and Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star have been removed from digital storefronts today. Players who purchased these titles before today will still be able to access and play the games. Additionally, Battle Breakers will shut down and become inaccessible on December 30, and refunds will be made available to those who made in-game purchases in the past 180 days.

Meanwhile, Epic isn’t completely leaving Unreal Tournament fans in the dust. Just before the announcement that servers for older titles would be shuttered, the company revealed Unreal Tournament 3 X, a free version of the third Unreal Tournament. It comes with crossplay for all PC players and has no microtransactions. It’s a silver lining for those who still like to hop back in for a nostalgic match or two. However, all other Unreal Tournament games aren’t getting the same special treatment, at least for now.

Unreal Tournament 3 X isn’t available for download yet, and Epic has yet to reveal a release date. Stay tuned for updates on when we’ll be able to play this free version of the game and, hopefully, other Unreal Tournament titles.

When my husband asked me how much spaghetti to cook, all I could think to tell him was to imagine if he was having a wank, that much.

The sound effects lmfaoo

nitter.net/corrouchies/status/1602643084277420033#m

December 1985. Knew we were getting a ZX Spectrum 128 for Xmas. Parents went out one night, brother & I carefully unwrapped computer, set it all up, played Rambo all evening. Reboxed, wrapped back up when finished. Parents none the wiser. Soz mum & dad.

Steven Hawking came up with a simple and clever way of seeing if time travel is possible. On June 28, 2009, he threw a party for time travellers from the future…but didn’t advertise it until after the party was already over.

In an effort to improve the chances of the party invite being noticed by future generations, Peter Dean, working with approval from Hawking, has made this gorgeous hand-printed poster of the party invitation:

There’s also a smaller less-expensive version of the poster in grey and a fetching yellow/orange.

raspberry pi hired a cop who used raspberry pis to build surveillance tech, and is now being flippant towards and blocking anyone who is less than jazzed about that decision

cool cool cool

Whenever someone stands near me at a concert and constantly records on their phone, I sing loudly, badly, and as close to the phone as I can. I like to think I'm trying to help them live in the moment, but in reality I just find it funny

The moment that first seemed highly unlikely, then just a little unlikely, then all of a sudden pretty plausible has finally happened. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is seeking to block Microsoft from its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard (and its Call of Duty IP), under the reasoning that it “would enable Microsoft to suppress competitors to its Xbox gaming consoles and its rapidly growing subscription content and cloud-gaming business.”

To support this notion, the FTC cited the Microsoft acquisition of Bethesda / ZeniMax, and it noted, “Microsoft decided to make several of Bethesda’s titles including Starfield and Redfall Microsoft exclusives despite assurances it had given to European antitrust authorities that it had no incentive to withhold games from rival consoles.” FTC Bureau of Competition Director Holly Vedova found that this demonstrates a pattern of withholding content from “gaming rivals,” so they want to block the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard to prevent such activity from continuing.

Some of the FTC’s characterizations of events are a bit questionable. Notably, it describes Activision as “one of only a very small number of top video game developers in the world that create and publish high-quality video games for multiple devices,” in order to highlight the damaging effect it would have for consumers if its games were Xbox console exclusives. Literally almost every part of that statement is up for debate.

As an olive branch just this week, Xbox head Phil Spencer announced that Microsoft had come to an agreement to put Call of Duty on Nintendo consoles for the next 10 years if the Activision Blizzard merger is completed. So it’s clear that Microsoft is willing to play ball with the FTC in order to get the Activision Blizzard acquisition completed (no matter how furious Sony and PlayStation are). However, I’m no lawyer and can’t claim to say how things will play out. Fortunately, The Escapist does have a lawyer writer or two kicking around, so stay tuned for additional developments and insights.

After FTX declared bankruptcy, the entire FTX.us domain was redirected to a page providing information on the bankruptcy proceedings.

However, NFTs that had been minted on the FTX platform relied on metadata from an API at that domain, meaning that the NFTs are now pointing to broken links. Owners of these NFTs can still see that the NFT exists, but images no longer work—even when viewing the NFTs in their own wallets, or when listing them for sale on other platforms.

