He knows how to get a big laugh from nothing more than an arched eyebrow
There are many ridiculous but not inconsiderable pleasures to be found in Scott Derrickson’s Doctor Strange: The sight of Mads Mikkelsen, villain supreme, skulking around in metallic eye makeup and a silly ponytail; the joy of listening to Chiwetel Ejiofor deliver unapologetically ridiculous dialogue with the same sonorous gravity he’d bring to a production of Hamlet; and last, but hardly least, the vision of Benedict Cumberbatch, as surgeon-turned-sorceror Doctor Strange, attempting to wrestle his rippling red cape into obedience, and failing. All of these things are funny, but not in a “Look how hilarious all of this is!” way, a la James Gunn’s 2014 class clown of a movie Guardians of the Galaxy.Doctor Strange has one significant quality that most Marvel adaptations lack: A sense of humor about itself, which it wears as lightly as the most gossamer Cloak of Levitation.
Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange is the movie incarnation of a minor Marvel character who first appeared in Strange Tales in 1963: He’s no Spider Man, or Iron Man, or Hulk. While Doctor Strange has his own solid fan base, he’s not forced to carry the beloved childhood memories of several million grown men on his shoulders.
That’s the last thing Doctor Strange—cynical, acerbic, supremely confident of his role in the universe—would want, anyway. When we first meet Dr. Steven Strange, he’s not so strange at all: Just a brilliant, glamorous surgeon, with a sweet, smart sometime girlfriend, Rachel McAdams’ Christine, and a drawerful of swanky collectible watches. One night, decked out in evening duds and en route to a charity event, he suffers a terrible car accident. (Texting while driving is his downfall.) His hands are shattered, and no amount of physical therapy will return them to their former unshakable glory. Then he learns of a secret place, somewhere near Kathmandu, where his powers might be restored. There he meets the enigmatic Mordo (Ejiofor), who leads him to a Celtic mystery chick with no eyelashes, The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton). She agrees to help Strange unlock a motherlode of mystical secrets that will, he believes, allow him to return to his old life. Not so fast, Doctor: There’s a price to be paid for all this shamanistic knowledge, and before long, our newly minted necromancer is mixing it up with the nefarious Kaecilius (Mikkelsen) and dodging the wrath of cranky sorcerer-librarian Wong (Benedict Wong).
Until the big climax—every Marvel movie has to have one—Doctor Strange is relatively quiet and visually beautiful, and some of its effects are wondrous: The Ancient One teaches the Strange one to summon currents of orange energy to his fingertips—they swirl around in glowing concentric circles before striking out in fiery flashes, like dragon’s tongues. The movie takes the idea of Christopher Nolan’s folding Paris, from Inception, and expands it into a series of dazzling, kaleidoscopic effects: The streets of New York and Hong Kong fold and unfold like angular M.C. Escher morning glories.
Those are great effects the first time you see them, and maybe the second. By the end of Doctor Strange, they’ve been repeated so often that they lose much of their magic. Luckily, the actors retain all of theirs. Although the casting of Scotswoman Swinton as the Ancient One, originally an Asian character, caused some controversy when it was announced, Swinton is so totally weird and out-there that her features and skin color are practically beside the point. (And though it’s true that Asians are underrepresented in Hollywood movies, the answer isn’t to cast only Asian actors as Asian characters, but to open the world of non-Asian characters to Asian casting. If we’re doomed to a system of one-to-one matching, racewise, that means we could never have an Asian Hamlet or Lear—or, for that matter, a black, Latino or Native American one.)
Even beneath his somber Samurai garb, Ejiofor can’t hide his obvious pleasure in getting to play, finally, a Marvel character: It’s delightful to see him having so much fun. And Cumberbatch, both a natural comedian and a subtle one, knows how to get a big laugh from nothing more than an arched eyebrow. That’s got to be one of the biggest and most delicate feats of wizardry in this vast and unknowable universe, and Cumberbatch comes by it effortlessly: No ancient Celtic secret needed.
The best part about Minecraft is the ability to express and create. Mojang’s sandbox has been used for some pretty impressive builds such as the Kingdom of Galekin that took over five years to build and is still going. Even sports fans can dive into the blocky world and give their support through creativity.
Sam is only 11 years old, and in Minecraft, he is a master architect. He is also a big fan of the CelticFootball Club from Glasgow and proved by building up their home turf in the video ground. The 3D tour of the stadium moves through the tunnel and welcomes the player with bright green field and seats. The build is even complete with a 5-1 score mocking Celtics rivals, the Rangers, from earlier in the season.
It was a creation made specifically for #BuildItScotland, an initiative to introduce children to new technology and ways to recreate monuments and landmarks from Scotland. Maybe we’ll see some other fun builds from the hashtag, but Sam’s Celtic Park in Minecraft scores major points with us!
