The most important Nintendo 3DS Game Ever Made...

[Music] cubic ninja was a pretty terrible game it released for the Nintendo 3DS by Ubisoft all the way back in 2011 as one of the earlier 3DS titles developed by Japanese Studio AQ interactive cubic ninja is a puzzle platformer where the goal is simple to manipulate CC a ninja Cube through various levels whilst avoiding enemies and traps contained within the pull of cubic ninja was that by default it didn't contain conventional controls instead it made use of the 3DS gyroscope to tilt CC in the direction that you want to move in the problem is that this control layout is really tedious and doesn't work well most of the time especially as levels become more challenging it's easier just to switch back to the conventional analog stick to control at best it's an average experience and offers nothing to show off the power of the 3DS and with 100 levels to play the excitement of the game wears off pretty quick to keep players invested however cubic ninja offered an easy to use level editor and the ability to share or import other people's Creations unfortunately however there was no easy way to share your level a QR code is generated for exporting purposes but you can't save it to your SD card and post your level online from within the game instead what you need to do is have a friend with their own 3DS and a copy of cubic ninja take a photo of your QR code for them to be able to play your level within their game it's really hard for me to understand why the QR code approach was used for cubic ninja especially when software such as Street pass is available on the 3DS which could really be used to generate player interest and share levels around with a lot more ease as a result cubic ninja reviewed poorly averaging a 51 out of 100 on Metacritic the game quickly made its way into bargain bins being sold for as low as three dollars and this is my personal copy of cubic ninja that I paid the poultry sum of five dollars for but by 2014 cubic ninja was the most important Nintendo 3DS game ever made and its prize quickly skyrocketed to hundreds of dollars and everyone wanted a copy let's talk about why [Music] as with all new console releases security would be a target for hackers and the best hacks are those that require no modification to hardware at all the goal is to run Homebrew and open up the system for development after the failure of the Nintendo DS security Nintendo would invest heavily in Security on the 3DS and for the first few years it succeeded from 2011 to 2013 some attempts were made with some interesting discoveries but to the average user that wants to play Homebrew on their 3DS there was really nothing available that is until the Gateway 3DS in 2013. however the Gateway 3DS was a piracy device specifically to play ROM dumps but by December of that year some users reverse engineered the Gateway 3DS or Homebrew and release an open source version the team behind the Gateway 3DS incidentally team executor did not like this and updated their firmware to Brick a3ds if they noticed that the payload was tampered with this as you can imagine received much backlash and criticism from the community and by late 2014 other than Gateway 3DS and some initial private work mostly proof of concept there was no publicly available exploit to hack a 3DS for Homebrew without Hardware modification however behind the scenes security researcher Jordan rabay also known as smilum online was working on his own an exploit to get access to Homebrew on the 3DS and would all be possible thanks to cubic Ninja at 2011 Bargain Bin game that no one cared much about smilum was able to use the QR code feature to gain access to Homebrew on the 3DS but how the QR code itself contains all the information about the user generated level and when scanned in that data is loaded into fixed size buffers located on the stack by generating custom QR codes with data that exceeds those buffers it is possible to overflow those fixed size buffers and smash the stack but this is only the entry point the exploit still needs to access code execution and get much higher privileges and it does just this by exploiting a system module of course this is still a user mode exploit and it does have its limitations and the exploit would be known as ninja hacks which of course is a nod to cubic ninja and it triggers the download and execution of a launcher program which can be then used to run applications notably The Homebrew launcher this exploit would be kept private until smeeling wanted to find the right time to unveil it initially ninjax was to be released on August 30th 2014. smelum held off its release due to the unveiling of the new Nintendo 3DS later in the year believing that any release before would give Nintendo time to address and Patch the exploit on the new revision of hardware on November 17th of 2014 smelum disclosed the exploit publicly along with the game required to exploit the 3DS of course the game was cubic Ninja the discovery which was the first ever public software-based Homebrew exploit for the 3DS family triggered a surge in demand for the game the same one that sat in bargain bins for years it quickly sold out and even prompted retailers such as Gamestop to drastically inflate the price and on the reseller Market on eBay during the height of ninja hack's popularity copies of the game could sell for as much as 300 there was no digital eShop version available in most countries other than Japan at the time and shortly after Nintendo would pull cubic ninja from the eShop in an effort to mitigate the exploit's reach at the time Homebrew on the 3DS was not particularly interesting there were only a few apps developed however what Ninja hacks did do was open up the door for more sophisticated exploits to be discovered essentially it's what started it all smilum was concerned that Nintendo would likely patch the exploit in an updated firmware and in December of 2014 firmware 9.4.0 hit exactly that this meant that only a few short weeks after the exploit was publicly released it was already shut down and those who own cubic ninja suddenly were left with a terrible game all over again and as a result the price of the game shot down again it was a paperweight also everyone thought now while Nintendo would celebrate a minor Victory ninja hacks would see updates that allowed for high firmware revisions to be exploited the final release 2.9 Alpha allows for all 3DS models to be exploited with cubic ninja and it's something that still works to this very day of course ninja hacks is mostly obsolete now due to easier more sophisticated methods but without it their 3DS hacking scene would not be as accessible as it is today Nintendo of course were very much aware of what smiling was up to but what we didn't know was exactly how aware they were until discoveries from Giga league in 2020 that showed a darker side of Nintendo doing away with their family-friendly image and in term little document known as the smelum hack and what to do about it discusses the exploit as well as identifying smelum as a person of interest in a PowerPoint slide with arrows alluding to some kind of agreement that involves an NDA likely in an attempt to approach shmilam and force him to sign an NDA and an agreement that he would never discuss Nintendo exploits again it's unclear if this ever happened but it does reaffirm once again that the Nintendo ninjas exist and if you get on their radar they'll likely pay you a visit of course nowadays it's 2023 and with the closure of the eShop earlier this year all of a sudden it's cool to hack your 3DS and why not it's a fantastic device for Homebrew and the scene has only gone from strength to strength over the years but if it wasn't for cubic ninja a terrible puzzle platform game the scene may have never become what it is today and for that I'm glad I picked up my copy of cubic ninja all those years ago but that's going to do it for today's episode let me know what you thought about it in the comment it's below as always if you liked it don't forget to leave me a thumbs up and I'll catch you guys in the next video bye for now [Music]

Channel: Modern Vintage Gamer

Views: 263,056

Keywords: 3ds, cubic, ubisoft, 3ds games, nintendo 3ds, cubic ninja, smealum, ninjhax 3ds, exploit, homebrew, hack 3ds, mvg, modern vintage gamer, mistakes were made, 3ds xl, ninjhax, modding, hacking, unsigned code, gigaleak, qr code, 2ds, new 3ds

Id: YAKujG8SXKY

Length: 8min 37sec (517 seconds)

Published: Mon May 22 2023