Pfizer this week launched a modification of the popular sandbox game Minecraft, offering children with hemophilia a new way to learn about staying safe and prepared and maintaining their treatment plans.
Launched this week at the National Hemophilia Foundation’s annual meeting in Chicago, the game is called HEMOCRAFT and was developed in partnership with the Entrepreneurial Game Studio at Drexel University, the NHF and other members of the hemophilia community.
The app, aimed at kids eight to 16 years old, is an adaptation that works in conjunction with Minecraft game. It offers a simulated environment meant to be fun and educational way for those with hemophilia to learn about better integrating preparedness and treatment into their daily routines.
Downloadable via HEMOCRAFTQuest.com, the fantasy game leads players on a quest where they interact with the “village doctor” to learn how to stick to their treatment plan and understand how it works. Kids are challenged to monitor factor levels and self-infuse to help control bleeding, if needed.
“These new digital innovations can be integrated into everyday routines to help empower people with hemophilia to learn about and track different aspects relevant to their disease so that they can have informed conversations with their healthcare providers,” said Kevin W. Williams, chief medical officer of Pfizer Rare Disease.
The app is aimed not just at patients, “but equally as important, their friends and family to better understand the concept of factor levels in being able to stay active, and stay in the game,” said Kate Nammacher, senior director of education at the National Hemophilia Foundation.
At the NHF annual meeting, Pfizer also unveiled a new device aimed at all of the 20,000 people in the U.S. (and 400,000 people worldwide) who have the condition.
The new HemMobile Striiv Wearable is billed as the first such device aimed specifically at hemophiliacs. The wristband offers an array of features that help patients track daily activity levels and monitor their heart rate.
The device integrates with Pfizer’s HemMobile app, where users can log bleeds and infusions, monitor factor supply and set appointment reminders. The data captured there enables personalized reports to be generated that can inform discussions between physicians and patients.
HemMobile Striiv Wearable is available free to anyone diagnosed with hemophilia in the U.S., regardless of what treatment they use.
It speaks volumes that a game which has been on Xbox since 2012 and looks like smudged doodles on a piece of graph paper still feels new and compelling. No matter how many times I play it, I always end up doing something different, be that stumbling across some impressive scenery or building myself a giant, woolly pig to live in. I may take breaks for months at a time, but Minecraft is a game I’m always drawn back to.
Thanks to an update just before Christmas, the console version now has heaps more to explore, including The End cities and flying with Elytra. This means it’s finally on par with the PC version. The only problem with Minecraft is that even though I really want to try out all the new stuff, I have to be lucky enough to find it first… and all of it’s locked behind a notoriously difficult boss… and there’s loads of work to do before you can even reach said boss.
Luckily, Creative mode is designed for the lazy like me, so instead of taking days to prep enough to fight the Ender Dragon, it only takes five minutes. After a bit of blundering around trying to get gateway portals to work, I zip away to an island in The End and get incredibly lucky. While you could search for hours trying to find an End city I found one on my first try. It’s grand, purple and branches off in multiple directions with towers sprouting upwards from narrow stems.
After scoping the place out for some seriously impressive, enchanted loot I hit the motherlode – an End ship. Floating a little distance from the city itself and bearing the head of a dragon as its figurehead, it’s a foreboding sight and is home to an Elytra – the best item in all of Minecraft. It’s essentially a pair of wings that you can wear as a cape, letting you glide around the world. Sure, you can already sort of fly about in Creative mode, but not like this. The Elytra are so much faster and more natural, letting you swoop down through ravines and bank around corners with ease. As you pick up speed, the wind whistles past your ears, and you suddenly realise how untouchable you are as the ground speeds by beneath you. It’s empowering.
Elytra are also wasted in the End where there’s nothing to see except beige soil and hazy mauve skies that stretch out for miles. It’s a shame that this is where you get your first taste of using them when they’re far better suited to the hills of the overworld and dodging past Ghasts and lava flows in the Nether. Taking them outside for the first time is a revelation; at first I was gripped by fear and the sensation of falling before pulling up just enough to skim along a nearby river. It’s exhilarating and completely changes the way I look at Minecraft’s blocky landscapes. Now I’m constantly hunting for mountain ranges and ice spires to weave through at speed.
