YouTuber LowSpecGamer makes a living out of making games playable on the weakest computers, reducing games to their most basic visual components so they can run on rigs made of balsa wood and held together with duct tape. He’s already tackled a range of modern games, including The Witcher 3, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Dishonored, but his latest video — for Valve’s bona fide classic Half-Life 2 — represents his biggest graphical reduction yet.
By removing shadows, weapon effects, textures, water reflections, and even character teeth, LowSpecGamer makes Half-Life 2 look peculiarly like Minecraft. Vehicles, buildings, and mountains morph until they look like they’re built of that game’s pixellated blocks, so much so that you’d expect Gordon Freeman to pull out a pickaxe and dig his way out of City 17.
It might not be a hugely sustainable way to play Half-Life 2 — especially when the sky looks like a Lovecraftian nightmare hellscape — but it does make the game run like greased lightning on a PC the size of a USB stick. So tweakable is the 13-year-old game that the Intel Atom CPU powering the Intel Compute Stick barely breaks a sweat, and with almost every visual effect removed, is capable of running it at more than 160 frames per second. If you want to copy his methods, LowSpecGamer provides a handy guide for Half-Life 2, and many other games, through his YouTube channel.
With books like World War Z and Zombie Survival Guide, Max Brooks has already taught us more than a few ways to survive a zombie apocalypse. Now, with Minecraft: The Island, we’ll learn how to survive something even bigger: life itself.
Minecraft: The Island, the first in a non-connected series of Minecraft novels from developer Mojang and Random House imprint Del Rey Books, follows a character who must survive on an island while figuring out who he is and what secrets the island holds. Below, Brooks explains more about the book, and what appeals to him (and millions of other players) about Minecraft. But first, check out EW’s exclusive reveal of the novel’s cover:
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: For people who don’t play (like me), what exactly is Minecraft? MAX BROOKS: Minecraft is an online world where everything is in cube shapes. Now, there are different types of Minecraft you can play. If you play on something called Creative, then you can just build whatever you want, and all the natural materials of that world, just like this world, are automatically in your inventory. And that’s usually where people build extravagant buildings.
So how do you play? I play on something called Survival, where literally you wake up in a world. It’s a natural world, and it looks no different than this world. There are different biomes, or ecosystems, like a desert or swamp or tundra, and you have to survive. From the moment that you open your eyes, just like in the real world, you’re losing food. So you better find a way to eat: Either hunt animals, or plant seeds and grow crops. But in order to do that, you better make tools. And to make tools, you have to get wood. And to do that, you literally have to start by breaking down a tree with your bare hands to get the wood to make the tools, to plant the seeds, to eat.
Wow. That’s very different than all the Minecraft music videos I saw on YouTube. Wow is right. That’s way different from music videos, but you know what? It’s actually not different from music videos. When I called it an alternative universe, I mean it. Because in our world, people make music videos, but those people still need to eat! And when you think about somebody making a music video online, just anybody, that person had an ancestor 100,000 years ago who literally had to find food. So that’s Minecraft. Minecraft is our world.
How did this book come about? What happened was, I got a call [asking], “Are you interested?” and [saying] that Mojang is starting to look at the concept of a Minecraft book, and do I have a take on it?
And herein lies the initial challenge of a Minecraft book. Like, if I’m writing a Call of Duty book, that’s a no-brainer. You already have the characters, you already have the plot, you have everything. Whereas this, you literally have to write a story that takes place in this world. So I already had a specific story I wanted to tell. Like we said, Minecraft speaks to different people in different ways, and this is how it spoke to me, specifically.
We need to be very clear: I’m not writing the Minecraft book. I’m writing a Minecraft book. If the folks from Halo called me to write theHalo book, I could do that, but you cannot write the Minecraft Book.
Because Halo has a mythology? Yeah. If you’re doing World of Warcraft or something like that, it’s very specific. Whereas Minecraft is literally just a world. It’s like saying, “Write the human race book.”
So how was it different than just sitting down to write a regular novel? First of all, there are very specific rules of this game. I would say for every hour I spent writing the book, I had to spend, I’m not kidding, tens — if not hundreds — of hours playing, and war-gaming, and researching to make sure that everything I did in the book could be done in the game.
