A former New Jersey man says that he missed the Jersey Shore so much that he spent years recreating the Point Pleasant Beach boardwalk using the video game “Minecraft.”
Kevin Domenic tells News 12 New Jersey that his family once owned a beach home in Point Pleasant Beach and that he has many happy childhood memories there. But he says that he moved away to Missouri to be closer to his wife’s family.
“[Point Pleasant Beach] is my favorite place in the world,” Domenic told News 12. “I thought, ‘Why not try to recreate it in ‘Minecraft?’’”
Domenic documents the process in a series of YouTube videos set to slow piano music. Even the smallest details, such as the color of pavers in some walkways, were copied.
New 12 New Jersey showed the recreation to some Jersey Shore residents, who said that they were impressed by the level of detail.
“The Jersey Shore has a huge impact on people from childhood,” says Point Pleasant Beach resident Lynn Krohn. “It’s a memory you have, being here, smelling the salt water and obviously it had a huge impact on him. I mean, this is incredible.”
Domenic even recreated the Minard Lane bungalow that his family once owned.
Thousands of “Minecraft” accounts were recently infected with malware that can potentially reformat hard drives and delete backup data and system programs, according to cybersecurity company Avast.
The malicious software is apparently distributed via “Minecraft” character skins created in the PNG file format and uploaded to the game’s official website by fans. Skins modify a player’s avatar and they’re quite popular. Avast estimates nearly 50,000 “Minecraft” accounts have been infected.
“The malicious code is largely unimpressive and can be found on sites that provide step-by-step instructions on how to create viruses with Notepad,” Avast said. “While it is fair to assume that those responsible are not professional cybercriminals, the bigger concern is why the infected skins could be legitimately uploaded to the ‘Minecraft’ website. With the malware hosted on the official ‘Minecraft’ domain, any detection triggered could be misinterpreted by users as a false positive.”
“Minecraft” is one of the biggest games in the world. It’s sold more than 144 million copies since its launch in 2009. Microsoft bought both the game and its developer, Mojang, for an estimated $2.5 billion in 2014. In a recent interview with PopSugar, Helen Chiang, the new head of “Minecraft” at Microsoft, said the sandbox game now has 74 million active players worldwide. This makes it a ripe target for hackers, but Avast said only a small percentage of the player base actively uploads modified skins, which has kept infection numbers low.
Avast said anyone who downloaded modified skins should run an antivirus scan. Some might need to reinstall the game or, in extreme cases, restore data on their hard drives. Infected users might also receive unusual messages in their inboxes with subjects like “You Are Nailed, Buy A New Computer This Is A Piece Of Sh*t,” “You have maxed your internet usage for a lifetime,” or “Your a** got glued.”
Avast said it contacted Mojang and they are working on fixing the vulnerability.
Pacific Rim: Uprising has earned just $55 million. At this juncture, it should top out a bit over $60m domestic, which is well short of the $102m domestic gross of the first Pacific Rim back in 2013. And while it’s doing a little better overseas, Legendary’s $150m-budgeted sci-fi sequel isn’t making up for lost ground, not even in China. While the sequel arguably only exists because Pacific Rim earned $113m in China five years ago, this time out Uprising scored a $66m debut, terrible word of mouth and a swift decline to under-$100m. With $267m worldwide, it’ll be lucky to top $280m. It’s a big miss.
This shouldn’t be a surprise since Legendary (and distributor Universal/Comcast Corp.) violated the most obvious rule of all: Don’t make a sequel if folks didn’t flock to or love the original. As a general rule, sequels happen when a movie earns a lot of money or grosses a figure that is A) noticeably higher than the production budget and B) has a somewhat leggy, buzzy run which in-turn leads to a vibrant post-theatrical lifespan. Sequels are supposed to be a reward for a movie that is a big hit and (theoretically) has another story worth telling. If the first film bombs, you shouldn’t get a sequel.
That’s what made a second Pacific Rim so intriguing. Guillermo del Toro’s monsters versus robots flick earned mixed reviews and didn’t really break out beyond the hardcore nerd crowd, earning $101 million domestic from a $38m debut and $411m worldwide on a $190m budget. Yes, $411m+ worldwide is pretty solid, especially for an original live-action feature, but that was still barely over double its budget. And with marketing costs being what they are, 2.5x-the budget is usually the magic spot for eventual profitability once VOD, DVD and other post-theatrical revenue streams are tabulated. So, Pacific Rim: Uprising was a big-budget sequel to a big-budget flop.
Thanks to the 24-hour news cycle and the clickbait-driven media, we get all kinds of buzz about continuations to every franchise under the sun. Chris Pine joshingly responds in a positive way to the notion of a third Princess Diaries movie and it gets reported as if it’s a greenlit picture. Folks are asked about Fantastic Four and they act like it’s something that’s actively being considered. But no matter how much Karl Urban talks about playing Judge Dredd again on the big screen, we are no closer to getting a sequel to Dredd than we are of getting MacGruber 2, Terminator Genisys 2 or John Carter 2.