The Elytra wings have also changed the way I look at my builds. While I usually opt for petite farmhouses and quaint villages, now I’m thinking about building vast metropolises full of skyscrapers and possible obstacles to fly past. I’ve laid the groundwork for a series of doughnut-shaped towers lined up in a pleasing fashion just so I can swoop through them.
Each tower will take me hours, placing each block by hand, but, like waiting ages for a short rollercoaster ride, that burst of adrenaline as I soar through them will be worth it. It isn’t great city planning for anyone who wants to live there, but at least the commutes would be more exciting.
I’ve also become a lot braver in my play style by wearing them. I now feel compelled to jump into any dark, cavernous hole just to see how far I can go without crashing to my inevitable death. Before, I’d spend ages meticulously placing torches to make sure I wouldn’t get lost. Why bother when you can zip around?
Suddenly Minecraft has become an exploration game again. I’ve seen forest and desert biomes hundreds of times before, but the Elytra let you see them in a whole new light. Towering, impenetrable jungles feel like small, lush oases in seas of plains from above, and the sands of deserts quickly give way to vast oceans. It’s also far easier to find temples and abandoned mineshafts when you can see a whole biome at once.
I’m surprised by just how much a singular item can change such a large game. I’m no longer settling for building in the biomes near a spawn now that it’s easier to find somewhere more exciting further afield. And even my builds are being planned with Elytra use in mind. Flying grants you the type of freedom you didn’t even know you wanted in Minecraft and once you have it you’ll wonder how you ever survived without it.
Minecraft fans can already have a good time on Xbox One, but just in case they want something a bit blockier, there’s a special new console design on the way. The 1TB Xbox One S included in the Minecraft Limited Edition Bundle has a grassy dirt design on the front and a shiny redstone circuit on its semi-transparent backplate. Clever!
Maybe if you attach some extra redstone repeaters you can power it up to an Xbox One X? Or at least turn it into a giant calculator. Anyway, the bundle includes codes for both Minecraft and the Redstone Pack, a month of Xbox Game Pass, and two weeks of Xbox Live Gold. Just in case you want to remember all your lovely creations being blown to bits every time you pick up your gamepad, the bundled-in controller has a special Creeper design with a blotchy green face staring out at you from between the thumbsticks.
If you prefer the company of a friendly swine, you can grab a limited edition Minecraft pig controller. Bonus points for the little curly tail on the battery cover. Both the creeper and pig controller will go up for sale starting on September 12, and the Minecraft Xbox One S will be available as of October 2 in the UK and October 3 in the US.
Minecraft can keep you going for a long time, but you’ll get the hankering for extra games eventually; when you do, check out our list of the best Xbox One games and keep on playing.
With Designated Survivor set to return next month, ABC has released a teaser promo for the upcoming second season of the political drama series which you can check out here…
Kiefer Sutherland stars as Tom Kirkman, a lower-level cabinet member who is suddenly appointed President of the United States after a catastrophic attack on the US Capitol during the State of the Union. Kirkman will struggle to keep the country and his family from falling apart, while navigating the highly-volatile political arena and leading the search to find who is responsible for the attack.
Designated Survivor season 2 is set to premiere on September 27th on ABC.
No man is more experienced at rescuing a troubled America than, of course, original 24 star and Canadian action hero Kiefer Sutherland, which is why ABC’s Designated Survivor has had such an entertaining first season. And since it’s coming up on the end of its first season, it’s time to think about whether Designated Survivor will return. Well, I have some good news: Designated Survivor was renewed for Season 2 just days before its Season 1 finale. So there’s no reason to be nervous that when the end of the season cliffhangers roll around, that you won’t get to know the answer. Unfortunately, though, that doesn’t mean that Designated Survivor Season 2 will be arriving soon. The series will likely premiere in September 2017 — it should once again be a fall premiere, and if its time slot doesn’t change from Wednesday nights, there shouldn’t be anything to delay the next premiere.
