‘Difficult’ Sekiro wins top gong
SEKIRO: Shadows Die Twice was criticised by many in the gaming industry for its extreme difficulty.
But that wasn’t enough to hurt its awards chances, taking out both Game of the Year and Best Action/Adventure Game for 2019 at The Game Awards 2019.
After being announced as the winner, Sekiro director Hidetaka Miyazaki said (through a translator) that he was very moved by the win, and while the game’s difficulty made him unsure, he was surprised, even overjoyed, by the reaction.
Last year’s Game Awards were dominated by profound single-player experiences and amazing storytelling, and this trend certainly continued in 2019 with a stacked nominations list for the top award, including Death Stranding, Resident Evil 2 and Control.
While From Software managed to win the coveted Game of the Year award with Sekiro, it was Microsoft that was arguably the real winner of the night, stealing the show with the reveal of its next-generation console, Xbox Series X, while details of Sony’s PS5 remain mostly unknown.
Hot favourites of the night Death Stranding and Control failed to clean up as anticipated, winning four awards between them despite sharing 16 nominations. Instead, indie developer of Disco Elysium, ZA/ UM, was a big winner, picking up four Game Awards.
Another big loser of the night was Untitled Goose Game and its Australian-based developers House House, who left the awards empty-handed.
Wilson Smith
A SHOCKING WhatsApp flaw allows hackers to crash your app just by sending you a text.
The bug is so serious that users are forced to reinstall WhatsApp to fix the issue – and affected group chats disappear forever. It was uncovered by cyber experts at security firm Check Point, who said one text could crash multiple phones in one go.
“The impact of this vulnerability is potentially tremendous, since WhatsApp is the main communication service for many people,” Check Point researchers explained.
“Thus, the bug compromises the availability of the app, which is crucial for our daily activities.”
VULNERABLE: A WhatsApp flaw is susceptible to hackers.
WhatsApp is the world’s most popular chat app, with more than 1.5 billion users and over a billion groups.
As many as 65 billion messages are sent via WhatsApp every day, so bugs in the app can seriously affect huge numbers of people.
Hackers can exploit the bug by sending a destructive group chat message.
When a user sends messages inside a group, the app examines their data to identify who sent the message.
Check Point created a tool that could access this data and edit it, replacing it with a message that causes the app to crash.
WhatsApp has already issued a fix for the bug, but you’ll need to update the app to make sure you’re safe.
If you’ve updated WhatsApp to the latest version, it’s impossible for anyone to attack your phone using this exploit.
Sean Keach