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Hacker group ‘Lizard Squad’ have struck again, claiming responsibility for a large Xbox Live outage. Apparently Microsoft’s service status page didn’t reflect the outage at the time, but Xbox Live users reported problems across multiple social media websites. Lizard Squad, who are now ‘at Lizard Patrol’ on Twitter, posted a tweet simply saying ‘Xbox Live, hashtag offline’, followed by:

“That’s a small dose of what’s to come on Christmas. Hashtag LizardSquad.”

Lizards sure do love their hashtags, being that they’re so technologically advanced. It’s a wonder they haven’t yet discovered Google, which would tell them that the collective name for Lizards is actually a ‘lounge’, and this not the first time I’ve said this, but that the fact that they don’t even realise that makes me wonder if this is really just a group of humans PRETENDING to be lizards. It honestly seems much more likely, but I really don’t have any proof, unfortunately, so I’m just going to have to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Lizard Squad have launched various DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service attacks, which are not technically hacks – it’s basically a system that overwhelms a server with fake traffic, causing it to crash. They’ve done this multiple times throughout the year, managing to take down various high-profile companies including Sony, Blizzard, Rockstar and Riot Games. Their motivation is supposed to be to encourage companies they attack to take security more seriously instead of being money-hungry. On the contrary, their Twitter bio currently says:

“Some lizards just want to watch the world burn.”

That certainly is a defining characteristic of many lizards I know. Bunch of pyromaniacs who really hate money hungry videogame publishers. Classic lizards.

A fully sealed defective Samus Aran Amiibo has sold on an eBay auction for $2,500 dollars. The Amiibo, which is essentially a small figure that can interact with certain Wii U games, features two arm canons instead of one arm canon, making it a likely extremely rare factory defect, and a collector’s item. It could potentially even be one of a kind.

The Samus Amiibo was sold fully factory-sealed in its original packaging and racked up a total of 75 bids before the auction ended. The owner told GameSpot that he purchased the Amiibo for only $13, so he has made a fat profit off of Nintendo’s mistake. I wonder if Nintendo factory employees will find some sneaky way to make more defect ones and sell them now, I mean, I totally would. But maybe they’re actually good people who wouldn’t stoop to my horribly devious levels. Bwah hah hah.

Nintendo have finally filed a patent that will emulate Game Boy, Game Boy Colour and Game Boy Advance games on mobile phones and even on planes. Can you imagine playing the original Pokemon games absolutely wherever you want on your mobile phone? I can already see myself getting distracted and forgetting to get off trains at the right stop, ah.

Regarding planes, this is specifically referring to those little display screens they have on the back of seats on certain flights that have movies and games on them. Of course, the fact that Nintendo patented these things doesn’t mean they’re actually planning on doing it – it could just mean they want to stop anyone else from doing it. Nintendo have said several times that they’re not planning to bring games to mobile devices.

According to InfoScout, the Xbox One outsold the PlayStation 4 fairly dramatically over Black Friday. Their study concluded that the Xbox One made up 53% of all consoles sold in stores, with the PlayStation 4 coming in at 31%, and the Wii U at 6%. InfoScout actually organised the data by having 180,000 participants send in images of their receipts from Target, Walmart, GameStop and more, which is an interesting technique.

Apparently a total of 66% of sales came from people buying consoles for their children, but that was mostly in favour of the Wii U, with a full 92% of Wii U purchases being for kids. Praise that 8% who bought it for themselves, though, seriously, where my Smash players at?

Of course, these percentages don’t reflect actual sales overall, being that the case could simply be that plenty of the people who recently purchased Xbox One’s already owned a PS4 or Wii U.