EARLIER: But once Designated Survivor does go off the air, what can fans expect from the upcoming second season? Obviously, knowing more won’t make the summer-long hiatus any shorter, but maybe it will be more bearable having some idea about where the series is going. And it may be heading in a slightly different direction, because in the second season, Designated Survivorwill have a new showrunner — for the fourth time in its short history, the show is changing hands. According to Deadline, Keith Eisner, formerly of The Good Wife, is taking over. According to Cinemablend, “creative differences” were allegedly behind some of the past showrunner changes, and Suthterland’s creative influence may have impacted the series, including orchestrating his reunion with former 24 bad guy and Designated Survivor confidante Mykelti Williamson.
But even a new showrunner won’t totally change the ongoing story of Designated Survivor. All season long, a conspiracy has been mounting: Who is behind the massive attack that took out the highest elected officials in the United States, making the lowly Secretary of Housing and Urban Development the President? Agent Wells has been the stealth hero of the series, investigating the attack and suspecting from the beginning that there could be another, subsequent one. Turns out, she was right, now she’s been kidnapped by the conspirators, there’s a traitor in the White House, and everything that Kirkman attempts winds up getting blocked by either normal political gridlock or some other aspect on the ongoing conspiracy.
Personally, I’m slightly nervous that Wells could be the first season’s last casualty, but it seems possible that someone else who lives in the White House could be the next target because of the mole — maybe even Kirkman’s family. Certainly, Designated Survivor is basically nothing like the real world or real politics. So, since the series takes such liberties with political institutions, it’s leading its upcoming second season in a very exciting new direction.
There are a few subtle differences in the pre-order version of the Xbox One X. “The Xbox One X Project Scorpio Edition features a custom design with the words ‘Project Scorpio’ printed on the console and the controller, and we’ve incorporated a sophisticated and dynamic graphic pattern across the exterior,” corporate Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Xbox, Mike Nichols, said in a blog post about the console. And yes, the vertical stand is included.
To be clear, the Xbox One X isn’t the next version of the Xbox line of game consoles.
It’s considered part of the Xbox One platform, meaning that all games on the original Xbox One function on the Xbox One X (and vice versa). It’s a more powerful iteration of an existing game console: the Xbox One. So what makes it worth $500 when a standard Xbox One — brand new — costs just $250?
For starters, it makes most games look far prettier than they already do.
“Metro: Exodus” is gorgeous; it was showcased as a major Xbox One X 4K game during E3 2017, the game industry’s annual video game trade show.4A Games
The Xbox One X is capable of powering so-called “4K” gaming — the next step up in graphical fidelity after HD — as well as 4K Blu-ray discs. It’s got “six teraflops” of processing power, which means it’s far more powerful than the current models of Xbox One and PlayStation 4 — even the new, more powerful PlayStation 4 Pro. It also takes advantage of HDR lighting, which makes visuals “pop”; colors are more vibrant and shadows are more detailed. You’ll need a 4K TV with HDR support to take full advantage of all that power.
The console is being touted as the most powerful game console ever made, and Microsoft says it’s also the smallest Xbox ever made.
Left: Xbox One X | Right: Xbox One S (the “S” model is the original Xbox One hardware in a smaller, more efficient box)Microsoft
Rather than launching the Xbox One X as a successor to the original Xbox One, the Xbox One X joins the slimmer iteration of the original Xbox One (known as the Xbox One “S” — are you confused yet?) seen above.
Though games and movies will look better than ever on the Xbox One X, Microsoft has a mandate that any games on the Xbox One X must be playable on all other Xbox One consoles as well. This is part of Microsoft’s ongoing push toward a unified gaming ecosystem across various Windows 10-powered devices; like millions of PCs around the world, the Xbox One and the Xbox One X are powered by Windows 10.
“Forza Motorsport 7” is an especially attractive highlight of the Xbox One X game catalog.Microsoft
Regardless of the “limited edition” console, there’s something else that’s important to remember here: When the console arrives this November, it’s likely to be in short supply.
Rather than fighting holiday crowds at your local retailer, you can pre-order the console starting today at all the usual places: Amazon, Best Buy, GameStop, and more.
