Nintendo's original Animal Crossing on GameCube helped pave the way for many of the cozy games players have today. The cute animal villagers largely enjoy a blissful experience, but a new AI hack has the town feeling that Tom Nook--the raccoon who basically controls the local economy based on bells as currency--is a tyrant who needs to go down.

Software engineer Josh Fonseca created this Animal Crossing hack (via Ars Technica), and he explained at length how he pulled it off in the accompanying YouTube video. The GameCube software wasn't really designed to hacked like this, but Fonseca was eventually able to find his way in and give Animal Crossing some commands that could be understood by the game's code.

Fonseca initially tried to use a single live language model AI to write new dialogue for the characters, while also drawing their character traits from online wikis. According to Fonseca, that approach failed because he was asking the AI to do too much. In the end, he set aside one AI program to handle the dialogue, while another program essentially directed its in-game presentation.

Hollow Knight: Silksong blew in like a hurricane at the beginning of this month, and it's already putting up numbers that major developers would envy. Silksong pulled in five million players in just a few days, when factoring in downloads on Game Pass. Now, Silksong is closing in on five million sales across all platforms according to a new report.

The GameDiscoverCo newsletter has shared its latest sales estimates for Hollow Knight: Silksong. 3.2 million copies are estimated to have been sold on Steam, while the game is believed to have pulled in 500,000 copies each on PlayStation 4/5 and Switch 1/2. That would put its current sales total at 4.2 million, without factoring in any sales from the Xbox family of consoles. Those Xbox sales figures aren't readily available, but the number of Silksong downloads on Xbox Game Pass is estimated to be 1.5 million.

Alinea Analytics has also shared its sales figures for Steam from the week of September 7-13. Borderlands 4 came in at No. 1 with 749,000 sales, and it was closely followed by Silksong with 530,000. Amazingly, the debut of Silksong pushed the original Hollow Knight's sales to 205,000, taking the No. 4 slot for the week. According to Alinea, this is the third week in a row that Hollow Knight has cracked over 200,000 despite having already sold 15 million copies to date.