Other projects that rely on the FTX NFT platform's API, such as the Coachella NFT project, also broke: the Coachella NFT platform shows 0 NFTs in existence. Those NFTs still show up where they are listed on external NFT platforms, although the images and metadata are broken.

• Tweet by jac0xb.sol
• Coachella NFT marketplace
• Broken Coachella NFT on the Magic Eden marketplace

While I was a bit distracted my girlfriend what kink I had but never done, I blurted out the first thing that came into my head - watersports. The very next weekend she pissed all over me. It was the most unerotic thing I have ever experienced.

At my mates wedding someone said his sister was pregnant. Being a bit pissed I rubbed her belly and congratulated her. I forgot he had another sister. After deciding not to kill myself I approached his other sister and repeated the above. I also forgot he had a third sister.

I used to regularly buy a bag of mozzarella with the intention of using it on my frozen pizzas over a few weeks. Every time I ate the entire lot in one day. The stuff is like crack. I've had to stop buying it as I have absolutely no self-control.

My wife was out for the evening, so tried on one of her dresses and make up as you do. Problem is i got through a bottle of whisky, crashed out on the sofa. My wife packed her bags & left me the very next day. Gutted she took the dress though.

Married and been together for many years. We have a healthy sex life, however, since following fesshole I'm scared to leave the house too often incase my husband wanks himself to death.

The letters "LP" appeared in yellow spray paint up and down our street one afternoon. My pal reckoned they were for new lamp posts and we wondered what would happen if we added a few more. 30 years later the street still has a ridiculous amount of lighting.

I'm 78 years old and have gone on a number of computer courses for retirees exclusively so I can find out how to safely download kinky porn on our home PC without the missus finding out.

An old guy at my golf club had cancer and used to joke that he wants a hole in one before he dies. Par 3 on our course is a blind shot, I waited and ran onto the green, put his ball into the hole and ran off. He's passed now but that night was the happiest of ever seen him.

More like....

I'm a police officer. Saw a woman shoplifting food stuffs today. Watched her steal bread, milks and eggs, chocolate and other stuff. I accidentally forgot to do anything about it. Soz.

Wim works on a web app with a problem. Specifically, the error log is the fastest growing file on the system. Well, perhaps that's not the problem, but actually a symptom. Like so many applications, it's a PHP web app with a MySQL backend, and the previous developer made… choices.

$sqlisgt = "insert into ser_gen_tj values (4, '$type_juridiction', '$enr[23]', 'O')";

There's your SQL injection vulnerability. Just dump variable values directly into SQL statements, what could go wrong?

Well, one problem is that sometimes this application needed to handle names. Names, especially in French, frequently contain '. So this wouldn't work:

$sql = "INSERT INTO personne VALUES ('$matricule','$nom','$prenom','$tel',Null);";

A single quote in $nom would break the query, it'd become syntactically invalid. And that's why the log file was the fastest growing set of data in the system. But the developer responsible "fixed" this, don't you worry.

$sql = "INSERT INTO personne VALUES ('$matricule',\"$nom\",\"$prenom\",'$tel',Null);";

Thank goodness no one has a " in their name, I suppose. Still, Little Bobby Tables is going to have a field day with this application. Or should I say, Petit Robert D'Tables.

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My wife doesn't know but, I drop the answer to Wordle into casual conversation each morning. I like to think this subliminally helps her in the very competitive daily Wordle competition she has with her work colleagues. She's now winning.

twitterisgoinggreat.com is a great continual timeline of the disaster going on with Twitter h/t @corinne_podger

When I was younger, I deliberately swallowed a 5p coin just to see how long it would take to travel through my body. Hearing it ching against the toilet bason was utter fulfilment.

Did Twitter Blue tweet just cost Eli Lilly $LLY billions?

Yes.

twitter is marking links to twitter ↔ mastodon crossposter services as "potentially spammy or unsafe"

Whenever I flush a turd from my 4th floor apartment, I have visions of its shocked expression falling through the vertical pipe to the sewer below. Like Alan Rickman at the end of Die Hard

absolutely block on sight

here's a bright spot: Tennessee has outlawed slavery tonight