Quick Hits: Hacknet and Rare Replay

A couple of titles from different places on the video-game spectrum, Hacknet will tax your latent hacking skills to uncover a cyber-mystery, whilst the collection of 30 games in the Rare Replay offering is simply digital joy.

If you already have some leet unix-based haxor skillz then you have a little head start when delving into Hacknet, the aim is to bust your way into some networked computers, extract some information, solve some online-tech puzzles and unveil the mystery of the cracker that came before you.

Visually Hacknet is not going to break many graphics cards, for the most part presenting a Unix based command line interface to enter commands and explore the Hacknet world by probing open server ports, checking in file systems and finding and using cracking tools to unlock tighter security on connected machines.

Hacknet provide an authentic feeling, but accessible environment to click and type your way through the story.  Sure, in the real world things are different, and having a successful play-through of Hacknet is not the forerunner to launching a dark-web cracking career, but for the time it takes to experience Hacknet, there is a sense of sneaky empowerment that can bring a grin to the players face.

Having just snared a Serious Gaming Showcase and Challenge award HACKNET will now represent Australasia at I/ITSEC the International SGS&C in Orlando, Florida from the 30th November until the 4th December 2015.  This is the largest simulation conference in the world.

Rare Replay chronicles the development of beloved Rare studio from its early beginnings as Ultimate Play The Game to the later years under the Microsoft Studios wing.

Available on the Xbox One in a highly polished wrapper program providing achievements and backwards compatibility to the 30 games that best represent the 30 years of the development houses existence.

There are also plenty of documentaries, interviews and archival content to be unlocked as you explore, in a single title, how the video-game industry itself has developed over three decades.

There are also separately crafted challenges built into the wrapper program that take classic moments in the games, twist the rules and ask the player to achieve new goals not found in the original titles.