Microsoft wants kids playing Minecraft in class, and it’s hoping that schools will not just let them, but support them. It’s launching a version of Minecraft today called Minecraft: Education Edition that includes some classroom tools and a way to roll out accounts to every student in a class or district.
The app has been in development since last January, when Microsoft purchased a mod working toward the same goal. The educational tools went into a beta period this summer, with Microsoft hoping to have a full release ready by the time school started. It missed that date by a couple months, but the game is now ready to go on both Windows 10 and macOS.
Despite the new name, Education Edition isn’t dramatically different from regular Minecraft. It’s pretty much the same game, just with some tools that’ll make things easier for teachers — there’s a way to see where all their students are on a map, give students different resources, and teleport people to specific locations. There are also a few new in-game items,
including a camera and a chalkboard.
Microsoft’s hope is that Minecraft can keep kids engaged while teachers use it to explore other subjects. Educators will have to build out worlds that connect with whatever they’re teaching, be it a setting in a book or a historic structure. In one example on the game’s website, an enormous blocky model of the human eye has been made, meant for students to venture inside of to see how it works.
Worlds and lesson plans will be collected on Education Edition’s website, but Microsoft isn’t going to be making these on its own. It’ll be up to teachers to create instructive worlds, and therein could be the problem. Creating a Minecraft world is a time-consuming process — and that’s true even for people who are familiar with Minecraft. Getting teachers to create lesson after lesson just isn’t practical.
That means the success of Education Edition lies in large part on the broader community of educators. If there aren’t enough teachers out there who want to make and share worlds and lesson plans for Minecraft, it’s going to be hard to get a lot of people using it.
The game is available to schools starting today, for $5 per student for a year’s subscription.
Successfully activating a beacon in Minecraft is a pretty big deal. First, you have to kill a Wither and collect a Nether star, second, you have to craft a beacon, and third, you have to create a pyramid on which you place the beacon.
When a beacon is working, it shoots a bright beam of light into the sky, which all players can use as a reference point. The beacon also gives players within a certain radius several power-ups. Here’s how to get your beacon going in Minecraft.
Getting yourself a Nether star is quite a process on its own. You need to travel to the Nether, collect some skeleton skulls and soul sand, summon a Wither, and kill it.
Each Wither drops one Nether star. To craft a beacon, you’ll also need three blocks of obsidian and five blocks of glass.
This crafting recipe will give you one beacon.
How to build a pyramid
A beacon cannot simply be placed anywhere — it must be placed atop a pyramid for it to work properly. There also cannot be any blocks between the top of the pyramid where the beacon sits and the open sky. The pyramid must be constructed from blocks of iron, gold, diamond, or emerald. The type of power-up available, the effect range, and the strength of the power-ups depends on how many levels the pyramid has.
You can create a pyramid for one beacon, or you can create a pyramid for multiple beacons.
Single-beacon pyramid
Your pyramid can have one level with nine blocks and a beacon.
Your pyramid can have two levels with 34 blocks and a beacon.
Your pyramid can have three levels with 83 blocks and a beacon.
Your pyramid can have four levels with 164 blocks and a beacon.
Multiple-beacon pyramid
Multiple-beacon pyramids contain many more solid blocks of iron, gold, diamond, or emerald, and are usually reserved for Realms where multiple people can contribute to the project.
The pyramids are built in the same manner but are expanded to fit however many beacons you’d like on top. The example above has four beacons on top. The bottom layer of the pyramid uses 100 blocks, the second layer uses 64 blocks, the third layer uses 36 blocks, and the top layer uses 16 blocks. That’s a whopping 216 blocks of solid ore.
Beacon power-ups
There are five powers you can choose from a beacon situated atop a four-level pyramid.
Speed: Get ready to run fast.
Haste: Mine blocks…fast!
Resistance: You’re more resilient to damage.
Jump Boost: Jump farther and higher.
Strength: Deal more damage.
Your four-level pyramid will also automatically give you Regeneration, which regenerates your health.
The range of these effects depends on how big of a pyramid you have beneath your beacon.
One-level pyramid: 20-block range
Two-level pyramid: 30-block range
Three-level pyramid: 40-block range
Four-level pyramid: 50-block range
When you leave the range of the effect, it will wear off after about 5-9 seconds.
Your beacons
Have you taken the time to kill a Wither, craft a beacon, and place it atop a pyramid? How long did it take? Tell us all about it in the comments section below!
Minecraft is not an easy act to follow. Many have tried, many have failed – most notably perhaps the Everquest spin-off, Landmark, now languishing with a “mostly negative” rating on Steam. More successful was Terraria, which carved its own niche in the sandbox genre, slipping out from under Minecraft’s shadow by existing in a completely different dimension, literally – it was in 2D. So when Square Enix – makers of Final Fantasy – decided to take a crack at the new “builder” genre with Dragon Quest Builders, many were skeptical, noting that there are precious few examples of Japanese game developers successfully adapting Western game designs. We’re all still waiting for the first great Japanese first-person shooter.
