by Stone Marshall | Jan 2, 2015 | Minecraft News |
There is going to be a new way for gamers to explore the world of Minecraft soon as Mojang have revealed a Minecraft: Story Mode is in development. The adventure series is being created by TellTale Games and the first of the episodes will make its way out in 2015 for he Xbox, PlayStation and the PC.
The Minecraft Story Mode is going to be an original and new story that will depend on the choice of the player. The game isn’t going to have Steve as the lead character. Mojang said that the game is going to be cool. It won’t rely on players owning Minecraft and the Minecraft community is helping, though how we are not sure about.
Along with the Minecraft Story mode game, there is also going to be a movie based around Minecraft. More details are to be released early 2015.
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by Stone Marshall | Dec 30, 2014 | Minecraft News |
Not too long ago, this game made headlines due to its developer Mojang’s recent $2.5 billion acquisition by Microsoft. That’s way more than the price of recent acquisitions like Facebook’s Instagram takeover ($1 billion) and Yahoo’s Tumblr ($1.1 billion). For many over here, it came as a shock because a lot of people in Bangladesh are actually almost completely unaware of Minecraft.
WHAT IS MINECRAFT?
It’s a sandbox game. And it’s just that. You get to do and create whatever you want. Ever wanted to make a replica of your own house but with a 24/7 supply of electricity? Now you can with Minecraft. It’s like Lego for adults who can’t afford Lego. A bunch of survival elements can be thrown in. These involve Creepers which creep up on you and explode. There’s an abundance of spiders, skeletons and fish which try to kill you. Except you kill them and harvest their bones and string to build your castle on their dead bodies. Minecraft is what would happen if you were thrown in the middle of Rangpur with nothing except your bare hands to build civilisation. And if you had the work ethic of 10,000 Egyptian slaves to go with it. Unlike Terraria, which is Minecraft’s 2D action-adventure cousin of the same genre, Minecraft does not have any quests.
WHY IT’S WORTH THE PRICE TAG
According to Satya Nadella, “If you talk about STEM* education, the best way to introduce anyone to STEM or get their curiosity going on, it’s Minecraft.” But there are more factors at work over here. All over the world, kids love Minecraft. A few weeks back, I saw a post in DSD about a woman asking what platform (Xbone, PS4, PC) would be best for her eight-year-old daughter’s requests for a console to play Minecraft. This was after the kid wanted to move out of the Android version of Minecraft on her tablet. When I was eight, the maximum creativity I could express on a computer was on MS Paint and now we have kids everywhere building houses with Minecraft. For Microsoft, owning Minecraft is a statement—it’s about owning the childhood of a
generation.
THE EXTENT OF MINECRAFT’S CREATIVITY
A group of players made a computer inside Minecraft. So to speak, you can create a computer inside a world inside a computer. Although, the Minecraft computer is very basic and can only load 16 lines of code into its RAM, it’s still a feat. Now, for all the Game of Thrones fans out there, a group made an exact replica of King’s Landing. The amount of detail put into the map is insane. A lot of gamers will think that with enough people, an exact replica of Dhaka is very much possible or maybe something less ambitious like your school classroom just as you remember it. It’ll be even more fun if you can get your friends to do it along with you. For some, recreating places from memories can be an extremely rewarding pastime.
MINECRAFT IN BANGLADESH
It took me quite some to actually figure out where the Bangladeshi players are. After doing several searches on Facebook, I finally found the 50 member Facebook group “Minecrafters BD” where I was welcomed quite warmly. Here is a community that has been struggling to play together the video game they love. Their dedication is one to admire and it’s just the thing that often breeds great gaming communities. Every now and then, one of the members host private servers on their PCs but that just doesn’t cut it when you’re aiming for a large community. According to one of the members, Istiak Al Nur Niloy, “It’s nearly impossible to set up a server for 24/7 uptime let alone moderate the server to keep everything in check. We as the hosts have no admin power and no one can keep their PC running 24/7. The servers that we are hosting irregularly at the moment are enough for the community but if a time comes that when we need a 24/7 server we can always rent servers from providers like Atrinos. For now the dream of a 24/7 dedicated server sounds a bit far-fetched.”
GRAPHICS?