And — because I’m very OCD — literally down to “How many steps can I take in a certain amount of time?” and “How fast do I lose my food when I get hungry, when I’m running as opposed to when I’m walking?” I mean, the game is that specific.
Did you do anything else to research besides playing on your own? No, because the story really happened to me once when I was playing Minecraft on Hardcore. Get this: I literally, playing the game, woke up at the bottom of the ocean. I opened my eyes and locked on the sun, because I didn’t know which way was up. Scary, huh? Swam like crazy for the surface — and, by the way, ran out of air within an arm’s reach of the surface. And once you lose air, you start to acquire damage. So I already broke through to the surface in pain, and then had to pick a location and swim for it, and hope that I found land.
Can you give us a rough outline of the book’s plot? The premise is that this person wakes up in this world and knows that they are from our world, but doesn’t know who they are in that world. They have no memory. It is a story of survival: waking up at the bottom of the ocean, swimming to an island, and having to survive on that island. And the story is, before this person can answer the really big questions like, “How did I get here? How do I get home?,” they have to solve the basic survival questions of “How do I eat?” and “How am I safe?” and “Where do I sleep at night?”
Okay, so it’s like Hatchet? It’s a little bit like Hatchet. I would say that in Hatchet, the boy knows who he is, there’s the divorce… I would say the key difference between Hatchet and my book is: The kid’s got a hatchet! How awesome would it be if my character had a hatchet?
Yeah, that would skip a lot of steps. Exactly. But if you skipped a lot of steps, you’d skip a lot of life lessons.
Do you think everybody who plays Minecraft thinks of it in terms of life lessons? Or is this just you, as an adult and as a dad? I have no idea. I’m the type of writer who can never try to anticipate my audience. My first book, Zombie Survival Guide, stayed in a drawer for a couple years, because I could have never imagined that anybody else would read a real book on how to fight something that isn’t real. I thought I was the only one who thought about this. So I would love it if more people look for life lessons in Minecraft and were interested in that stuff, but right now, I have no idea. So I have to go with what appeals to me about that world.
So is this going to be a series? No. There are other Minecraft novels coming out, and I think it is really important for the Minecraft authors coming up behind me that everybody understand that they’re not sequels, the other books. I may write another Minecraft book down the line, but the ones that are coming out behind me are not part of the same story.
Well, it’s nice that you get to be first. Yeah, well, I literally wrote the book before we had a book deal.
You did? Oh yeah. Mojang had a publishing deal with another company, and they came to me, they asked if I had a book idea. I had a book idea, they loved it… and I think their contract ran out.
Because they waited too long? No, I think that’s just the normal business cycle. And while Mojang was waiting to find a publishing partner, we were in limbo. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And I had to do it, so I literally sat down and wrote the first draft of the book and my plan — if you can call it a plan — was if there wasn’t a deal, or if they said, “We found a publisher, but we don’t want you,” then I was just going to publish it as free fan fiction. Just throw it up on my website and… whatever.
Well, thank god you didn’t have to do that! Yeah, but the attitude was, “I have to write this book. This book is going to get written, because otherwise it’s going to be rattling around in my head, and it’s going to be unfair to any other writing projects I ever do.”
Now that you’ve scratched the itch, do you feel like you want to write more Minecraft books? I don’t know, because I haven’t really finished it yet. We’re on draft three, and there may be two, three, four more drafts. Part of the job now is to take the time and get it right. It’s not fair to this book if I give one neuron of my brain to another book or a sequel or anything like that.
Minecraft: The Island hits shelves later this year.
MINECRAFT fans on the Isle of Wight have been invited to take part in a project to build their own virtual version of Newport.
Devised by Chris Gutteridge, computer programmer at the University of Southampton, Project Newport is a full scale reproduction of Newport in the computer game Minecraft — a computer game about designing and building anything from a simple house to a castle in the sky.
The project ties in with Joanna Kori’s Future reCollections exhibition at Quay Arts which looks at the past and present uses of the Quay Arts building.
Chris’ contribution was to expand on that idea with the whole town, and also consider what it’s future might be.
It’s a blank version of the town, fit for adaptation and Chris wants people taking get creative and build their own vision of Newport.
