When Minecraft exploded on the scene I was one of the countless people who assumed it would just be a fad. We were all wrong, and the game has sold more copies than any other game except Tetris. It’s so popular that Microsoft put up $2.5 billion to acquire the game’s developer Mojang. Part of the game’s strength has been catering to kids and adults alike, and it does that through several different games on various platforms. Minecraft: Story Mode arrived on Android a couple of years ago and has been immensely popular. Fans of that game will be thrilled to hear that the sequel has just been launched.
Developed by highly regarded studio Telltale Games, in conjunction with Mojang, Minecraft Story Mode – Season Two brings you more of the same point and click adventure action that made the first title so successful. Protagonist Jesse returns for this all-new 5 part story arc and will be joined by returning characters plus plenty of new ones, too.
As before, you’ll have to pay for each episode via an IAP, and that’s after forking out $4.49 (£4.19) in the first place, so playing the game won’t be cheap. Luckily, you can get 10% off the first episode for a limited time, so hurry up and download it now to make use of that. A list of compatible phones and GPUs can be found on the Play Store listing, so be sure to check that before you buy the game.
Here’s the trailer to whet your appetite:
Reviews on the Play Store have been positive so far, but it’s hard to know if they’re mostly biased super fans or not. Let us know what you think about it in the comments.
After an extended eight-episode Season One, the cast of Minecraft: Story Mode returns in a brand-new adventure. Story Mode’s selectable hero Jesse, having saved the world from the Witherstorm in the first five episodes, is now the leader and de facto mayor of Beacontown. In Beacontown, intrepid builders craft their homes into the most creative shapes and forms imaginable and Jesse stands at its head. The only problem is Jesse and his authority as the “greatest hero ever” is all that keeps the town running smoothly.
Welcome to your doom.
The same is true for the rest of Jesse’s cohort from the first season, who have all settled into their roles as the New Order of the Stone. Axel presides over Boom Town, Olivia is the head teacher in Redstonia, and Lukas is the best-selling author of the New Order’s adventures. When the last adventuring member of the crew, Petra, invites everyone on a job, only Jesse takes time out of his busy schedule to answer the call.
Jesse probably shouldn’t have bothered through, as the job ends up with an ancient gauntlet stuck on Jesse’s hand and a giant portal spitting out charged Creepers under Boomtown. The journey to close the portal will take players from the neighboring town of Champion City to an ancient temple on the far edges of the known world map, deep under ocean.
While I enjoyed this episode overall, that’s mostly down to the characters involved, not the story itself. There’s a feeling that things just sort of happen here, but stepping back and thinking about it, that’s because of a major divergence in the story. There’s a whole section involving Champion City the feels like it just drops the main story completely. Everything improves once you get to the underwater temple, but until then it doesn’t necessarily feel like the story is heading in one direction.
The larger themes of the first season of Story Mode came in two flavors. The first was “You can’t do it without the help of your friends,” and the second was “Don’t meet your heroes.” Those themes carry over to Season Two whole cloth. Most of this is focused around Petra this time, her attempts to find her own place away from the team end in failure and her hero, at least in my playthrough, doesn’t quite live up to the hype. When it comes to these themes, Season Two just feels like it picks up right where the early part of Season One left off, which is a bit different from how Telltale handled The Walking Dead.
Weep for a fallen comrade.
That’s fine though. This isn’t the Walking Dead, it’s Minecraft. The stakes are low; it’s more about the light-hearted humor and Minecraft community jokes. When Jesse and Petra try to cover the portal they’ve unearthed, their first attempt involves simply covering the hole with dirt, like any Minecraft player would. When you find what remains of one of Jack’s original adventuring pals, you see Jack crying over a pile of inventory, not a body. This is an adventure for the whole family; it’s here to make you chuckle more than make you ponder ethical dilemmas.
Minecraft: Story Mode looks to have been updated with Telltale’s newer engine, meaning the graphics look better and he environments are more expansive. One of the things I enjoy about Story Mode is how the blocky Minecraft presentation actually papers over the weaknesses of the Telltale engine, which is the sparse details on the characters and their environments. Telltale Games have to be ported to wide variety of platforms and that level of detail is one of the things that goes first. In Minecraft though, it’s all blocks! This seemingly saves up resources to play around and there are some scenes, like Beacontown and the Temple, that look great here.
The developers have also revamped a few mechanical aspects of Minecraft: Story Mode. Quick-time events comprise most of the action, but there’s a whole new combat system, with movement, dodging, and a stamina meter. Crafting via crafting tables returns in Season Two, but there’s also one section where you get to freeform build with a list of materials. As a Minecraft fan, I found that kind of fun and hope to see more of it integrated into the game’s puzzles in the future.
Until the cliffhanger ending, Episode One of Minecraft: Story Mode – Season Two feels like a complete tale. This continues on from the latter half of the first season, which was a series of done-in-one episodes with distinct adventures. I felt satisfied when everything wrapped up, but it’s clear the ideas here are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of Jesse’s journey to solve this problem. I get the feeling that we’ve only scratched the surface of this Minecraft universe, so I want to see more. I want to know about how this world came to be, I want to see all the place Telltale has crafted to fill the place out. I just hope future episodes retain a strong focus on the main journey.
