If you get infected with Malware today, it's a very serious issue that could potentially compromise and complicate your life. Back in the day before the rise of botnets and ransomeware, viruses were quite cheeky and sometimes very bizarre. The Internet Archive is letting you explore what those antiquated infections could do, without the danger of course.

malware_HYMN.COM

The collection is a whimsical exploration of virii from the 1980's and 1990's that was curated by Jason Scott from Internet Archive and Mikko Hypponen, a chief researcher from F-Secure. Click on any of the examples and you'll be greeted with the animations and messages that tended to be the end result. They're safely contained within a DOS box emulator, but are without their destructive powers anymore anyway.

After 17 years of waiting, it looks like SEGA is listening to our dreams. The once-mighty Japanese gaming icon has been in contact with the organizers of Project Dream initiative, a group dedicated to resurrecting the Dreamcast console into the modern age of gaming.

Project Dream isn't just your average fan club--the group has laid out extensive marketing strategies, rendered mockups of a Dreamcast 2, and posed the concept of a PC and console hybrid. Project Dream has gained a lot of traction since launching its site, and even got over 27,000 signatures on a petition to bring back the system. Now after months of hype and lead-up, the team says a few of SEGA's higher-ups are listening to the pitch.

"It went from me ringing up to pester them for not replying to our mail and the receptionist asking for a full lowdown on what we wanted to talk to people about," Project Dream co-head Joanne Freeman told Twinfinite. "It all kind of happened quite quickly, and by the end of it, he finished chatting with me on the phone and sent one of our team members a message to say 'send what you got through when you're ready, and I'll make sure it gets to the right people.'"

The first video showing off footage from Ubisoft's upcoming foray into the mobile world with Assassin's Creed Identity has been released. They wanted to address some fan questions about the game and how they were going to handle the limiting mobile aspect. The graphics alone are quite impressive, however.

On the surface it essentially looks like it's merely Assassin's Creed II for iOS. They'e calling it a new experience, with a more open and RPG-type game with "bite-sized chunks" that can be played more casually. Ubisoft wants to appeal to both hardcore Assassin's Creed fans and new prospective junkies as well.

The controls are actually looking to be fairly neat, with the ability to play the entire game with one finger, and quite effectively, as shown at least. Something that's not easy to get right on a mobile device. The graphics are similarly downgraded, but it actually looks quite good.

Destiny is going to be updated to 2.1.1 next week, and Bungie is making some changes that are small, yet significant to the gameplay mechanics.

They're bringing in a new Special Ammo economy to help balance the use of those more powerful weapons, hoping to increase the use of the primary weapons instead. You'll have to wait for an ammo drop from green special crates to fill up.

Matchmaking is getting an overhaul with "Freelance" matchmaking where you don't have to be in a party to have fun. This'll be available to all solo players in 6v6 and 3v3 modes. Sometimes your friends just don't want to play with you, that and the number of players might be dwindling some.

Let's face it: current-gen console gaming isn't hard drive friendly. Since a single 50GB game takes up 10% of an Xbox One's stock 500GB hard drive, gamers often have to delete and swap out titles in their library to keep up. But ADATA aims to avoid the frustration with its new line of spacious Xbox hard drives.

ADATA's new HD650X and HD710M external hard drives are specifically designed to give Xbox consoles a much-needed boost in storage capacity. Both models sport USB 3.0 connectivity for speedy transfers and come in 2TB flavors for optimum storage, offering up to four times the capacity of stock HDD's. The drives support easy plug and play setup, and are compatible with Xbox Ones, Xbox 360s and Windows 10 PCs.

The HD650X external HDD sports a lively lime-green style that matches the Xbox theme, and ships with a 3 year warranty despite it being quite durable against HDD-destroying elements like water, dust and electric shock.

Biometrics are something we've been using to uniquely identify other humans since the 13th Century, but the current methods are flawed and can be spoofed with enough creativity and time. So now researchers have found another novel way to uniquely identify people: With "Brainprints".

