Are those retro game threads AI bots & scams ?

[exxos]

It was brought to my attention earlier today, that there seems to be a mass influx of those retro game threads appearing across the Internet lately..

We have such a thread on here in fact...

viewtopic.php?f=114&t=7320

That user has been classified as a spammer on many other retro forums and been banned..

But things get more sinister, because they also seem to be acting more like AI spam bots than users. It is difficult to really ascertain either way.

What ultimately concerns me is, if the Internet is being spammed by such adverts, is it just a innocent advertising but powered by AI, or a actual user ?

But either way, do we actually know these games are even genuine ? or could they just be very elaborate new-age scams ? Considering the financial backing behind them as well...

With the age of AI bots, they can literally recreate anything...


Which reminds me, I totally forgot to mention about the Xenon3 game i've been working on.. I will open a kickstarter soon on it...

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XENON 3: HYPERBLAST
16-COLOR APOCALYPSE – THE BITMAP BROTHERS' FURY REBORN!

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Blast from the Past... Evolved to Annihilate Your Senses!

Remember Xenon and Xenon 2: Megablast? Those Atari ST/Amiga icons that redefined shmups with seamless ship-to-tank transforms, vicious organic bosses, and parallax perfection? The games that made your joystick sweat and your heart pound?

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Xenon 3: Hyperblast crashes onto Steam, itch.io, Switch, and PC – TODAY – but locked to JUST 16 COLORS for that authentic Bitmap Brothers crunch! No HD cheats. Pure pixel sorcery: dithered chrome gleams like molten steel, neon lasers carve the void, nebulae pulse with faux-gradients via genius palette tricks. 640x480 base, upscaled to 4K butter at 60FPS. Your eyes will burn with nostalgia-fueled fire!

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WHY HYPERBLAST WILL OWN YOUR SOUL:

• Morph Mayhem: Flip from agile fighter jet to ground-crushing tank mid-scroll – dodge bullet hell your way!
• Boss Bombast: Time-defuse screen-spanning horrors across procedural prehistoric-to-cyber worlds. Reverse-scroll ambushes keep you paranoid!
• Power Shop 3.0: Collect xenite tokens, meta-upgrade lasers, shields, bombs. Branching trees for endless builds!
• Modern Retro Bliss: Co-op local/online, daily challenges, VR mode, leaderboards. Fair 1CC scoring with practice ghosts.
• Soundtrack Slam: Bomb the Bass vibes remixed – thumping chiptune electronica that'll rattle your subs!

"It's like Xenon 2 snorted pure adrenaline and discovered roguelites!" – RetroGamer Magazine

Screen-clearing explosions. Writhing xenomorph swarms. That one perfect run.

$12.99 – LAUNCH DISCOUNT $9.99!
Wishlist on Steam NOW | itch.io Demo OUT | Switch eShop Q1 2026

PILOT THE HYPERBLAST. ANNIHILATE THE XENITES. BECOME LEGEND.
#Xenon3 #16ColorFury

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[mrbombermillzy]

Its a bit of a nightmare, isnt it?

Worse, is that people are posting political videos on YT, like 'Trump ousted by JD Vance' and stuff like that. However, if you look under the video just before the comments, it will state that the video has been very heavily altered or is generated by AI; a mandatory statement apparently, as its pretty much impossible to differentiate an AI video from a real one now.

I wonder how many account holders will 'forget' to do this and will cause all kinds of panic; remember the war of the worlds radio broadcast in the 1920s/30s which freaked people out?

And dont even get me started on the YT adverts...from what I have heard a high percentage are actually scams...(groundbreaking phones to realistic AI bunnies. Theres even a portable welder advertised which looks like a desolder gun. Apparently thats what buyers received anyway!)

But back to this guy Marcio...

Well, he responds to other posts, but that doesnt confirm he is human. :lol:

What we need nowadays is some sort of advanced Turing test.

