by Stone Marshall | Dec 8, 2015 | Minecraft News |
So, Nintendo is making a big announcement of some sort on Monday, Dec. 7. We do not know the nature of this announcement, but it’s supposed to be a big one, according to Nintendo World Report and Nintendo Life. And really, there are a few possibilities that stand out—announcements we’ve been waiting for. While it could be anything, four choices stand out. Let’s take a look.
Big Nintendo Announcement: Four Possibilities For What It Could Be
Pokémon Z
Nintendo is teasing a big announcement on Monday. Separately, the Japanese magazine CoroCoro, which often spills big Pokémon news, is promising a big Pokémon-based announcement in December. A big Nintendo announcement… a big Pokémon announcement… it all adds up! And we’ve been waiting for news of more Pokémon for a while now.
More Super Smash Bros DLC
Supposedly, Super Smash Bros still has at least one character slot available for DLC. And that’s the kind of announcement that would immediately capture the full attention of the Internet, as it always has in the past. Personally, I don’t think this is super likely just yet. Cloud Strife was revealed less than a month ago and isn’t even out yet. Why would Nintendo announce more Super Smash Bros DLC just yet? It could happen, but I wouldn’t count on it.
Nintendo NX News
Nintendo has promised that it will unveil the Nintendo NX in 2016 and no earlier. But more details about the system keep leaking out. First, the WSJ reported that it will in fact be a console and handheld hybrid. Next, we learned that the company is, in fact, going to distance itself from the Wii name. Who knows what other leaks will come out before Nintendo unveils the system? … unless they get ahead of the game and pop the big surprise on us early. But I wouldn’t count on this either. No, I think the announcement is going to be Pokémon… unless, of course, it’s…
Minecraft Wii U
Ah, Minecraft Wii U, a perennial subject of late. Tales told that you’d come out in November, based on a leaked PEGI rating, but it was not to be. Still, the game seems to have been rated, and we had rumors that it was being developed for a long time, even before Minecraft Story Mode was announced for Wii U.
Pokémon or Minecraft, Minecraft or Pokémon? The big announcement could really be either. If it is Minecraft, don’t be surprised if the Minecraft Wii U release date ends up being… right away. Nintendo has hinted it has extra games in store for 2015 that haven’t been announced, and a surprise Minecraft release date would really help liven things up here at the end of the year. And if it’s Pokémon Z instead? Either way, we’d be pretty happy.
by Stone Marshall | Dec 7, 2015 | Minecraft News |
Nintendo is gearing up to make an announcement very soon. Fans should keep an eye out for news sometime on Monday.
Damon Baker, Nintendo of America’s senior manager of licensing and marketing, shared a tease about what’s to come during Nintendo World Report’s podcast in support of Child’s Play. He said earlier today:
“Speaking of announcements, I wish I could tell you guys, but stay tuned for Monday. Monday there’s going to be something… something happening on Monday. It’s going to be big.”
Baker closed off his comments by stating: “Stay tuned, it’s going to be good.”
As far as what announcement is planned, it could be anything. Baker has been known for his involvement with indies so something in that area is one possibility. Maybe it’ll be news about the Smash Bros. presentation airing this month. Ultimately, we really don’t know!
Some sort of Nintendo announcement coming on Monday
by Stone Marshall | Dec 7, 2015 | Minecraft News |
Riot released huge updates for League of Legends this week aiming ultimately to reduce game-time and to accelerate the speed of matches. Instead of expecting things to feel different, players were instead more surprised by the minions update.
According to
Kotaku, Riot has not previously made any comment on the impending changes to the League of Legends minions in its announcement for the 2016 pre-season. The news only appeared this week when the lengthy 5.22 patch notes were released. The Summoner’s Rift, the main map in League of Legends and the one that all pro tournament games are played on, Riot dropped a few bits of info about how they’re making changes on the turrets and minion waves to try and shorten the overall pace of League games.
Turrets are the team’s defensive structures, hindering enemy minions and champions from getting into the player’s base and destroying everything. Riot’s Patrick “Scarizard” Scarborough expressed that the turrets are now “more vulnerable to enemy damage” at the beginning of the match. As long as the turrets are taken out quickly, the turrets will be easier to take out. The team that’s able to do so early on will be able to increase their forward momentum more rapidly than they could in the 2015 season.
The minions, on the other hand, are given a big performance boost, although situational. The team with a level advantage over their opponents are awarded combat bonuses for their minions. In effect, the leading team’s minions are expected to be stronger and stronger as long as they maintain their lead. Minions are now also able to respawn fifteen seconds earlier at the beginning of the game.