“They might want to rebuild what Carisbrooke Castle was like at a certain time in history, and have to look up how tall the walls were, or where the stables would have been,” said Chris.
“Or maybe fill the town with zombies. I reckon a couple of them will accidentally learn something,” he joked.
For Chris, the aim of the project is to help provide the engineering oriented education that wasn’t afforded to him when he was growing up on the Island.
There are dozens of amazing artists on the Island, he says, but when it comes to engineering and computers, there is very little for children to engage with.
Using open source data from the environment agency and OpenStreetMap, Chris wrote a program to combine the data and generate it in Minecraft.
Chris will be hosting a free drop-in at Quay Arts tomorrow (Saturday) between 1pm and 4pm.
He is also involved in the University of Southampton science and engineering festival which runs from March 11 until 19 and Chris hopes will encourage younger people from the Island to become involved in science and technology.
CHICAGO: After spending four years building Chicago out of virtual blocks, an 18-year-old from the north suburbs unveiled an intricate Minecraft map of downtown.
Ryan Zull, a New York University student who grew up in Deerfield, Illinois, posted the model on Reddit under his username, Koodoo25. At a 1-to-2 scale, it’s among the most detailed models of the city ever made in Minecraft.
Minecraft, which was first released to the public in 2009 and bought by Microsoft in 2014, is one of the best-selling videogames ever, according to Time. The game is a sandbox video game, which means it has no rules and it’s up to gamers to create their own experiences. It allows users to build and explore worlds where they can compete or work alone or together.
Zull said he first started working on the model in July 2013, though the work wasn’t continuous, and the project sometimes sat untouched for as long as a year.
He’s not the first to publicly release a Minecraft model of Chicago – another Reddit user posted one in 2015. But Zull’s is more than twice as detailed as that model, by scale.
“I started by making Mies van der Rohe’s Federal Plaza and eventually worked my way outwards from there,” Zull said in an email. “All the buildings and streets were created directly within Minecraft. … All the design is done by measuring dimensions of buildings and streets in Google Maps and fitting them into the Minecraft world as proportionately and accurately as possible.”
He unveiled his Chicago map on Reddit recently and quickly gathered acclaim. But Redditors were also instantly curious about the project’s future and were quick to request additions. One user asked if Navy Pier and Lincoln Park would be built, while another asked about CTA lines.
Zull said the model is a work in progress and that he plans on building all of downtown.
“There may be a few tiny details or dimensions a little bit off, but everything down to the placement of streetlights and trees was done to recreate what I saw in Google Maps Street View as accurately as I could,” he wrote on Reddit.
Minecraft players can download a playable version of the map themselves on Planet Minecraft. — Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service
It’s rather overwhelming walking around the Lego booth at the New York Toy Fair. Not only are there hundreds of new sets but they span brands, ages and complexity.
From Duplo to Creator sets to classic Lego City and even the large Lego Technic products, it’s an impressive range.
This year Lego Boost extends this further with a sensor driven remote controlled robot that can be built in six different ways and offers new brick-based interactions.
Lego’s own Friends, Elves, Nexo Knights and City lines are all extended in 2017.
Big on children’s radar will be the franchise and movie tie-in sets. Coming for 2017 there are sets for Pirates of the Caribbean , Cars, The Lego Batman Movie, Minecraft , Star Wars, Frozen , Moana and Cinderella. There are also new sets coming for the Ninjago feature film.
To help you decide which of these to get for your family, here’s my top picks from each of the lines at the show.
Lego Disney
Two sets stood out here for the quality of design and great looking minifigures. Ariel and the Magical Spell (41145) is a 222 pieces aimed at children 5 and over. It provides turquoise, teal and green bricks with mermaid characters and a underwater theme. It will be available in August
Then there is Cinderella’s Enchanted Evening (41146) that is made of 350 pieces to create a magical horse and carriage. It comes with Cinderella minifigure and a miniature castle build. It will be available in August.
Lego Star Wars
While the Star Wars: The Last Jedi sets are, for understandable reasons, not revealed yet there was still plenty of Star Wars bricky goodness at Toy Fair. Bit of a surprise pick for me, but the LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar (75184) was really impressive this year.
Not only the range of figures and mini-builds behind each window but the inclusion of a few new Lego pieces I’d not seen before. This will be out in September — which I know is early for Christmas but there you go.
