by Stone Marshall | Dec 16, 2014 | Minecraft News |
As live-action adaptations of comic book properties are currently dominating the media landscape, it’s easy to forget that there are a number of interesting video game movies in development as well. Despite the stigma attached to such films – with the quality of past video game-based movies lending credence to the involuntary cringe at the very mention of them – we’ve broken down how the future of video game adaptations could be bright.
Despite that potential, this year’s Need For Speed proved underwhelming, and many of the most promising projects (BioShock, Uncharted) are still in development or have been delayed. Meanwhile, we learned about a year ago that Warner Bros. was looking to adapt the popular “open world” game Minecraft with Night at the Museum director Shawn Levy apparently tapped to direct.
Well, Levy was indeed involved, but while making the press rounds in advance of the upcoming Night at the Museum: Secrets of the Tomb, Levy spoke with The Wall Street Journal‘s online outlet WSJ Cafe about why he ended up leaving the Minecraft adaptation and what his approach to the film would’ve been. Watch the full video above.
For anyone unfamiliar with Minecraft, it’s a game with a unique, lo-fi look and feel, wherein players have to use 3D cubes representing various elements (stone, dirt, sand, etc.) to construct anything from shelter to weapons; players will also have additional difficulties like the weather to deal with, even as monsters called “creepers” attack once night falls.
Levy provided an overview of how he got involved, saying that:
What happened, simply, is Warners asked me to develop, kind of, how could this ever be a story for a movie? Because it’s not a narrative game. And we came up with an approach that felt good to us, and I discussed it with Mojang, the game-makers who make Minecraft and they’re like, that doesn’t sound like what we want for – if we see a movie get made – we don’t know what we want but that doesn’t feel right. So I said okay, well, that feels like – that’s a movie I can envision, and so I’m not sure what happens next.
Levy went on to share that he has four movies he’s working on for 2015 and that the Minecraft film “wasn’t a right fit narratively, and so I’ve got to kind of focus on the other ones.” When asked to elaborate on what his take for such a tricky property could have been, Levy replied:
It wasn’t a comedy… I guess it had a bit of a Goonies flair, like kind of a – I’m not even allowed to speak of it as much as I have but, it was an adventure movie. And I thought it could have been a lot of fun, and fulfilled a lot of the qualities that people love about the game, but you know what, it’s not my game. They know what they’re doing and the truth is there is a long history of trying to make great movies out of games and they’re rarely done well. And so I think Mojang is still figuring out what they want. We gave it a shot and it wasn’t the right fit and these things happen.
Levy’s comments reflect the differences between adapting a comic book property and a video game – with major players DC and Marvel, the big Hollywood studios have folded those companies into their own. Game companies like Ubisoft (Assassin’s Creed) are developing their IPs internally, and it sounds like Warner Bros. has promising Minecraft‘s Mojang AB a great deal of creative control.
Still, a Minecraft movie with a Goonies feel actually sounds like something many people – gamers or not – might have been interested to see. The completely open, non-story nature of Minecraft really does allow for countless interpretations. There’s no way to guess what Mojang has in mind, but it wasn’t a presumably broad, 1980s-type adventure film.
Minecraft is still in development, with no official release date.
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by Stone Marshall | Dec 15, 2014 | Minecraft News |
Popular sandbox game Minecraft, which was only available for Android and iOS mobile devices until now, has finally made its way to Windows Phone devices.
“Starting today, you can enter the world of Minecraft from your Microsoft Lumia or other Windows Phone and turn your imagination into reality-one block at a time,” noted Adam Fraser on the Lumia Conversations blog post on Wednesday.
Mojang had announced a Windows Phone version of its hit game back in October after Microsoft’s $2.5bn purchase of both the game and studio.
The Minecraft Windows Phone version boasts every single feature found in the other mobile versions, including Survival mode, Creative mode, and multiplayer over Wi-Fi, infinite worlds, and all the usual stuff.
The popular gaming title has been downloaded 100 million times on PC and has sold more than 21 million copies on iOS and Android. It is the most popular online game on Xbox, and the top paid app for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating system in the U.S.
The game is already available for PC, Mac, Linux, Raspberry Pi, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, iOS, and Android.
Minecraft Pocket Edition can now be purchased from the Windows Phone app store for £4.99 ($6.99), the same price as the iOS and Android Pocket Editions.
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by StoneMarshall | Dec 15, 2014 | State of Stone, Stone Marshall Club |
Hi readers.
First, thank you for reading! I love writing but it’s not as much fun without readers.
Second, I decided to start writing about Flynn’s world, new books, old books, answer questions and give stuff away, here, on the Stone Marshall Club page.
My thoughts about Flynn and books will be posted here, under the State of Stone. When you are wondering where I am on the next book, check here. I’ll add notes every so often.
When you want to know about new book releases, I’ll post it here, but sign up for the email list to be notified first.
In the Stone Marshall Club there are also freebies and character pages.
Thanks for reading!
-Stone Marshall
by Stone Marshall | Dec 15, 2014 | Minecraft News |
Minecraft has finally become available in all relevant mobile phone platforms.
Mojang and Microsoft announced that the popular game’s mobile version has become available for the Windows Phone.