A strong factor that led to these changes are the long standing issue of the online game’s long match times. Earlier comments from players were very skeptical saying that these changes may lead to a snowballing- giving a leading team more and more advantages and making it more difficult for the other team to catch up. MonteCristo, eSports analysts tweeted that although the changes are good, the minions are likely to create “brutal snowballs.”
As gamers continue to adjust to the many big changes to League of Legends, it is more likely they will soon get into the groove of things as they get attuned to the new meta.
Riot Games’ ‘League of Legends’ Minions Update Surprises Gaming Community
by Stone Marshall | Dec 6, 2015 | Minecraft News |
Minecraft players will no longer need to close their game whenever a call is coming or an urge to take a selfie occurs. Verizon Wireless, one of the largest wireless telecommunications providers in the country, developed an app that lets players create a phone that actually works inside the game.
Before this new update is released, Verizon said that even if players built a phone they wouldn’t be able to use it to call, text or take a selfie. Verizon, together with Wieden+Kennedy and BlockWorks, developed a function that gives Minecraft players the ability to browse the Internet, make video calls, and send MMs selfies to their friends by creating a selfie stick.
SethBling and CaptainSparklez, both Minecraft experts, conducted the beta test of this new Minecraft update. They showed how the phone functions during the game through video demos
“Users can open up websites, take an MMS selfie using a selfie stick, and even make a video conference call to a cell phone-all visualized within Minecraft’s standard blocky interface of course,” Verizon stated.
Verizon explained how they came up with the new changes. “In the world of Minecraft, almost everything is made of blocks. We’ve created a web application, Boxel, that translates real web pages and streaming video into blocks so they can be built on a Minecraft server in real time. Our server plugin uses Boxel-client to handle the communication between Minecraft and the real world as translated by the web application.”
The codes behind the stunts created by the game experts are posted on a special Verizon page in Github. These libraries were open-sourced so that everyone can try it out, even those who only have a little knowledge in coding.
Kelsey D. Atherton of Popular Science posted his own explanation about the new Minecraft feature. According to the post, in order to make a cellphone call, one must first plant a cell tower tree in the Minecraft’s “blocky” soil. After a few seconds, the planted tower will rise which will provide players an actual cellular service. To complete the tower, the user should just switch it on, and the Minecraft phone will then connect to the Internet.
‘Minecraft’ Updates & News: Verizon Develops an App That Lets Users Create a ‘Working’ Smartphone
by Stone Marshall | Dec 5, 2015 | Minecraft News |
A pair of new Minecraft Update 1.9 preview builds debuted this week, two weeks after the community’s last preview of the next Minecraft patch, but there isn’t all that much to get excited about in this week’s previews of Minecraft Update 1.9.
It’s been a few months, since the last time a week passed without a new preview of Minecraft Update 1.9. Thankfully, following last week’s lull in the release cycle, Mojang has returned with a pair of new Minecraft snapshots this week. Neither of this week’s preview builds consists of much more than bug fixes for issues from recent Minecraft snapshot; a fact that shouldn’t exactly come as a shock, given that Mojang is in the final stretch of its work on Minecraft Update 1.9. But fans might be happy to hear there are a handful of other gameplay tweaks in Minecraft snapshot 15w49a, too.
The first Minecraft Update 1.9 preview build of the week improves the game’s handling of thrown items, converting snowballs and thrown potions back into items if/when they become lodged in cobwebs. The first Minecraft snapshot of the week also improves door functionality, giving players a bit more control over the object’s orientation when placed. Minecraft snapshot 15w49a even features a small tweak for horses, which allows them to rotate with the player going forward.