Lego Minecraft
A lot of new Minecraft Lego coming this year. The Waterfall Base (21134) stands out as one of the larger sets at 729 pieces. This is a nice set that offers a range of terrain and characters, all drawn from the video game. Plenty of zombies and other mobs are included as well. This will be available in March.
The Ocean Monument (21136) is another large set with1122 pieces. It offers a load of interactive elements and characters from the game, including a Lego version of the Elder Guardian, Guardian and Squid mob as well as Steve and Alex minifigures. It will be available in August.
Lego City
Top pick here is the Coast Guard Headquarters (60167) which is a 792 piece build for anyone aged 6 or older. It offers a nice base building, helicopter and launch. The theme is in white and orange of sea-rescue and the level of design is excellent. It’s available in August.
Also worth a mention is the Bus Station (60154) which updates the set with a 337 piece build of building and vehicles. It’s available in August.
Lego Technic
A lot to choose from this year but for me the 6×6 All Terrain Tow Truck (42070) stole the show. It’s a massive 1862 pieces and does need some skill to assemble — an age of at least 11 is suggested.
Once complete the build is stunning with attention to detail and realistic moving parts. A nice touch is the Teddy Bear mascot perched on the front grill. This will be out in August.
Lego Batman Movie
There are some of these Lego Batman Movie sets out already but we hadn’t seen the fantastic Ultimate Batmobile (70917) before. This is another big build, weighing in at 1456 pieces.
It comes as three separate vehicles than can combine to make one super Batmobile. Well executed and closely matched to the film. This will be available in June.
Lego Nexo Knights
While there are a few contenders for top set here, in the end I had to go for the Knighton Castle (70357) and its 1426 pieces. Some new pieces included here, but it’s the impressive overall design I really love.
All the favourite Nexo characters are included along with some new shields to unlock in-game content. This is available in August.
Lego Elves
New this year in the Elves universe are the Goblins. This is a nice addition as it not only extends the line but opens new routes for imaginative play.
Accordingly, my top set here is the Breakout from the Goblin King’s Fortress (41188). It’s 695 pieces and includes an impressive castle with a variety of interactive ways to escape and capture elves. This is another August set.
Lego Friends
There are a lot of Lego Friends sets coming up this year. In terms of August releases shown at Toy Fair this had the most.
Top of the list for me is the Heartlake Hospital (41318) which comprises of 871 to make not only a fully operational medical facility but loads of minifigures and bespoke equipment bricks. There is a high level of detail that looks like it will be great fun to build and play with once complete. This is another of the August Lego sets.
Lego Boost
This is a new range from Lego and offers an interactive building kit with app and sensors all provided. While this sort of thing has been tried before, the level of depth and complexity you can achieve with the set (17101) is really impressive.
From an interactive robot to a cat or even a working guitar, Lego Boost was great fun to see demoed and looks like it will do very well. It will be available in August.
In March, Warner Bros is bringing its sandbox title Lego Worlds to console after nearly two years in open development.
The PS4 and Xbox One versions – with Nintendo Switch to follow – overhaul controls and add in story elements, but remain a Lego fans digital dream: a massive palette where almost anything imaginable can be built out of Lego, without the threat of stepping on a misplaced brick.
WIRED speaks with Chris Rose, associate producer at developer TT Games, on Lego Worlds‘ differences to certain other brick building games, lessons learned from releasing the game on Early Access, and whether Lego Batman will be making an appearance.
WIRED: How do you feel about the inevitable Minecraft comparisons?
Chris Rose: It’s not just Minecraft – we get compared to all the different building games, I’ve heard just about every comparison out there! I’d say the biggest differences we’ve got would be the brick resolution, which improves the terrain. A lot of sandbox games are what we call voxel-based, so cubes, or smaller cubes making up larger cubes. Generally speaking, they’re set to a few shapes, and that’s how you build the world around you.
We were adamant we wanted to make sure the worlds were as natural looking as we could get them, using slopes and bricks of all sorts of shapes and sizes. We felt, being Lego, there’s no ‘default’ – every brick is as relevant and useful as the next one, so it was important the terrain looked like it included as much Lego as possible.