Episode One of Minecraft: Story Mode – Season Two draws from both halves of Season One. The episode feels like a complete journey on its own, but it also points towards a larger, grander story. Some of your cast favorites are incognito and the pacing grinds to a halt in one section, but Minecraft: Story Mode – Season Two is still off to an enjoyable start.
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Pixelmon, the Pokemon mod for Minecraft, is ending development after a request from The Pokemon Company.
In a forum post titled “It’s Been A Gréat Ride,” the Pixelmon development team bid its players a fond farewell.
“We have had a great time making this mod and creating such a wonderful community but after a request from the Pokémon company we will be shutting our doors,” reads the post. “I’m sorry for the disappointment this will cause but let’s remember all the great times we had playing Pixelmon, discussing Pokémon, making awesome things inside this mod and everything else that we’ve done.”
Pixelmon was an impressive mod which let you capture and play with Pokemon inside Minecraft, and you could even battle other players. The extremely popular mod has been around for several years, but it is only recently that The Pokemon Company decided enough was enough.
It’s been 30 years since Disney debuted its animated series DuckTales, about the adventures of Duckburg’s trillionaire Scrooge McDuck, his grandnephews Huey, Dewey and Louie, and his nephew Donald. And while fans, many of whom now have kids of their own, still have a warm place in their heart for the series, Disney XD is starting from scratch as it reboots DuckTales on Aug. 12, with a marketing campaign that targets favorite kids platforms like Minecraft and Angry Birds in order to hook a new generation.
“They don’t have the nostalgia for the DuckTales brand,” said Marc Buhaj, svp, programming and gm, Disney XD, of the network’s core audience of children age 6-11. “A basic goal of us at Disney XD is to ensure that our content is on the most relevant platforms. However, we’re also conscious that there had to be an organic desire and need for audiences on those platforms to take your content. And that doesn’t always happen.”
But few series would be as organic a fit for Angry Birds as DuckTales is. “One could argue that the original Angry Bird might be Donald,” said Buhaj.
From Aug. 3-12, the characters will be incorporated into Rovio’s main Angry Birds game—with a targeted audience of kids in the XD demo— as a “branded spell” that greets players and explains their mission: to help Donald Duck retrieve Scrooge’s stolen gold from the piggies. In the game, Donald will sling coins at the pigs and make gold coins rain down on the screen. Then, normal gameplay will resume.
“The integration exemplifies branded content, since our ducks seamlessly fit into the Angry Birds universe, it just made sense. A really natural extension,” said Buhaj.
The team took a similar approach to Minecraft. In September, Minecraft users can play on an integrated Quackburg server and explore the world of Duckburg, where DuckTales is set. “We’ve got all of the significant geographic locations of Duckburg in Quackburg. It’s all the places you’ll recognize, and also some new environments,” said Buhaj.
One likely highlight for Quackburg users: “I think Scrooge’s money bin is a place that a lot of us would head to, to swim in gold coins,” said Buhaj. “You have a universe in Duckburg that fans enjoy exploring. We couldn’t do that with every property that we have, nor would be try.”
While its rare for companies to use Angry Birds and particularly Minecraft as part of their marketing, “it all comes down to having IP that people want to work with and works for their brands as well” said Buhaj.
Ahead of the launch, Disney rolled out a series of short-form YouTube videos to introduce audiences to the characters, like this clip from Donald’s birthday, which debuted last month.
For Disney, the short-form videos are part of a “content ecosystem” in which stories of various sizes are created simultaneously for multiple platforms. “Rather than being an add-on that gets produced at the end, we launched with six, 30-45 second shorts that really introduce characters to the audience, to that young audience that didn’t know the Ducks,” said Buhaj.
Between August and October, Disney will roll out several themed games in the Disney XD and Disney Channel apps to drive more interest in the series. DuckTales: Duckburg Quest, which will launch with the Aug. 12 premiere, is an open adventure game in which players can play as one of the main characters and explore Duckburg or take on frequent troublemakers the Beagle Boys.
In the game Crash n’ Dash, which will debut later this year, users can play as DuckTales’ chauffeur and pilot Launchpad McQuack and go behind the wheel of several vehicles. Ultimately, said Buhaj, “I’m hoping that with the heritage behind this, there might be interest in a bigger game.”
While much of the campaign is focused on the core demo, some of the marketing elements will appeal to older fans. The DuckTales: All Ducked Out avatar creator, which came out last month, allows viewers to create their own personalized cartoon duck character. Last week, the Disney XD app added DuckTales: Bill Me!, a Snapchat-like filter in which viewers can take a selfie with their favorite DuckTales character and personalize it.
“We want our audiences talking back to us, and sharing their love of IP when they’re engaged with everyone else. So the more toolkits that we can drop off to audiences of all ages, I think is always positive,” said Buhaj.