Here are the complete patch notes for Minecraft snapshot 15w49a, via Jens Bergensten:
- Snowballs and thrown potions now turn into items when stuck in cobwebs – via
- Horses now rotate with the player
- Improved doors
- They are now placed facing left/right depending on which half of the block you click on, unless neighboring doors cause them to place a certain way -via
- Improved path finding
- Balancing tweaks
- A small feature
- MCPE derpy snow golems
- Shear normal snow golems to take their pumpkin
- Changed the /particle command
- Added a params parameter to specify particle parameters (for iconcrack_, …)
- Added a player parameter
- /playsound now supports tab-completion
- Server-known sounds are now tab-completed
- Sweep attacks now do one heart of damage
- Zombies, Zombie Pigmen, Slimes, Magma Cubes, Wither Skeletons, Spiders, Cave Spiders, Silverfishes and Endermites now fight back when hit by other mobs
- Texture changes
- Melons and glistering melons are now oriented the same way
- Health Boost and Absorption now have different icons – Screenshot
- Increased elytra wall damage
- Fixed some bugs
- Fixed items placed into beacons being lost when reloading the world – you can no longer place more than one item in a beacon, hoppers/droppers no longer feed into beacons, you drop the payment item when closing the beacon UI again
- Fixed signs, sugar canes, vines, two block high plants and cobwebs causing glitchy mob behavior
- Fixed clearing the nausea effect showing portal tint
- Fixed projectiles behavior in regard to non-solid blocks: They now ignore non-solid blocks and get “stuck” in cobwebs
- Fixed command selectors with decimals creating fake scoreboard players instead of simply failing
- Fixed players floating above saddled donkeys/mules
- Fixed lightning strikes destroying item frames, paintings, and armor stands
- Fixed endermen being able to pick up blocks behind walls
- Fixed overworld lava flowing towards unreachable drops
- Fixed undead mobs staying in shadows even while wearing stuff on their heads
- Fixed the rain texture being rendered upside down
- Fixed crop hitboxes not adjusting for growth height
- Fixed being unable to put flower pots on pistons
- Fixed blaze fireballs damaging other blazes
- Fixed tamed wolves attacking when wild wolves are hurt
- Fixed being able to place cacti under water
- Fixed trapped chests being listed under “Decoration Blocks” instead of “Redstone”
- Fixed ocelots and rabbits running from players in creative mode
- Fixed clicking on non-existing link target or deleted screenshots giving an error
- Fixed being unable to pick block on the dragon egg
- Fixed teleporting with relative x rotation above 90 affecting y rotation
- Fixed guardian beams turning green at the end of charging
- Fixed lit furnaces still being obtainable using the /give command
- Fixed multiple item textures have partially transparent pixels, causing their item models to have holes
- Fixed the shift+F3 menu remaining on server disconnect
- Fixed server resource packs not staying persistent – more info
- Fixed offhand items rendering while drawing bow (1st and 3rd person view)
- Fixed shulkers deflecting arrows from the side but not the top/arrows being glitchy when shot at the edge
- Fixed punching cake consuming one slice
- Bosses are unaffected by potion effects/tipped arrows: The Wither and the Ender Dragon will now ignore all effects
- Fixed the Infinity enchant working with tipped arrows
- Fixed levitation not affecting squids
- Fixed shulkers teleporting into other shulkers
- Fixed end cities spawning even without Generate Structures
- Fixed dead shulkers teleporting
- Fixed cauldrons getting filled with water while snowing in biomes where it only snows above a certain height
- Fixed shulkers opening into blocks
- Fixed blocks/items on mobs’ heads turning red when the mob takes damage
- Fixed pistons pushing AreaEffectClouds
- Fixed leading zeroes being omitted on dyed leather armor colour
- Fixed the drop item scoreboard objective increasing with /give
- Fixed shulker floating slightly above ground
- Fixed setblocking signs with at least one, but not all 4 lines specified putting “null” on empty lines when reloading the world: It now only accepts proper json for each line and each line has to exist, empty sign otherwise
- Fixed the librarian zombie villager robe texture sometimes being white instead of transparent, sometimes being transparent
- Fixed the shulker hitbox height while peeking
- Fixed levitating slimes moving
- Fixed slimes always moving south first
- Fixed arrows blocked by shield getting stuck above the player
- Fixed shields still displaying metadata
- Fixed the chest armor slot for AttributeModifiers being called “torso” when all other slots were consistent with their /replaceitem names
- Fixed AreaEffectCloud not working with some particles, crashing with others
- Fixed end portals generated with 12 eyes not being activated
- Fixed elytra going invisible on invisible players
- Fixed taking damage while gliding pushing you upwards
- Fixed picking block on frosted ice giving a warning
- Fixed loot table exceptions not being caught
- Fixed rain putting out fires too seldomly
- Fixed being unable to remove container minecarts with invalid loot table
- Fixed being able to place multiple end crystals in the same place
