The beta for Halo 5: Guardians’ upcoming new mode, Warzone Firefight, released in beta form this past week on April 14, and planned to end on April 18. 343 Industries has since announced that the beta is being extended by one day, wrapping up on Tuesday, April 19, at 10 a.m. PT.

The team announced the extension and thanked players for their patience in a forum post on the official Halo forum. The extension seems to be a result of technical issues the beta faced.

Warzone firefight, an upcoming game mode for Halo 5, is a take on the popular Firefight mode that debuted in Halo 3: ODST. Warzone Firefight sees up to eight players cooperatively play in a five round match against waves of enemies, and is planned for a summer launch.

For more on Halo 5: Guardians, read our review here, and be sure to check out a gameplay trailer for the Warzone Firefight mode.

[Source: Official Halo Forums]

One of the first things you do in the colorful, comedic Thimbleweed Park is photograph a corpse. You don’t simply point a camera at the body and snap a picture, though–that would be too easy. Thimbleweed Park is a point-and-click adventure game, and a nostalgic one at that. It apes all the mechanics that defined the genre’s earliest years, including Maniac Mansion‘s memorable user interface. So to capture that corpse on film, you must select “use” from the ever-present list of verbs then highlight the camera in your inventory before finally clicking on the body to complete your task.

“Modern adventure games, although they’re very good, they’re kind of missing that charm that those old games had, and we’ve always kind of felt this interface was part of that charm,” explains designer Ron Gilbert, who masterminded Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and a number of other genre-defining adventure games in the late ’80s and early ’90s. “And it’s not just the look but the fact that you [had] verbs and had those choices. There were puzzle-solving opportunities with that, plus there were a lot of humor opportunities.”

With its verb-driven puzzles and deliberately retro aesthetic, Thimbleweed is clearly committed to delivering old school charm. At the same time, however, the game won’t slavishly recreate every aspect the classic adventure game experience. “We understand that people do approach games a little bit differently today than they did back then,” assures Gilbert. “So even though this has this aesthetic of this classic point-and-click thing, we’re trying to adjust all of those little design decisions with people’s more modern expectations for how things work.”

Naturally, some of these design adjustments are relatively minor, while others should ensure the game is actually playable. “When you would asked somebody in [Maniac Mansion] for information, they would tell you and then they would never tell you that information again,” explains Gilbert. “We expected players to grab a pencil and a pad and write the information down, and players expected to do that. I think players today don’t expect to do that, and so, when you do talk to different characters, they will tell you same things over and over again in different ways.”

This theme of preserving players’ fond memories by delivering an authentic yet subtly updated experience extended to nearly every facet of my demo. But it all started with a body under a bridge. Though Thimbleweed’s narrative eventually encompasses five playable characters, it starts with just two: Agents Ray and Reyes, a pair of washed-up FBI agents sent to the mysterious, decaying town of Thimbleweed to investigate a murder.

It’s a straightforward enough premise, but according to Gilbert, the game’s grim opening photo shoot is only a precursor to a series of larger mysteries. “What you quickly realize is that it’s not really a murder mystery,” teases Gilbert. “The body is so unimportant that it actually remains in the river for the entire game. As you are trying to figure out who killed the person under the bridge, you kind of get these new goals, and that especially happens when you start to unlock the characters.”

While Gilbert denies Ray and Reyes are anything like their obvious doppelgangers Mulder and Scully–“we were not thinking X-Files at all; it never entered our head”–he does acknowledge David Lynch’s Twin Peaks as an influence. Like that series’ titular town, Thimbleweed’s citizens harbor their own secrets that gradually eclipse the central death that kick-starts the story. And after roughly the first hour or two of gameplay, players can freely swap between five of these characters, all of whom offer their own perspective, personality, and narrative arc.

“I think that’s one of the things that interactive storytelling can give us: we’re not telling a single linear story,” says Gilbert. “When you have multiple characters, you can tell multiple stories. You can complete and solve the main story and never really solve the stories of the characters. Or you can spend time and really go deep into their stories and solve some more puzzles that resolve their whole stories.”

Thimbleweed’s multiple protagonists also serve a gameplay purpose, one that smoothes a rough edge found in many early adventure games. “I think one of the cardinal sins of adventure games is if there’s only one puzzle to solve,” asserts Gilbert. “You should always have two or three or four puzzles that you’re constantly working on, and then each of those then kind of opens up new branches of puzzles.”

