Nintendo has confirmed that Minecraft Wii U Edition will undergo Nintendo Network maintenance this week.
That will see network services within the popular sandbox game temporarily become unavailable between 4.50 – 6.30am BST on Tuesday 21st June.
There is no given indication as to why the maintenance has been scheduled, but we’re sure that it is nothing more than some background tinkering to improve online play.
Minecraft Wii U Edition most recently added the Super Mario Mash-up Pack, which introduced new skins, a Super Mario-themed pre-made world, and a set of Super Mario-themed music and item textures.
Looking for some new apps to help make your everyday phone use even more efficient? Or do you just want to have a bit of fun on your phone this weekend? We’ve got you covered on both fronts with our latest Five to Try column, which spotlights some new and updated Android options in the Play Store.
Evie is an interesting pick, as it shakes up the usual Android launcher approach by building the interface around an intelligent universal search bar, while Dango is designed to get you the contextual emoji and GIFs you need during conversations. Meanwhile, Minecraft: Pocket Edition got a huge update this week with dedicated servers and wider cross-platform play, while _PRISM is an alluring puzzler and Toca Life: Vacation is a perfect pick for the kids.
Evie’s home screen search bar taps not only into your local apps, but also info, maps, and services from the web.
Tired of hunting around your phone for the right app or service to complete a task? Evie could help: it’s a new home screen launcher built around a search bar. Start typing in a query, such as the name of an app, restaurant, movie, or nearby hotspot, and it’ll serve up options not only from your device but also the web, Yelp, and other services.
And from there, it’s even more useful. You can tap on a restaurant listing, for example, and have one-tap access to the correct app for placing a delivery order, as well as the ability to make a reservation or beckon an Uber or Lyft driver (with a cost estimate to boot). Search can often be siloed to just point you at apps or search within a single app, but Evie seems to bridge the gap and impresses as an all-in-one option for varying needs. If you spend far too much time digging through menus, it’s worth a look.
This week’s E3 gaming convention might have been mostly about big console and PC games, but even the years-old Minecraft took center stage for some big news of its own: Pocket Edition on Android now has cross-platform multiplayer that lets players link up over Xbox Live to play with iOS, Windows 10, and Gear VR players. And there’s another big feature in this week’s update—dubbed “The Friendly Update”—as the game now has support for dedicated servers.
Want to play online with one friend—or up to 10? Mojang’s Realms feature lets you pay a monthly fee for access to a server that continues on even when you’re not there, letting you create persistent worlds to share with friends. It’s $4/month for two total players or $8/month for up to 10 in the same space, although there’s a free month-long trial available for the larger plan.
Like Evie up top, Dango is an app designed to speed up everyday use of your phone… albeit in a very different way. See, Dango is an artificially intelligent app built to help pull up the emoji, animated GIFs, and stickers you need at any given moment. Once installed, it puts a little pink face in any chat or messaging above the keyboard; as you type, it reads the context of your message and suggests an ideal emoji to fit your note.
Tap the pink icon and you’ll see a wider range of suggestions, including several emoji, pop culture GIFs based on mood, and more. Better yet, Dango doesn’t just suggest images based on your in-progress messages, but also the ones sent your way, gaining context from conversation. If you’re a heavy GIF and emoji user, it could save precious seconds with every single missive.
Looks just like the pineapple-man I met on my last vacation…
Toca Boca is one of the premier developers for ad-free, kid-friendly apps, and its latest offering is perfectly primed for the summer school break. Released this week, Toca Life: Vacation ($3) drops you onto a tropical island resort, letting you choose from an array of characters and interact all around the locale, including at the hotel, beach, and even the airport.
Your cartoonish avatar can leap on the bed, x-ray a suitcase, fly an airplane, wander the boardwalk, and take on all sorts of other appropriately-themed activities. Toca Life: Vacation isn’t heavy on complex interactions, nor are there extensive games to play; rather, it’s a colorful and kid-centric way to have a little tropical fun wherever you are, and hopefully spur a little creativity in the process. This might look totally confusing, but it makes sense once you start rotating the shape and touching the symbols.
Thanks to their multitouch screens, phones and tablets are ideal for the kind of puzzle games where you must push, pull, rotate, and otherwise manipulate objects. That’s why The Room trilogy has been so successful, and also why _PRISM ($3) might turn your head this week. It doesn’t have the spooky atmosphere or narrative threads of the former series, instead putting a mystical, serene spin on the act of solving these faux-physical brainteasers.