But Pacific Rim 2 actually got made. Sure, this all started in 2014, when Universal had recently joined forces with Legendary (the first Pacific Rim went out as a Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. release) and when Universal was lower on stockholder-friendly franchises. But as Universal’s 2014 slate of record profit margins (in a year sans tentpoles) led to a market share-winning 2015, Pacific Rim: Uprising became less an essential IP and more of… something from a bygone era. Pacific Rim 2 was a lot less necessary in 2018 than it was in 2014. In retrospect, Pacific Rim could have been treated as a “dodged a bullet” one-and-done.
Universal was planning to toss Kristen Stewart out of her own franchise before Snow White and the Huntsman even opened in June of 2012. Taking a female-led hit, and it did earn $156 million domestic and $394m worldwide on a $170m budget, and creating a male-driven spin-off was both a bad idea in terms of why the first film did well and oddly cruel. But the appeal of saying “Hey, we’ve got a new franchise!” was too much to resist after Battleship bombed and The Bourne Legacy slightly underperformed. Yet, by early 2016, Universal needed The Huntsman: Winter’s War as much as Disney needs Tron 3.
Disney has threatened to make a third Tron movie in one form or another over the years. Tron: Legacywas more successful than the other “next Pirates of the Caribbean” or “Disney’s Avatar” titles (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, John Carter, The Lone Ranger, Prince of Persia, etc). The Joseph Kosinski-directed sci-fi sequel has its cult following (it’s still terrible but Oblivion is good and Only the Brave is a new classic). But once Disney started kicking butt with Marvel, Lucasfilm, Pixar and Walt Disney Animation, plus those live-action fairy tales doing their thing, there was zero need to take a risk on a third Tron movie.
A Pacific Rim sequel became riskier and riskier with every year that went by, as the new installment now presented itself not as a sequel to a recent hit but as a long-gestating sequel to a film that wasn’t all that fondly remembered or (depending on viewer awareness) an outright original. And once Guillermo del Toro jumped ship, you somewhat lost the fan loyalty that almost justified the project in the first place. Unless Steven S. DeKnight had created a new classic on par with, I dunno, Edge of Tomorrow or Fury Road, this was always a huge risk, even with a winning John Boyega in the lead role.
Pacific Rim: Uprising was a sequel to a box office miss, borne of a notion that having IP was in itself valuable to the overall portfolio no matter if that IP had any worth. You don’t get and shouldn’t expect sequels to truly underperforming originals. You can get sequels to surprise blowout hits like Ted or leggy cult favorites like Pitch Perfect or John Wick. Yes, you can have breakout sequels, but those have to originate from films that earned good reviews, profitable global box office (preferably with a leggy run) and post-theatrical interest. Pacific Rim was 0-3, and you can’t will a franchise into being.
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery was a hit ($68 million worldwide on a $17m budget), so the production of The Spy Who Shagged Me shouldn’t have been a surprise. Unbreakable was a minor disappointment, earning $96m domestic and $256m worldwide on an $80m budget, so it’s no surprise that a sequel didn’t come until M. Night Shyamalan released Split and then made Glass into a 2-for-1 sequel Unbreakable/Split sequel 18.25 years after the first superhero drama. And even if you argue that Tron: Legacy was a minor hit, nostalgia magic didn’t strike twice for Blade Runner 2049. A movie isn’t more appealing because it’s a sequel.
Unless you’re Batman Begins and you earn $371 million on a $150m budget but with rave reviews, superb legs, great word-of-mouth and strong post-theatrical, your next chapter isn’t going to be The Dark Knight. Pacific Rim: Uprising was a big budget sequel to a big-budget predecessor that wasn’t remotely an outright hit. So if you’re wondering why we don’t have Tron 3 or why Universal is gun-shy about a third stand-alone Hulk movie, well, look at Pacific Rim. They didn’t need Pacific Rim: Uprisingany more than they needed The Huntsman or Disney needed Tron 3. Having no franchise is better than having a poor franchise.
Universal will be fine (go see Blockers), but what could have been a box office game changer instead becomes an all-too-apparent cautionary tale. In the end, the lesson of Pacific Rim: Uprising, a movie that I actually enjoyed on its own pulpy merits, is pretty simple: Don’t make a sequel to a box office bomb.
Artificial intelligence doesn’t compare favorably to humans when it comes to problem solving. Ask any eight year old child to place a few blocks on a grid in Minecraft and they’ll almost certainly be bored by the task. A computer, on the other hand, doesn’t grasp such difficult concepts so easily.
Stephan Alaniz, a researcher with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Technische Universitat Berlin, yesterday published a white papertitled “Deep Reinforcement Learning with Model Learning and Monte Carlo Tree Search in Minecraft.” In his paper the scientist explains his efforts to create a superior method for training an AI to perform simple tasks based on visual input.
If we’re ever going to have robots that can live and work among humans seamlessly without damaging us or our property they’re going to have to understand how to interact with the environment using visual context. One of the most popular ways to train AI for this task is using video games with simple controls.
We can judge an AI’s effectiveness at completing specific tasks in a structured environment, like Minecraft, by comparing it to human efforts.