There’s another problem when it comes to attracting newer players who’re into flashy games to Minecraft: the graphics of the game are pretty blocky and old-school. But to that, Siam Shafiq, who hosted a Minecrafters BD server at the time, said “Overall with some time and dedication I believe Minecraft can take off in Bangladesh but only if the people judge the game by its gameplay, not its graphics. Based in a 3D world of cubes it’s only normal to have that sort of retro graphics but that’s the entire point.” But then again, if you treat each block like pixels are on a screen, a lot of detail CAN be added to the game if one is patient with the amount of blocks taken.
While Minecraft is taking off globally, very little is done over here in Bangladesh. Some of the players urge the ISPs to host a dedicated server like they do for CoD and Counter-Strike but until the community grows enough to turn the extremely stiff heads of Bangladeshi ISPs, there’s little that can be done; unless you are like Ayaan Manzur from Minecrafters BD and his friends who rent a server for Tk. 400 every month from Singapore.
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by Stone Marshall | Dec 30, 2014 | Minecraft News |
Notch now owns a $70 million Beverly Hills mansion, but we bet he’d rather live in this swank Minecraft recreation of the property…or maybe not. We can’t say what he’d really like.
Last week, Minecraft creator Notch bought a $70 million Beverly Hills mansion before Jay-Z and Beyonce could snag the property. We all stared in awe at the extravagance, but now we can stare at awe at this Minecraft recreation of the home. Notch’s life has started to come full circle; pretty soon his entire life will be inside the matrix.
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by Stone Marshall | Dec 29, 2014 | Minecraft News |
Minecraft has been making a lot of news this year with the game debuting on a number of consoles. One of the biggest news involved Mojang studio being bought by Microsoft.
The game’s 1.6.4 update was recently released exclusively on the Xbox One and Xbox 360.
This move did not surprise many as Microsoft now owns the game and will naturally look to provide updates to its own consoles first.
Earlier this year, the game debuted on next generation consoles such as the PS4 and Xbox One. A subsequent update titled “Horses” was then reported on the way. Then last week it was announced that Mojang, the studio responsible for producing the game, had launched a collaboration with Telltale Games to create a whole new game titled “Minecraft: Story Mode.”
“Story Mode” will follow the formula of other games released by Telltale such as “Game of Thrones: Iron From Ice” and “Walking Dead.” The games concentrate more on solving puzzles and decision making, which will in turn influence how events in the game play out.
As for the 1.6.4 update, it comes with a new “Tutorial World” where players can learn more about the game’s existing and new features. As for the update’s main feature, it involves the addition of horses which players can tame and ride. Additionally the horses can use their own armor.
The update also brings new enemies for the players in the forms of Witches, Wither Skeletons and Bats. Fireworks also make an appearance in this update and they are programmed in such a way that they are launched at certain times during the day.
Cinemablend says Mojang plans to release the 1.6.4 update for Playstation consoles in the U.S. shortly and it could even happen within the next few weeks. Those who have Playstation consoles in Europe have already received the update.
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by Stone Marshall | Dec 29, 2014 | Minecraft News |
At long last, kids ruled in 2014. Books aimed at them have often figured in the top 10 of the all-year sales chart for printed books, but in the respective heydays of JK Rowling, Stephenie (Twilight) Meyer and Suzanne (The Hunger Games) Collins the rest of the elite group usually consisted of grown-up titles and there was always a chance that one such mega-seller – by Dan Brown, say, or EL James – would pip them to the top spot.
This year, in contrast, seven of the top tier books including the No 1 – by John Green, David Walliams and Jeff Kinney, plus four Minecraft manuals – are for children or young adults and an eighth, Guinness World Records, is predominantly aimed at them.
The Minecraft books (2, 5, 6, 7) are 80-page guides to a hugely successful video game in which players either build structures or battle enemies; launched in Sweden in 2009, it passed 100 million registered users in February this year. Published by Egmont (the UK arm of a Danish media group, the name possibly signalling Beethovenian ambitions), the four titles spearheading this new Viking invasion achieved combined sales of around 1,700,000.
What’s fascinating about this is that there should be a market for video game spin-off books at all, let alone such a stunning one. There’s no shortage of Minecraft tutorials on YouTube, in its own online domain, but rather reassuringly young gamers en masse evidently felt a need for a hardback handbook opened next to their PCs – a demand reflecting the relative robustness of manuals of all types and children’s books, compared to other genres whose print sales and revenue have been hit harder by readers’ inexorable (though possibly slowing) flight to ebooks.