You’ll draw slide glyphs into place, rotate and shift icons, and hunt around each geometric shape to find the next input needed to expand the puzzle to its full size, with a mysterious and and colorful aesthetic throughout. _PRISM isn’t terribly long, promising about an hour’s worth of gameplay on average, but it’s well-designed, nicely presented, and should be a treat for fans of brainy-yet-tactile challenges.
It’s been quite a while since Minecraft was a PC game. It’s on just about every platform you can imagine nowadays. One difference between the PC platform and every other platform out there, though, is the extraordinary modability of the former. While none of the countless mods created for Minecraft to this point have been officially supported, you can do all kinds of things to the game with user-created content.
Because none of those mods are supported, though, and because they’re made using reverse-engineered or extracted code, any update to the game can render the mods useless. Players end up playing years-old versions of the game just to keep their mods working, the devs say. I’ve done exactly that, so I know, at least anecdotally, that that’s accurate.
That’s exactly what the Minecraft team at Microsoft is looking to change with the new Add Ons initiative.
On top of working to let different platforms play together, as they’re already working on with the Windows 10 and mobile platforms, the team wants to let players make their games almost unrecognizable with custom worlds, tilesets, and monster behaviors. If you want to make chickens flammable and explosive, that’s definitely a thing you can do. You an make zombies behave like rabbits, right down to eating and mating. You could, as they showed, do a whole-world conversion and be playing in a city with aliens.
The plan is for these mods to eventually work on all platforms, including typically closed systems like consoles and iOS, explained senior producer James Webster in a hands-off preview at E3.
So how do you get in there and start modding?
What the team has done is make all the swappable parts of the game visible to the player in the form of text and image files. The text files, built in a format called JSON (Java Script Object Notation), look pretty intimidating at first, but looking for a few more seconds reveals that a lot of what’s in there is incredibly simple. A Creeper’s speed is set to 0.2. Crank that up to 1.0 to make creepers not just startling but downright terrifying. Save the the file and reload the mod pack and you’ll see creepers move with a new zest for life.
I expect that, in this age of YouTube tutorials, even the younger players will figure this system out in short order and start doing some absolutely wild stuff with this new access.
The idea behind making these add ons official is to make them secure and future-proof, meaning that you can’t break the game with these mods and they’ll work with all future versions of the game, so that you can upgrade when patches come out without fear.
The whole initiative seems very community-focused, and Webster and his team have a lot of faith in the community. They’re not worried about creating apps to assist with modding because they know their players will do that for them in short order. For example, I’m waiting for a mod that lets you paint textures directly onto the models, rather than using the somewhat confusing texture image files that look, as Webster described, a bit like taking the wrapping off a gift and laying it out flat.
Minecraft is one of the biggest communities out there, but the variety of platforms and the obsoletion of mods through upgrades have both done a lot to fragment the community. Letting platforms play and mod together will help to reunify that community and give one of the biggest games out there and even longer life.
According to Jay Ong, Marvel’s vice president of games, Insomniac’s Spider-Man game is just the beginning for Marvel’s ambitious plan to bring its superheroes to consoles.
“When I joined Marvel two years ago, I came in with a mandate to usher in a new era for Marvel Games,” Ong told Polygon in an interview. “We have a treasure trove of the best superhero characters on earth. What can we do with this to create truly epic games?
“Is [Spider-Man] a signal of things to come? Oh, yes. Absolutely. And we can’t wait to tell the world about it.”
Over the past few years, Marvel Games’ output has been primarily on mobile (Avengers Academy, Contest of Champions, Future Fight), on PC (Marvel Heroes) and for Disney Infinity and Lego games. Marvel fans haven’t had their own Batman: Arkham equivalent. But with multiple Marvel console games in development, it sounds like that’s changing.
Ong said there was a lot about Marvel Games’ plans for consoles that he couldn’t talk about. There are existing partnerships with Telltale Games, Sony Interactive Entertainment and Warner Bros.’ TT Games to make titles based on Marvel’s properties, but he indicated there’s a lot more in the works, some of which we’ll hear more about later this year.
Marvel wants to work with the best game developers in the business, Ong said, teams that share the company’s passion for its heroes and villains. But it’s being choosy about who it works with, and which teams work on which properties.