If nothing else, Thimbleweed’s branching puzzles should keep you from getting stuck, though with five playable characters, five limitless inventories, and an unrestricted world full of objects to scrutinize and fully voiced NPCs to interrogate, Thimbleweed could conceivably become a little overwhelming. Thankfully, the game’s early hours are punctuated with playable flashbacks that introduce the five main characters while also easing you into its particular brand of puzzle-solving.

“This is one of the things that we’re doing to help people that are maybe new to point-and-click adventures,” says Gilbert. “We’re putting them in these small, controlled environments where they can kind of slowly get into the puzzles rather than just pushing them into the pool and saying, ‘Hey, sink or swim!’ Which was how things worked back in Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island. I think players today … want this comfort of knowing that they are heading in the right direction.”

During my hands-on time, I explored one of these controlled flashbacks as Ransom, an insult comic clown who was busy preparing for his next performance at the Thimbleweed circus. While Ransom strung together some crass commentary, I searched his trailer for a red clown nose (which I found on a nearby doll), pulled down a poster hiding a safe full of cash, deciphered some hints tacked to a corkboard in order to open the safe, and finally took the cash to a nearby carnie to buy back Ransom’s joke book.

In that short span of time, I learned how to apply verbs to objects in the environment, utilize items in my inventory, and engage NPCs with the game’s dialogue tree system. As Gilbert described, this one section encapsulated everything I remember about old school adventure games–plus, I got to groove to the jazzy noir soundtrack and cringe at Ransom’s abrasive behavior. It wasn’t always crystal clear what I could interact with, but in theory, experimenting with the mechanics and discovering random jokes when you fail is half the fun.

“It’s all the wonderful, charming things about point-and-click adventures but without all the stupid stuff about point-and-click adventures,” jokes Gilbert. “We want this game to really feel like you remember those old games. It’s not really how those old games were, because I think we remember those old games being a lot better than they actually were.”

Whether Thimbleweed can successfully turn our rose-tinted memories into a modern reality remains to be seen, but you’ll be able to decide for yourself when the game launches on Xbox One, PC, Mac, and Linux either this October or next January. According to Gilbert, “We don’t want to detract from Call of Duty by releasing [during the holiday rush].”

There’s rarely a boring moment in the security world. This week, a former journalist, Matthew Keys, was sentenced to two years in jail for aiding Anonymous hackers who briefly defaced a headline on the LA Times website. Keys was charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 1986 computer crime law that allowed his prosecutors to push for felony charges.

Then the world learned that the US government paid “grey hat” hackers for information about an iOS 9 software vulnerability, which the feds then used to access the locked iPhone that belonged to a San Bernardino terrorist. The hackers who rolled out a full PR campaign a month before they revealed the Badlock bug turned out to be over-hyping a medium-level security flaw. And the man who wants the world to think he’s the brains behind Bitcoin announced that he will demonstrate proof in London next week—but skeptical security researchers aren’t holding their breath.

But most of the news in the digital security world, as usual, happened behind the screen. Researchers showed that people who prefer the aesthetic consistency of URL shorteners are actually opening themselves up to malware attacks and online spying. Meanwhile, the web is becoming more secure (whew!), thanks the efforts of the technologists of Let’s Encrypt, who are helping tens of millions of websites switch to an HTTPS standard that will encrypt traffic between websites.

And there was more: Each Saturday we round up the news stories that we didn’t break or cover in depth at WIRED, but which deserve your attention nonetheless. As always, click on the headlines to read the full story in each link posted. And stay safe out there.

It’s Tax Time, But the IRS Still Sucks at Cybersecurity

IRS Chief John Koskinen admitted Tuesday that unless the agency is given permission to pay digital security professionals more than the currently approved salary rates, those much-needed experts will take jobs elsewhere. He noted that the IRS’s top cybersecurity expert recently left and that currently there are only 10 such experts employed at the agency. The IRS has already been the victim of security breaches this year, and Commissioner Koskinen is calling on Congress to authorize the IRS to pay for the expertise it needs to keep Americans’ financial data secure.

Anyone the IRS does hire to boost its security won’t be starting from scratch. Security technologist Bruce Schneier noted this week that the annual Government Accountability Office report on the state of IRS security outlines 43 recommendations for fundamental improvements to IRS security. This is a big deal because of how sensitive taxpayer data is—cybercriminals can easily use it to commit serious fraud.

But taxpayers shouldn’t only worry about the IRS’ own lax security. Ars Technica reported this week that millions of Americans have received fraudulent robocalls from scammers outside the United States claiming to be the IRS. When someone receives a call, they get routed to overseas call centers, where operators urge them to wire money under false threats of prosecution.