Warner Bros / TT Games
Then we have the active vehicles, things like drills and steamrollers; tools like bazookas to blow up huge chunks of terrain; creatures like dragons and T-rex that you fly and ride. I think we’re at the point now [from Early Access] where people have finally recognised that actually, Lego Worlds is a very different game. The only similarity to other builder games is that, well, you can build stuff.
How does the difference in Lego brick shapes meaningfully change the experience?
It lets you create at a different scale. If you’re building something that has a lot of roundness to it, you have to make it quite big when you’ve only got cubes available to you. We’ve given you the shapes to make objects on a much smaller scale. If you want a bigger scale, you can do that anyway, but it means you don’t have to do huge recreations of stuff – you can build 1:1, or slightly bigger or smaller.
We’ve also added tons of door and window types. It sounds pretty simple but a bank vault door is pretty big – you want to make sure it feels weighty as well, like you can’t easily destroy it.
You launched in Early Access on Steam in 2015. What have you learned in that time?
First and foremost how much people wanted this game to be made. We knew people would like it, but we were blown away by how positive people were towards it. Even the negative reactions weren’t full blown “we hate this” – they were reasoned complaints that made sense. [It gave us] information to take on board, so we could reconsider some of the decisions we’d made.
[For instance], the UI has changed four times in the past two years, and one of those never even saw the light of day. We hated it, it wasn’t good enough.
Mainly, we wanted to try out new stuff. Because we were in Early Access, we were in an environment where you can use some trial and error – people are a bit more forgiving when you have that approach.
Warner Bros / TT Games
Bringing the game to consoles, how have you adapted the more precise controls of mouse and keyboard?
We’ve iterated the controls four or five times, with all sorts of tests – bringing kids in, public tests, and feedback from the community.
We’d supported controllers [on PC], but with mouse and keyboard you can get in close. My approach was that [in any form] a pointer should act like a trackpad. I used to exclusively play Worlds in Early Access on a trackpad. I thought the [controller’s] thumbstick should behave in a similar manner, so we used that as a focus. The pointer behaves in places like you’d expect a mouse to, just a very slow mouse, but the actual building tools themselves are finely tuned so they don’t shoot off or snap bricks out of place.
You’ve announced you’ll be allowing players to share their Lego Worlds creations – how will that work?
It’ll be involve sharing models more than whole worlds, because the world data size is massive. We don’t want to over-do it and eat up people’s bandwidth usage. We settled on the models as they’re a lot smaller – some of them are only a few megabytes. The idea is you’ll use a tool in-game to copy what you want to capture, go into a micro-editor, and when you save it there’s a tick box to upload it to our servers.
Will you allow world sharing if there’s demand?
I wouldn’t say it’s inconceivable [but we’ll see] if we get enough feedback. What we have said is that when the game is out we’re going to do something very similar to what we did in Early Access – every once in a while, we’re going to step back and absorb the information, listen to what everyone is saying.
We’ll do that for the release of the title, as we’re effectively starting over with more people involved, with Xbox and PlayStation players coming in. If people turn around and say they want to share their entire world, then we’ll figure something out.
Warner Bros / TT Games
Will user-created content be cross compatible between formats?
The model file is Lego’s own system. If you have the LDD tool – Lego Digital Designer – there’s a filetype called LXFML. You could build something on the PC version now in LDD, import it into your save file folder, and it’ll work in the game. Obviously you can’t get into the directories on console, but it’s still LXFML that we use, so shared models will be cross compatible.
Lego games are almost synonymous with licenced characters – will other properties be coming to Worlds?For now, we’ve taken the approach that [i]Lego Dimensions was the mash-up. We’d like Worlds to sit in its own bubble for a while and be free of those IP approaches, or being tied into all that. We’re trying to focus it very heavily on the Lego themes – City, Creator, Minifigs for characters – and we’ve found that’s working quite well. Some people are asking us “can we get a Star Wars pack, an Indiana Jones pack, a Lego Batman pack?” It’s not that we don’t want to, it’s just that we think we’ve done those in other ways, so we don’t want to over-do it. It’s nice to have a game that isn’t tied into any other franchises.
Lego Worlds launches on PS4 and Xbox One on March 10; the Nintendo Switch release date for the game has not been revealed.
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