Perhaps its time to bring out the Blade Runners? :)

Lastly, I will say you DONT have time to make a game, so thats fake, right? :lol:

[Icky]

However, if you look under the video just before the comments, it will state that the video has been very heavily altered or is generated by AI; a mandatory statement apparently, as its pretty much impossible to differentiate an AI video from a real one now.

With the concoction @exxos made above I feel like adding a new emoji with the placard FAKE to the forum. :)

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[exxos]

Lastly, I will say you DONT have time to make a game, so thats fake, right? :lol:

wahhhh there's a sound track and everything !

x3.zip

[prog99]

They are certainly getting viewed with a fair degree of sceptism and there's definitely some circumstantial evidence.
I'd maybe back one if I knew who it was and it wasn't on a niche platform like the neogeo!
I've so far crowdfunded a brewery and a climbing wall so you actually get a physical product out of them

[exxos]

Man, it's a rabbit hole..

The best evidence the kickstarter is real is a link to it from steam..



You can't trust any site is genuine anymore..

The Kickstarter has been verified by Stripe as well..

But there are other sites not just kick starter.. No idea if they real...

But my comment still stands, this could very well be the next level if scams in the making..

I've confirmed the person posting about the game very much looks like a bot... But who's behind it? The company itself?!

The IP shows as a single line ISP in Canada.. So doesn't seem related.. But who knows..

[exxos]

I've asked for help / reported the issue on PHPBB own forum and cleantalks..

Cleantalk seem to think its a problem with registration blocking not working.. While that is obviously a huge problem of bots trying to register, there is nothing to stop the actual user registering, doing many legitimate -looking posts, and then letting AI bots take over later..

I put it to them that the only idea I concurrently come up with is to put CAPTCHA on the forum login page.. As it may make it harder for bots to actually login to the forum..

I did use cloudflares "drop in" API to protect my IP unban page, but doing this on the forum gets more complicated because I have to keep track of what pages I have hacked all the time... Keeping track of the styles and editing them manually every formal date is already a total PITA amount of work, without hacking in CAPTCHA systems as well.. So I would rather someone else actually take care of this problem and do it in a more elegant way.. Problem is, how slow this will actually happen....if at all....

While there are some limited form extensions they don't specifically target problem we are actually having.. They more seem to be for blocking posts etc but all this is already taken care of silently in the background with cleantalk anyway..

I do see a pattern to these "AI bots". But I need to write a script to scan the logs for the past several months to actually see how bad this problem is.. We could literally have thousands of sleeper accounts on this forum for all we know... But I do periodically delete dormant accounts every couple of years anyway... So at least the potential damage to totally be more limited should the worst happen..

[exxos]

So this is proving to be a lot more complicated than I first thought.. Because it's a mixed bag between what a genuine user does and what a web crawler bot does..

It also makes me think of a deeper problem because anyone could post a kickstarter etc post on the forum, but who is actually checking up if it's a scam or not ?

Considering they almost never happen I really do wonder about just not allowing such crowdfunding things to be posted on the forum... Obviously this sounds like a crappy thing to do.. But unless someone actively wants to police every post from now to the end of time and diligently verify if its actually genuine or not..

I really think the simplest solution is just to not allow crowdfunding posts any more... It certainly would address the current problem.. And other forums would get spammed with such posts anyway..

What do people think ?

[prog99]

Given the poster in question has spammed every retro computing forum in existence I doubt they'll miss not posting here anymore.

[exxos]

Didn't get anywhere with CleanTalk..

Hello Chris,

Thank you for your feedback.

We understand your position; however, at this time, we have no plans to change the logic of our protection. If this changes in future releases, we will be sure to inform you.

I can hack back in checking registered users, but as said before, it causes to many issues.

Similar issues as mentioned here viewtopic.php?t=8173

It seems nobody ever considered registered users spamming, nobody seems to care about it either... Considering how much security is pushed these days, you would think such issues would be taken more seriously by somebody out there.. but I guess its not noticed enough yet for anyone to bother about.