A brainprint is the unique way in which your neurons fire when reading, or doing anything. It's a distinct and consistent way to identify people. New research by the Basque Center for Cognition and Binghamton University into the brainprint has been able to show just how unique our thought patterns actually are. They were able to identify people with 97% accuracy just based on them thinking about a particular word that flashed on a monitor in front of them for a half of a second.

That's good news for the coming robot revolution, because until brain thought patterns can be faked, we'll at least be able to know whose who, and not human. But in more practical terms it could be another piece to the puzzle of authentication. As a means to make a password it's horrible, but in a multi-factor authentication scheme, it could be used to identify that you're actually who you say you are and present at the time of entering your pin or password.

The Division's beta test gave us a nice taste of what to expect from the final game, but many gamers felt like they've experienced it all before. In fact, The Division has been compared to a certain futuristic MMO-slash-RPG shooter mashup that's now crumbling under its own ambitious weight. According to Ubisoft, our fears are premature, as The Division is "very different" than Destiny.

While playing The Division, it was hard not to see how it parallels Destiny. Both have that same mix of shooter, RPG skillsets and progression, open-world MMO-style scope with drop-in drop-out co-op, PVP modes, and that distinctly grindy loot style. And both games have this sense of disconnect with NPC's, characters and environments. Apparently I'm not alone; most Destiny players feel the same way.

Julian Gerighty, The Division's associate creative director, says that the two games are quite different. "It's hard for me to talk about Destiny, obviously, but thinking about the qualities of The Division: contemporary; virus-ridden real-world city; open-world game. There are a lot of differences that make it stand out, so I think it's a modern game in the way that it's a very co-operative focussed experience. Progression is extremely important. So I would say that they are both very modern and different games."

Having one's own ideas and completely original IP seems like a positive direction to take for any developer, but it seems that it might not necessarily be the most practical route for everyone. Platinum Games, of Bayonetta fame, explained why that's a very difficult route to take.

Speaking to Famitsu, Tatsuya Minami, the chief executive for Platinum Games said that "We used to have the idea that we wanted to be a studio that only made 100 percent original games," He then continued, "However, it turns out that only doing that is considerably difficult, and so now we take on various work."

There are a tremendous amount of risks involved in developing your own and paving your own path. And they don't always pay off it seems. Popularity of your own idea is never guaranteed and you never know what the reception will actually be. You and your team could be incredibly excited about a particular game, but then it might flop before your eyes.

Things aren't looking good for Deep Silver's new Homefront sequel. Initial tests of the upcoming closed beta reveal that the game has tons of problems on the Xbox One, and needs a lot of work before it's ready to hit store shelves.

According to analyses from Eurogamer's Digital Foundry, Homefront: The Revolution's beta suffers from a myriad of dysfunctions, including FPS drops, jittery and jerky animations, and frequent glitches. Digital Foundry further notes that the wonky animations and enemy glitches can be attributed to the CryEngine's poor networking optimization.

The graphical hiccups and disruptive frame rates ultimately break the immersive fluidity that's vital to first-person shooters. Homefront: The Revolution beta apparently runs with an entirely unlocked frame-rate on Xbox One, which is a bad idea given the console's limitations. On top of the unlocked framerates, the game also has an adaptive v-sync that creates ugly tear lines on the screen.

Trackmania has never been your typical racing game anyway, with the ability to put together some of the most insane tracks, limited only by your imagination. And the newest insane addition, Trackmania Turbo, now has a March 24th release date.

The dynamic racing game was originally intended to be released in late 2015, but that release date was pushed into 2016 back in October so that the developer, Nadeo, could further refine the mechanics of the game based on feedback from fans. The expectations are rather high for a series that's won a Guinness World Record for being the most popular online racing sim with the largest content base of any racing game.

When it releases it'll be available on the Xbox One, PC and the PlayStation 4. It'll support the Oculus Rift and eventually have support for PlayStation VR as well.