Dragon Quest Builders released this October in the US and is currently enjoying an 83% rating on review aggregator site Metacritic, matching stablemate, Final Fantasy XIII. It’s a critical success and a bracing, fully-formed game. It’s even more surprising that, considering its chunky aesthetic, Builders is a game that plays less like either Minecraft or Dragon Quest (the classic RPG series that inspired it), and more like The Legend of Zelda, with large, explorable worlds enhanced by building and crafting. A game like this could have ended up a half-baked jack-of-all-trades, and yet is one of Square Enix’s biggest surprises in years. At launch in Japan (on PS Vita, PS3, and PS4 – only the Vita and PS4 versions are available in North America) it sold over 700,000 copies, and if quality is any yardstick, it’ll meet with similar success in the West.
Dragon Quest Builders succeeds as a concept mainly because it isn’t trying to simply ape Minecraft. The focus for the Builders development team was to take Dragon Quest‘s iconic elements (slimes, Akira Toriyama’s character designs, an inviting and colorful fantasy setting) and design a pliable world around the mythology of the very first Dragon Quest game – the 1986 blockbuster hit for the Nintendo Entertainment System that set a template for the RPG genre that still resonates today.
“This is a game that anyone could play without hesitation, where you can naturally master crafting as you play, ” says Noriyoshi Fujimoto, Builders‘ producer. “There is a solid story and world, in which the buildings you created can be used to make progress. What you build is not the end; the villagers react to it and make use of it as well.”
Drawing instant comparisons to Minecraft presented its own challenges, though, and Fujimoto will freely admit that Western games do certain things better. Instead of simply applying the Dragon Quest brand onto a Minecraft clone (in Japan, it’s basically a license to print money), the team focused on making something that would work in its own right. While clearly influenced by Western open-world games, Fujimoto’s team was careful to play to their strengths – RPGs and action games. “Unlike in the old days, we can now play international titles more easily,” he says. “I think Western studios are better at open-world games, presenting the realism and detail and to give more freedom within the game.”
A self-professed fan of Ubisoft’s best-selling Assassin’s Creed series – which are known for their increasingly vast environments – Fujimoto took note of some of the key mechanics in Western-developed open-world games, particularly the cause-and-effect dynamics where every action has real consequence. What the team took from their observations of Assassin’s Creed was to ensure that players could experience a similar level of freedom, while offering all of the necessary tools and materials in Builders‘ sandbox to let players build whatever they desired.
Although you are initially given various templates to follow, architecturally-speaking you’re free to channel your inner Frank Lloyd Wright.
This meant changing things up and moving away from Dragon Quest‘s traditional and strategic turn-based style. “We decided to forgo the classic command-based battle because we felt the action-style matched the game better,” Fujimoto says. While Dragon Quest fans will enjoy the nods to the original game, Builders was designed with a much broader audience in mind.
In Builders, the player is tasked with rebuilding the world of Alefgard, which was destroyed by the Dragonlord at the end of the first Dragon Quest. This is where Builders most closely mirrors the game style of games like Minecraft and Terraria. Fujimoto quickly realized how their game could improve on what they perceived as Minecraft‘s fundamental shortcoming. “Kazuya Niinou, the development director, felt that the freedom of building things in the sandbox genre was very interesting,” Fujimoto says, but points out that the lack of a focused narrative disappointed those players looking for a more traditional, plot-driven game. “Through trial and error,” he continues, “we came up with the idea of putting it together with the story-driven RPG style of Dragon Quest.”
Planting your Banner of Hope in the center of town causes NPCs to migrate to your location, triggering a wave of quests and advice to propel you through the game’s narrative arc. Once your objectives are clear you’re free to go about gathering materials however you choose, ultimately using them to rebuild your town. Although you are initially given various templates to follow, architecturally-speaking you’re free to channel your inner Frank Lloyd Wright.
Like The Legend Of Zelda, Builders offers vast environments suited for exploration, viewed in third person, with enemies populating each of the game’s four worlds in plain sight. Players can craft more powerful weapons and armor over time to compensate for each successive area’s more challenging encounters, but the primary source of satisfaction is gained simply through exploring, building, and crafting, and reshaping the world to your liking. “Hunting for treasure is fun, of course, but you can also enjoy the sense of achievement after completing a tunnel, or rearranging the tunnel to make it magnificent,” Fujimoto says. Magnificent is right. Dragon Quest Builders is that rare game that may at first glance look like Minecraft, but on the strength of its own merits, escapes its predecessor’s shadow completely.