“One of the things we really focus on in terms of our new strategy is that we all believe that great games drive the brand and great games are what our fans really deserve,” Ong said. “The question is, ‘How we can get there?’ The thing we landed on is to be really selective with who we partner with. Extremely selective. Right now I would say that out of every 10 opportunities we look at, we maybe do one.”
Ong said Marvel Games has a set of criteria as it looks to work with publishers and developers.
“What we look at first and foremost is the talent level of partner,” he said. “Are they world class in building the games we’re talking about? They have to have world-class talent. They have to be able to invest the resources to make that talent sing. Equally important is, do they have passion for the IP they’re working on? Do they share the same ambition? Do they love the character? We look for passion, that comes through in the first 30 seconds.
“One of our mantras is authenticity; it’s easy to make a game with Spider-Man on the label, but it’s much harder to make it truly authentic in a way that reflects Peter Parker, the character.” Insomniac Games and Spider-Man creative director Bryan Intihar, Ong said, embody that mantra.
When publisher Activision was in charge of developing and publishing Spider-Man games, those titles were often tied to the release of movies or annual publishing schedules. The quality of those games varied, and while they were often successful commercially, Ong indicated that Marvel Games doesn’t want to push games to market just to coincide with a theatrical release. (The upcoming Spider-Man game is “wholly original” and unrelated to 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, the next Marvel feature film starring the web-slinger.)
“We are absolutely obsessed about [quality],” Ong said. “That is our North Star. We always say ‘Great is not good enough. We’re going for truly epic.'”
Ong said that if a future Marvel Games title lines up with the release of a Marvel Studios movie, great, but “in this modern day and age, that model doesn’t work anymore.”
“Things like [games] you cannot under-resource,” he said. “You can’t not give the development time … to do justice to the game. We think, ‘How do we make the game better? How do we help our partners make the game better?'”
It’s not yet clear when Marvel, Sony and Insomniac’s Spider-Man game — or Telltale’s unnamed Marvel game, which Ong says will delight fans — will be released. But those titles represent a new course for Marvel Games.
“Building these franchises, and building these characters [at Marvel Games], this is that first big milestone from this team,” Ong said. “This is a huge ambitious project.”
The official Minecraft game has been recently released for Windows 10 users, but it is still being marked as “Edition Beta: on the Store. Now the game has received a pretty important update, which adds a couple of new features.
The new update allows players to start creating with basic redstone components, explore new desert temples, collect four types of cute, fluffy rabbits, spruce up dwellings with five new door types, download new biome settler character skins and much more. Here’s how the official changelog looks like:
What’s New in Version 0.13.0 Basic Redstone Circuits, including Redstone Wire, the first set of Redstone Producers (Daylight Sensors, Pressure Plates, Tripwire Hooks, and more), and the first set of Redstone Consumers (activator rails, note blocks, TNT, Trapdoors, and more). The rest of the Redstone functionality is right around the corner…stay tuned. Desert Temples! But maybe stay off the roof…can’t say we didn’t warn you. Keep zombies out with Spruce, Birch, Jungle, Acacia, and Dark Oak doors. Cute fluffy crop-eating bunnies! Biome Settlers Pack, with new skins from the Desert, Tundra & Forest.
The game is available for a price of $6.99 along with other inside-app purchase, so if you’re interested, go ahead and download it. And if you’re a Windows Minecraft gamer, here are some other stories that you might be interested in.
Microsoft has recently released an update for its Windows 10 Movies & TV app, bringing a couple of useful features especially for desktop users. Let’s have a look at which these are and whether they matter or not. When it announced that it’s going to rebrand the Xbox Music app to Groove Music, Microsoft also talked about the new Movies & TV app in Windows 10. And the first important update has started rolling out for the service.
Movies & TV App for Windows 10 gets new features
Microsoft representative Ellen Kilbourne said that the app has received the following updates:
During playback, you can double-click or use the ESC key to toggle in and out of full-screen mode
Extras that come with bundles won’t flood your collection – they are now listed on the detail page of the main title in the bundle
Those who are members of the Windows Insider program are being further asked to provide feedback on this app, as it allows Microsoft to see what’s wrong and what works well.
So, what’s your take so far on the app, do you like or do you think there are still many features that have to be deployed? Leave your comment below and let us know.