Being a hit on screen first, or as well, is not a phenomenon confined to the Egmont quartet. Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid existed first in an online version before becoming a book. Walliams was a TV writer and actor long before taking up children’s fiction. Green has a sideline as a video blogger, or vlogger; whereas that’s Alfie Deyes’s (29) day job, with his jokey book as a spin-off.
If you took the Minecraft books away, 2014’s top 10 would look very similar to 2013’s: the latter also included Walliams’s and Kinney’s latest offerings, Guinness World Records and Dan Brown’s Inferno (then No 2, now No 8). The Fault in Our Stars, Green’s 2012 love story narrated by a teenager with cancer – widely seen as a YA book, though not officially classified as one – was at No 17 a year ago, and owes its spectacular subsequent ascent to the screen adaptation. Similarly, Gone Girl, also originally published in 2012, is at No 4 two and a half years later (it was No 3 in 2013) thanks to David Fincher’s film. Its author Gillian Flynn is the only woman to make the top 10.
Just like YouTube idols transformed into writers, reminiscing celebrities capitalise on their screen fame (usually on television) to win publishing deals; but the 2014 list confirms that the public long ago got out of the habit of seeing the resulting books as ideal Christmas presents. Besides the late Lynda Bellingham’s autobiography (12), two sports books, by Guy Martin (32) and Roy Keane (37), are the only hardback memoirs in the top 100. Yet publishers still seem in denial about the once-mighty subgenre’s slump, shelling out for much-hyped autumn offerings from John Cleese, Stephen Fry, John Lydon, Graham Norton and others that all flopped.
More surprising is the decline of cookery titles, which until recently gave crime and children’s fiction a good fight for the highest positions. The genre’s talisman Jamie Oliver, who up to 2012 routinely occupied a top 10 spot and for several years running was the Christmas-week No 1, now languishes at No 23. Mary Berry is ahead of him at No 13, but you’d expect her to be higher, given The Great British Bake Off’s vast audience.
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The Hairy Bikers (47) and Tom Kerridge (77) are well below their 2013 positions, while other TV cooks who once seemed set for annual hits – Lorraine Pascale, Nigel Slater, Paul Hollywood – are nowhere to be seen. It appears counterintuitively possible that, while Minecraft addicts are turning to print manuals, their parents are turning away from them, increasingly getting their recipes online rather than from food-stained Jamie or Nigella recipe books on the kitchen table.
With memoirs and cookbooks both ailing, this has been another annus horribilis for non-fiction: ever fewer “serious” factual titles do well enough to make the top 100 – in an especially feeble 2014 showing, only Bill Bryson’s One Summer (54) really qualifies besides Alan Johnson’s Orwell prize-winner, This Boy – while at the other end of the spectrum once-bankable genres are losing their commercial potency. Both less serious and less sellable, then: not a good combination.
Non-fiction’s woes have allowed fiction to surge into the positions vacated, notably the places just below the top 10 where celebrity cooks and comedians formerly roamed in packs. Here can be found, not just commercial crowd-pleasers, but literary titles feted by critics and award judges – though some are missing.
There is, for example, no sign of the winners of the Folio, Baileys Women’s fiction or Man Booker prizes (George Saunders, Eimear McBride and Richard Flanagan, respectively), or indeed the 2013 Booker winner (Eleanor Catton) in paperback; all were probably seen as too forbidding. Yet the Costa awards did much better, with Kate Atkinson’s novel prizewinner (11) and Nathan Filer’s first novel and overall winner (26) both well placed. Shoppers also picked out two attractive losing finalists, Donna Tartt (14) from the Baileys shortlist and Karen Joy Fowler (42) from the Booker last six.
Amid these garlanded titles can also be found Girl Online (28), by (or rather “by”, as it was ghost-written) Zoe Sugg, AKA Zoella, another YouTube vlogger. The book, and Penguin’s handling of its authorship, have been much criticised but it pulled off something remarkable in being the third highest placed 2014 novel; outselling the likes of John Grisham, James Patterson, Sophie Kinsella and Jodi Picoult, even though these authors’ efforts were paperbacks available for most of the year and hers was a pricier late-November hardback.
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