People Scammed Walmart For Cheap PS4s

Some take advantage of Walmart's price-matching promise to get PlayStation 4s for as cheap as $50.

Some enterprising shoppers have taken advantage of Walmart's new price-matching promise to buyPlayStation 4s for as low as $50. Under the terms of Walmart's price-matching promotion, the company says, "If you find a lower advertised price on an identical product, tell us and we'll match it."

CNBC reports that people are setting up bogus Amazon selling accounts, and listing PS4s for just a fraction of what they normally cost. While Amazon is often quick to shut these pages down, users need only to take screenshots and show it to a Walmart cashier to request the price-match.

Some have successfully done this, with one Twitter user saying they were able to get a PS4 from Walmart for $50 (tweet since deleted, but captured by Kotaku) and other for around $100. People on the deals forum Slickdeals.net are also saying they were able to get PS4s on the cheap in this way.

It's likely that Walmart has since wised up and will amend its price-matching policies and protocols.

if you're looking to legitimately buy a PS4 in the near future, various retailers will offer a very nice Black Friday bundle that includes a console and copies of Grand Theft Auto V and The Last of Us for $400.

Continue Reading

GTA 5 Exec Responds To Concerns About Game's Violence

"This is a criminal setting; it's a gritty underworld; it is art. And I embrace that art. And it's beautiful art."

The Grand Theft Auto series has yet again drawn controversy over its violent content. Today on Bloomberg TV, one of the hosts asked GTA publisher Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick if it was true that players can have sex with prostitutes and then kill them in Grand Theft Auto V.

Zelnick's response was that GTA V is a work of art--and it may not always be pretty. "This is a criminal setting; it's a gritty underworld; it is art," he said. "And I embrace that art. And it's beautiful art. But it is gritty."

"This is a tough universe because it's a criminal universe" -- Strauss Zelnick

Zelnick also pointed out film and television programming is also stuffed with violence.

"Let's make no bones about the environment in which we operate," he explained. "And we stand shoulder to shoulder with other major motion picture releases, major television shows that explore a similar universe. So yeah, this is a tough universe because it's a criminal universe."

The executive also pointed out that GTA V offers hundreds of hours of gameplay, allowing you to do much more than just kill prostitutes. In fact, some GTA V players have shown just how creative they can be in anon-lethal fashion. One player is even trying to play the game without killing anyone.

"There's hundreds of hours of gameplay [in GTA V]," Zelnick said. "People have been engaged with Grand Theft Auto Online for over a year and there are plenty of things to do. And it's an incredibly exciting environment. Can it be rough? Absolutely."

Continue Reading

free-to-play hooks, dev says

STAY CONNECTED. FOLLOW POLYGON NOW! 

  

×

Avalanche Studios downplayed fears today that its new game, Just Cause 3, will feature in-game microtransactions or free-to-play game mechanics, a rumor that spawned after screenshots of the new game leaked ahead of today's official reveal. Christofer Sundberg, co-founder and chief creative officer of Avalanche Studios, said the leak of old screenshots led to "a few misconceptions."

"Those leaked screenshots were taken from an ancient version of Just Cause 3," Sundbergwrote on the developer's website. "Like most games, this one went through an exploratory phase where we looked at different control schemes, different technologies, different business models. Those leaked screenshots show aspects of that process, and in no way reflect the game we are making today."

Just Cause 3, Sundberg said, will be distributed as a retail box and available for download, similar to other AAA games. It's not a free-to-play game, nor does it feature in-game microtransactions, he said.

"Does that mean we'll release the game and call it quits? Nope," Sundberg said. "Beyond launch, we are likely to look into DLC packs and items as part of our ambition to supportJust Cause 3 and its players for many years to come, but until that time we're completely focused on making the best Just Cause game we possibly can. Rest assured it will be a huge, fully packed and extremely rewarding experience right out of the gate."

Square Enix and Avalanche Studios announced Just Cause 3 earlier today. The "next generation of chaotic sandbox fun" is slated to come to PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One in 2015.

• SOURCE
 
• Avalanche Studios

Continue Reading

botnets

A single piece of malware can cause enormous damage, but when thousands, or even millions of computers run the same program, their effects can be devastating. So a botnet is a group of computers that coordinate their activity over the internet. There are a number of harmless botnets used for such purposes as the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) text messaging program, but the vast majority are created by malware.

Botnets spread through viruses and worms and once installed on the victim’s computer they use the internet to make contact with a control computer. At this point, the infected computer (often called a zombie) will do nothing more except periodically check for instructions from the control computer. Over time, more and more computers are recruited to the incipient botnet until it may contain tens of thousands of zombies, but they don’t raise suspicion as they appear to be doing nothing.

At some point in the future, the control computer will issue a command for the botnet to wake up and begin doing something. Often the people who created the botnet itself have either sold or rented the botnet to another group who want to use its capabilities.

Botnets have been used to flood the internet with spam messages, to commit fraud against advertisers and to perform so-called distributed denial of service attacks on companies and governments. Botnets are so large, and so widely distributed across the internet that they can be very hard to tackle and the effects of a coordinated attack on critical parts of the network can mean even very large websites struggle to remain online while the botnet targets their computers.

Continue Reading