Gizmodo Australia » cheats

Video: Girl Cheats Claw Game In Creative Way

Matt Hickey — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:32:52 +0000

Either this little girl is very ballsy or very, very dumb, but I have to give her credit for just going for it. Not content to be ripped off by one of those claw game scams, she just went for it, climbed up into the machine somehow, and picked her trophy. But the fun comes when a little boy—presumably her brother—goes to get his mum, and then the crowds come. I totally wish this had audio.

Rock Band Bot Can Get 100% On Expert Song, But You Still Suck

Gizmodo US Edition — Sun, 04 May 2008 22:30:00 +0000

Robotics maker Mark Single hooked up a Rock Band guitar to Christmas light show software and scored 100% on Green Grass and High Tides on Expert, one of the hardest songs in the game. He’s detailed how he did it so you n00bs can try your hand at it too. I’ve never really understood the point of modding a game to play itself, but in case you were one of the lame asses who needed to cheat to get sweet scores in Guitar Hero III and panicked at the thought of actually playing to pass songs in Rock Band, Pure Pwnage has got you covered. Though, at the end of the day, is it really worth it to get a perfect and still feel so empty? [Pure Pwnage via HacknMod]

Guitar Hero Robot Shows Just How Much Its Creators Love Achievements

Jason Chen — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:00:00 +0000

These Electrical Engineering students at Texas A&M love Guitar Hero so much that they made a “robot,” which is actually just some levers and switches and a circuit board set up on top of a Guitar Hero guitar, and a system that analyzes the video signal to determine when and where to hit the notes. The end result is a bot that can get a very respectable 96% on some hard- arse songs, negating the need for a human player to get all the crazy achievements in Guitar Hero 3. We would have suggested these college kids go get drunk and laid instead of spending their time building a Guitar Hero robot, but then we remembered that they’re Electrical Engineering majors. [Slashbot]

Wristwatches Banned in College-Entry Exams Thanks to One Lousy Cheater

Wilson Rothman — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:10:07 +0000

Some kid used his mobile phone-connected watch to receive incriminating text messages during a college-entry exam in Thailand and now “all kinds of watches” have been banned from 18 exam centres. Thailand has a seriously competitive testing system, with selectivity in some engineering and medicine programs reaching 1 in 100. Still, you’d think that a kid caught using an innovative way to cheat would be sent to the head of the class (kinda like Captain Kirk and that Kobayashi Maru business). I wonder what they’ll do when everyone has cellular/GPS implants—little bit harder to ban, I’d imagine. [Reuters]

Microsoft Banning Xbox 360s for Life?

Seamus Byrne — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 18:15:01 +0000

Label this as unconfirmed for the moment (we’ve since written Microsoft for comment), but one tipster told us about a refurbished Xbox 360 that couldn’t connect to Live. When he called Microsoft, they said that his box had been “banned” from the service. We attached the email after the jump.

…[a friend] called me up when he ran into trouble getting [his refurbished Xbox 360] to work. So I came over and started trying to get the media extender and Xbox Live working. While we had no trouble connecting to his network and getting the media extender working, the Xbox live connection kept failing, with an obscure error code (the whole X = 0000 0F01, W = 0000 0201, kind of cryptic message).

So I called Xbox 360 support, read the error message to them, and discovered that there was a lifetime ban on the box, it could never be connected to Xbox Live (and thus was useless to my friend).

I explained to the representative that this was a Microsoft-certified refurb, and that my friend had just purchased it. She said that it didn’t matter, Xbox reserved the right to revoke Xbox Live privileges “with no recourse,” and that was done by identifying offending consoles and banning them.

While we’ve heard colloquial accounts of modded boxes getting banned, we’ve never heard of problems with refurbished models. If the story is true, it essentially nullifies the Xbox 360 resale market. The risk is too great for consumers to purchase Xbox 360s that may not work on Live. We’ll give you an update when we hear something back on this rumor.

CheaterCam to Bust Cheaters in Online Classes

Seamus Byrne — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 17:03:45 +0000

The rise of online classes at colleges and universities has brought with it a rise in cheating by unscrupulous students who know there’s nothing to stop them from busting out the textbook during a test if they’re taking it at home in their underwear. Well, we all know how teachers feel about cheating: They’re against it. Well, some schools are calling on gadgets to help prevent remote cheating. Alabama’s Troy University plans to force students taking online classes to install 360-degree webcams for test-taking. Special software will be able to automatically detect “suspicious activity” for the professor to check out later. How that software will work is beyond me, but boy am I glad Blam doesn’t have a webcam trained on me while I work from home. There’s a lot of “suspicious activity” going on that is just none of his damned business. –Adam Frucci

AP [via The Raw Feed]