The White House Has a Brand New Cybersecurity Commission

The President has assembled a new crew of experts from across the business, government, and academia worlds to help advise the executive branch on improving the US’ cybersecurity. The 12-member body includes General Keith Alexander, who’s the former head of the NSA; chief security officers and executives from Uber, Facebook, Microsoft, and MasterCard; as well as academics from Stanford and Georgia Tech, to name a few. Among other responsibilities, the new task force will make bold recommendations to improve digital security across the government and the private sectors, as well as ways for Americans to improve their personal privacy practices.

The FBI Finds Nothing Interesting So Far on Syed Farook’s iPhone

In a development that’s resulted in more facepalming than surprise within the cryptography community, a source tells CBS News that the FBI has found “nothing significant” in the data of the now-cracked iPhone of San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook. According to CBS, the FBI is still analyzing the phone, which was unlocked with the assistance of contract hackers after a six-week legal dispute with Apple over the company’s refusal to help bypass its own encryption. But iPhone forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski is skeptical: “There’s no such thing as ‘an ongoing analysis’ this long, unless you’re playing Angry Birds on Farook’s phone,” he wrote on Twitter. The anti-climax of accessing Farook’s work-issued phone was predictable: The FBI had already accessed his personal phone and an older iCloud backup, and the NSA had found no contact with terrorists in his metadata. This all suggests that the FBI’s push for Apple to help unlock the phone was about setting a precedent, not opening a single iPhone 5c.

The FBI Hacked PCs to Get Around Encryption as Early as 2003

The crypto war, it’s sometimes easy to forget, didn’t start with a locked iPhone stymying the FBI. This week, the New York Times reminded us of the crypto war’s decades-long history when it covered a recently unsealed 2003 case in which the FBI hacked into the PCs of animal rights activists to bypass their encrypted communications. The case known as Operation Trail Mix, the first of its kind, used a piece of spyware to grab either the keystrokes or decryption keys of PGP-using members of a group called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, who were attempting to stymie a New Jersey lab’s pharmaceutical testing on animals. Despite rules that the FBI must report any instance when it encounters encryption to the federal court system, it never noted the hacking incident in its annual account of its wiretaps.

Malicious Wi-Fi Network Gadget Can Brick Unpatched iOS Devices

As WIRED’s Brian Barrett warned back in February, don’t be one of the dummies that falls for a 4Chan prank advising iPhone users to set their phone’s clock back to January 1, 1970. Doing so, thanks to a serious bug in iOS, can permanently brick your device. Now that Apple has patched that retro clock bug, a couple of security researchers have turned that prank into a full-on attack. They used a Raspberry Pi mini-computer to create a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot with the network name “attwifi,” so that any iOS device in range that’s ever logged on at a Starbucks would automatically connect. Then that malicious network would automatically change the device’s clock date, triggering that very nasty bug in any unpatched phones or iPads. Simply walking down a city street with the hackers’ device could likely brick devices in all directions—a disturbing demonstration of the importance of keeping iOS updated.

Canadian Police Had a Secret Blackberry Global Decryption Key for Years

Canadian court documents linked to the prosecution of a Montreal-based crime network revealed in a Vice investigation this week that Canadian police have an encryption key that can unlock millions of Blackberry devices. Law enforcement kept this power a secret for years. The documents came to light after a two-year trial revealed the Canadian police used the global encryption key to surveil communications intercepted from cell site simulators. Exactly how Blackberry has worked with Canadian law enforcement to provide the decryption key remains unknown, but what is clear is that the mobile communications company has deeply collaborated with law enforcement to help read customer communications in ways unbeknownst to Blackberry users.

The CIA’s Venture Capital Firm Is Investing in Companies That Surveil Social Media

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the CIA is watching social media, but now we know a lot more about how it’s done and what the agency hopes to do in the future. An investigation by The Intercept into the CIA’s venture capital unit, In-Q-Tel, reveals that a number of tech companies that specialize in social media mining and data analytics receive funding from the CIA to build and research new tools for social media surveillance. One company, Dataminr, scans Twitter to help law enforcement track trending topics. Another, Geofeedia, specializes in geolocation tracking of posts during events (e.g., a protest), while other companies build tools to help analyze networks and influencers posting and organizing on social media websites. Privacy advocates warn that these technologies are helping the US government compile dossiers on people based on constitutionally protected speech. The fact that the police are using algorithms built by private companies for the purpose of labeling social media users is a serious cause for concern, advocates say.

Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.