DuckTales will launch on with an hour-long premiere Aug. 12 as part of a 24-hour event on Disney XP—repeating the one-hour premiere 24 times—which the network has never done before. “This series is a special one,” said Buhaj. The launch will also include the Disney XD app, Disney XD VOD. Regular-sized episodes will begin airing on Saturday, Sept. 23.
Director Jon Watts has revealed what he believes is the only acceptable flaw in Spider-Man: Homecoming, citing the ferry scene having an unrealistic portrayal of the current operations of the Staten Island Ferry. The movie has finally swung into the theaters and so far it is proving to be worth all the wait and hype, earning a certified fresh Rotten Tomato score. It’s also doing very well in terms of box office, on track to rake in over $100 million in its opening weekend.
Initially debuting in last year’s Captain America: Civil War, Tom Holland has now fully dived into the bigger world of the MCU with his first standalone film. Despite all the talk about Homecoming nailing its coming-of-age tone mingled with some comic book-y tropes, though, Watts is the first to come out and share what he believes is the big thing they missed the mark in terms of its on-screen depiction.
In an interview with EW, the director has cited the Staten Island ferry action piece where they took the creative liberty to tweak some elements to make sure that the scene fits the movie’s narrative:
“The only real flaw is that [in our movie] there are cars on the ferry, and there haven’t been cars allowed since the ’90s. So I’ll declare that in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they never had these rules.”
Fans are sure to be very forgiving of Watts’ point as Homecoming makes up for it with so much attention to detail on other aspects of the setting. The movie’s Queens looks and feels like it is the real New York; There’s graffiti-laden buildings (with name scribblers of Spider-Man comic book artists), the local bodega cat named Murph plus Queens-native rock band Ramones featuring in the movie’s soundtrack.
While Spider-Man may have joined the bigger MCU, Homecoming is arguably is the most contained film of the character thus far. The set pieces are very localized with the majority of the film grounded in Queens further driving the point of the wall-crawler being the “friendly neighborhood superhero.”
This will likely be carried over to the character’s next standalone film due in 2019 as it seems like Marvel is looking to have the ongoing trilogy all set in during Peter’s high school life; meaning after he finishes up saving the world in Avengers: Infinity War and its yet-to-be-titled sequel, he will eventually come back to proceed with life as a normal kid.
The ongoing filming for Avengers: Infinity War is nearing its end. Production for the Marvel film, initially planned as the first chapter in a two-part epic, has been going on for roughly six months now in Atlanta, Georgia beginning in January with frequent breaks for scheduling and location changes. The film will pit all of Marvel Cinematic Universe’s heroes, thus far, against Mad Titan Thanos (Josh Brolin) who endeavors to collect all Infinity Gems.
In the last couple of weeks, various photos teasing fans from the set of the film have hit the internet. From Science Bros selfies with Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo who plays Iron Man/ Tony Stark and Bruce Banner/Hulk to The Russo Brothers (Joe and Anthony) spending some time in Doctor Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum and a wrecked New York cab prop, fans are always on the lookout on what other teases what we can get from the closed-off set. And if the tip holds true, we may have to wait a couple more weeks before we are treated for another photo sneak-peak again.
The nugget of information comes from Atlanta Filming – the Twitter account that tracks production developments and star citing in the city where a lot of movies and TV shows are shooting. According to them, principal photography for Infinity War is almost done with just a handful of actors left in the area to finish their respective parts. Production is expected to officially wrap up on July 14th with its direct sequel, the yet-to-be-titled Avengers 4 set to start work on the 27th.
Pretty much everyone is wrapped for Avengers until part 2 starts July 27 th.
With cumulative film boasting a massive cast, it is interesting to know who among the reported over 60 stars are still in Atlanta shooting. We know that Tom Holland, who plays Peter Parker aka Spider-Man, and RDJ are currently not in the area since the two are busy promoting Spider-Man: Homecomingin new York. Last week after he debuted the trailer for his upcoming film, Marshall, Chadwick Boseman, who takes on the role of Black Panther, revealed that he is scheduled to be back in the city to continue filming.
Interestingly, we have not really spotted any of Steve Rogers/Captain America’s (Chris Evans) crew in the set of Infinity War. No social media selfies and or any other indication that Evans and the rest of his squad from Captain America: Civil War although it has been confirmed that most, if not all of them, are going to be a part of Avengers 3. To be fair, however, there were just a handful of actor photos that came out of social media despite the fact that the Russos posted a photo of a vacant lot full of trailers – presumably owned by the film’s actors, a couple of weeks ago.
Originally, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers 4 would be shot simultaneously. Eventually, that was changed to the movies going to be filmed back-to-back instead. On top of the main base camp for the project in Atlanta, location shoots were also held in Edinburgh, Glasgow and the Scottish Highlands, as well as in Durham Cathedral in England. A scheduled New York shoot is also expected to take place sometime in the summer.