Watching the above video, it’s apparent that AI – even one that’s shown to be more effective than other agents trained to perform similar tasks – isn’t very good at doing simple things yet. But developing cutting-edge technology takes time — though advances in machine learning techniques are happening at a terrifying pace.
Future research will drive training times down, effectiveness up, and generate new ideas for algorithms that further blur the lines between artificial and human intelligence.
But for now, it’s interesting enough to watch an AI process hundreds of different moves as it tries to figure out a simple block placing challenge in Minecraft. It might be worth remembering, in the future, how simple these things were when they began learning.
The release of Just Dance 2018 for the Nintendo Switch opened up a lot of possibilities for the console, including crossover content from some of Ubisoft’s other games. More specifically, there’s a video showcasing a crossover of the Rabbids version of Princess Peach from Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle dancing to Beyonce’s “Naughty Girl”.
The video of the Rabbids Peach was posted up over on the official Nintendo YouTube channel. It’s only a minute long and starts off with Rabbids Peach doing a similar kind of dance routine to what you would expect from Beyonce.
The background is littered with other Rabbid backup dancers, shuffling and moving their hands and feet to the beat of the music, while Princess Peach’s castle stands erect in the background, and the washing machine-looking portals are nestled on the other side of the screen.
The gameplay is still typical Just Dance, requiring players to stay in sync with the rhythm of the music, and manage the beats of the dance routine to the song. The dance icons scroll through at the bottom of the screen, with the character silhouettes being represented by outlines of the Rabbids.
Players are required to pull of the motions depicted in the images. Those who manage to perform the moves in rhythm to the beat of the music will acquire higher scores.
Beyonce’s “Naughty Girl” is just one of 300 songs featured in Just Dance 2018, which came out last fall in 2017 for home consoles. The Ubisoft dance title is just the latest in a long line of games that have come out within the franchise.
The comment section on the video isn’t entirely happy about the inclusion of the Rabbid dance trainer, mainly because Rabbid Peach doing rather exotic dances to Beyonce’s “Naughty Girl” has already mentally scarred some people who just weren’t prepared for the kind of imagery present in the video above.
Nintendo allowed Ubisoft to use the Super Mario characters and themes in Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. The game sold well enough for what it is and I suppose Nintendo allowed Ubisoft to go a step further by using the Mario-themed characters from the turn-based RPG in Ubisoft’s other title, Just Dance 2018.
Not everyone was mentally unprepared for the crossover in the multiplayer dancing game. Some gamers were quite thrilled to see the characters hopping from one game to the next and bringing some levity and hilarity to the dancing game. And besides, if everyone is having a good time being goofy and enjoying themselves dancing, then isn’t that the whole point? I’m sure seeing those swinging hips of Rabbids Peach is well worth the laughs that come with the crossover… right? Right?!
With Shenmue 3 set to launch sometime later this year, it looks like folks hoping to catch up on the series’ story up to this point are in luck. According to Sega, remastered versions of the original two Shenmue games are on the way.
SEGA
✔@SEGA
You’ve asked, we listened and we’re extremely excited to finally announce that Shenmue I & II are coming to PS4, Xbox One and PC in one package! Both games will feature Japanese and English voice overs, the choice of classic or modern controls and more! #ShenmueSaved
The above tweet comes directly from Sega, who have officially revealed a launch of Shenmue and Shenmue II on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. The best news is that these spruced up versions of the games will be launched as a single package, allowing folks to get the full narrative in a single purchase. It’s also noted that players will be able to enjoy both the Japanese and English voiceovers, as well as choose between classic and more modern controls. Other tweaks are mentioned but not detailed.
Of course, this is the internet, so rather than be excited to get playable versions of the first two Shenmue games, many of the comments gripe that folks would also like remade versions of games like Jet Set Radio or Skies of Arcadia. And then there are of course the obligatory “what about Switch?” comments.
We’re excited to see this news, even if we’re not exactly surprised. The original Shenmue and Shenmue II launched on the Dreamcast at the turn of the century, a console most folks in the U.S. didn’t own. Also, another issue was that, if memory serves, Shenmue II came out on the original Xbox here in The States rather than the Dreamcast, which wasn’t exactly an ideal scenario. After that Xbox launch in 2002, things went quiet for the series.
Several years back, director Yu Suzuki announced during the Sony E3 press conference that he would be taking the series’ third chapter to Kickstarter, hitting its $2 million goal almost instantly. The latest launch window has Shenmue IIIarriving later this year and, given all of the attention the series has received in recent years, it makes sense that Sega would want to make the original games available, too. We’re sure there’s a decent recap of the first two games available on Youtube somewhere, but this move means folks can choose to simply play the games and get the story firsthand instead.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t just the result of a third game finally arriving for the series nearly two decades after the plot was left dangling. A while back, Sega held a poll asking players what old-school games they’d like to see remade for modern consoles. At the top of that list was Shenmue, so this can also be seen as Sega offering some nice follow through.
So what do you think, folks? Are you excited to finally have the chance to play the original Shenmue games on modern consoles? Drop your thoughts into the comments below.