- Fixed an issue with level.dat causing the end dragon fight to fail
- Fixed villagers still not going through doors
- Fixed skeletons riding horses being unable to reach their pathfinding goal/not attacking properly
- Fixed the “Block Broken” subtitle being inaccurate
- Fixed beams from end crystals moving in the wrong direction when spawning Ender Dragon
- Fixed a mob pathing issue
- Fixed Activator Rails and Powered Rails powering each other
- Fixed some subtitles being unrelated to the sound
- Fixed slimes being slightly offset from their actual position
- Fixed silent Shulkers still producing sounds
- Fixed some of the new textures not being compressed properly
- Fixed texture variants switching on nearby block updates
- Fixed the level-up sound originating at a position in the world, not at the player position
- Fixed the baby zombie hitbox being too big, causing floating mob heads and floating Grumm/Dinnerbone baby zombies
- Fixed frost walker not working from transparent blocks
- Fixed right clicking a hoe/shovel on grass/dirt playing the wrong sound
- Fixed each cuboid part of a model rendering smooth lighting as if it were a full block, causing lighting issues on corner stairs and custom models
- Fixed NBT data for SmallFireballs being incomplete
- Fixed server-side resource packs not showing up in the resource pack list
- Fixed being unable to place blocks in marker armor stands
- Fixed zombie/skeleton/zombie pigman arms going up and down if they can’t reach you
- Fixed the enderdragon getting in boats
- Fixed villagers killed by zombies turning into baby zombie villagers/chicken jockeys
- Fixed creepers sometimes dropping gunpowder when their explosion sets off and end crystal
- Fixed being able to place end crystals inside blocks, replacing them with fire in the end
- Fixed the dragon respawn sequence not stopping when /killing the dragon
- Fixed the beam target of end crystals on obsidian pillars not updating when the ender dragon spawn sequence is stopped
- Fixed the end crystal beam appearing detached as the crystal bobs up and down
- Fixed end crystals overlapping when interrupting the dragon rebirth sequence
And here are the patch notes for Minecraft snapshot 15w49b:
- Fixed the bottom of falling sand turning black when remaining space is < 1 block
- Fixed mobs entering a cauldron never leaving the cauldron
- Fixed a crash when depleting an item stack
- Fixed a crash in worlds with double-slab blocks
- Fixed Falling Sand entities being invisible/rendering at 0,0
- Fixed the time query daytimecommand not resetting after day night cycle
- Fixed stat.openInventory whilst riding horse
- Fixed armor stands being able to have potion effects
- Fixed the End Portal teleport range being too large
Be sure to check back with iDigitalTimes.com and follow Scott on Twitter for more Minecraft coverage throughout the rest of 2015 and for as long as Mojang supports Minecraft in the years ahead.
Minecraft Update 1.9: Snapshot 15w49a, 15w49b Deliver Small Tweaks And More Bug Fixes
by Stone Marshall | Dec 4, 2015 | Minecraft News |
Listen up you little Creepers and Zombies out there. Microsoft wants to teach you how to code using Minecraft as a teacher.
On Monday, Microsoft announced a partnership with Code.org that will teach kids (and adults) the basics of computer science in an hour using Minecraft-themed lessons. Microsoft bought Mojang, the Swedish video game company behind the hit game,
for $2.5 billion last year, and wants to use the title to get the more than 100 million players around the world interested in coding.
The new Minecraft module is part of Code.org’s third annual Hour of Code, a worldwide campaign that tries to demystify code by teaching the basics of computer science in just an hour. The Hour of Code takes place during Computer Science Education Week from December 7 – 13.
Minecraft, released in 2009, has no storyline to speak of, but instead lets players create their own worlds and explore others in an infinite digital sandbox.
If users sign up for the free Hour of Code Minecraft module, they’ll learn how to use blocks of code to make Steve or Alex, the two main character skins from the game, adventure through a Minecraft world. Other modules, including some based on Star Wars, “Frozen” and other popular content, are also available on the Code.org site.
Minecraft lead developer Jens Bergensten provides the introductory video for the Minecraft module, and and other members of the Mojang team walk students through the process of building code to get their characters to achieve various goals like shearing sheep and breaking down trees into wood resources.
“A core part of our mission to empower every person on the planet is equipping youth with computational thinking and problem-solving skills to succeed in an increasingly digital world,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said a statement. “With Minecraft and Code.org, we aim to spark creativity in the next generation of innovators in a way that is natural, collaborative and fun.”
Students who choose the Microsoft module will tackle a series of 14 coding challenges, including some free play time so they can take the coding tactics they learn during the module and explore the Minecraft world with code. The Minecraft module is available for crafting now.
Microsoft and Code.org want to teach kids to code with Minecraft