On Dec. 10, game developer Mojang announced that Minecraft: Pocket Edition, the mobile version of Minecraft, is now available for Windows Phone. The game is already available for Android and iOS.
“Windows phones just got significantly cooler. Now you can play Minecraft: Pocket Edition on the darn things! Hooray for Minecraft! Hooray for Windows phones! Hooray for portable gaming devices,” the company said.
Similarly, Windows announced that the game became available on Windows Phone.
“Windows Phone users can join the vast community of more than 100 million Minecraft players today with the launch of Minecraft: Pocket Edition for Windows Phone 8.1,” the announcement said.
“With a local Wi-Fi network, players can engage in multiplayer gameplay and team up with friends to explore new biomes, fight monsters, and craft infinite new worlds together,” they explained further.
Available for $6.99, the game requires the latest version of Windows Phone but, according to PC Gamer, the game’s download size of 12 megabytes should allow it to work on phones with a mere 1 gigabyte of RAM.
Since Windows purchased Mojang earlier this year for more than $2 billion, it makes sense the company would finally release a mobile version of the game.
Aside from this new release of Minecraft: Pocket Edition, there is bad news. The planned Minecraft-based movie has hit an obstacle.
Shawn Levy, slated to direct the film, as well as writers Kieran Mulroney and Michele Mulroney have left the Warner Bros. project, according to Variety.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Levy said he left over differences on the movie’s script. Mojang did not like the idea Levy envisioned, which was an adventure story with “a bit of a ‘Goonies’ flair.”
According to Variety, Warner hopes to find replacements after the new year begins.
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by Stone Marshall | Dec 13, 2014 | Minecraft News |
Your space craft touches down on the uncharted planet. In the distance, a craggy spine of mountains looms over a vast alien forest. No human has ever been here before; perhaps no one will ever come back. You are alone.
No Man’s Sky doesn’t work like other science-fiction adventures you may have played. There is no over-arching story, no grand scheme to funnel players through. Instead, it provides a vast universe filled with worlds that have been procedurally generated by computer algorithms, and it tells you to go out there and explore. You can fly your spaceship, land on any chunk of rock, get out and look around. Everything else, from here on in, is up to you.
Somehow this is counter-intuitive to expectations in 2014.
Sean Murray, co-founder of Hello Games, the tiny Guildford-based studio behind No Man’s Sky, is unrepentant about its narrative minimalism. For him, the game is about freedom and personal experience in an unknowable cosmos. “We have this galactic map, and when the game starts, the map is completely unexplored,” he says. “As people fly out, they slowly start to fill in some of the detail, but the universe is so vast that they’ll only discover a tiny amount. Everyone will have very different experiences.”
Although presented to the public on several occasions since it was revealed last year, very little is really known about No Man’s Sky. We know that it’s a persistent online universe inhabited by every player; we know participants will be able to gather resources from planets in order to buy new equipment and space craft. We know there are computer-controlled inhabitants – from creatures roaming planet surfaces to aliens piloting space craft – but nothing else is clear. Perhaps because there is nothing else. That is the point.
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“I’ve travelled quite a bit,” says Murray. “I was in the Arctic for a while, where there’s this sense of utter isolation. It’s something games just don’t do. Danger in games is always about explosions. That’s not the danger most of us experience in real life.”
What Murray laments is the way mainstream titles tend to restrict the gaming experience. “Games are obsessed with having no breathing space – they never let the player walk around and enjoy something,” he says. “With Call of Duty, it feels like they sit there with a stopwatch and if an explosion hasn’t gone off every 30 seconds, someone is fired.
“I’m numb to it. I mean, games are amazing now, they’re beautiful. But you sit and watch something that looks glorious, and hundreds of people have worked on it, and you find yourself yawning.
“Then you play something much more simple, like Amnesia, and you have so many more emotions – just because there are lulls, there is sometimes nothing, so when something does happen, it surprises you. That’s what real life is like. Anything you see enough of, just becomes normal. Games are terrible for that.”
But Murray has a theory. Since Minecraft was first released in 2011, it has engendered a new era of game design – and gamer – that is more about player experience and creativity than it is about a drip-fed narrative. Right now, the players who are in to open-ended games like Minecraft, Terraria and Day Z represent a niche – but soon they will be the mainstream.
“The kids who grew up with Minecraft will really struggle to relate to something like Assassin’s Creed,” argues Murray. “They won’t want to be that guy. When they say ‘I love games’ they don’t mean the same things that we do when we say it. The Minecraft generation has a totally different expectation. I’ve found myself intersecting with them – I’ve found myself playing those games, playing Day Z for hours and being reinvigorated. This is the kind of game we want to make.”
But these new games do not just provide players with the freedom to explore, they also offer the freedom to be creative agents in the world. As well as building houses, it means experimenting with the environment and mechanics to produce their own game experiences.
“So few games allow you to express yourself,” says Murray. “In the Call of Duty single-player story, I can’t express myself at all. They don’t want me to. They’re fighting me so hard – to the point where I just go around shooting everyone in the groin– it’s the only thing I can do to be expressive, to be funny within the game. And when you make choices in Mass effect it feels like it was agony for the designers to put that in there.
“Then suddenly, there are these other games where you’re just telling your own story. You ask a kid what they’re doing when they play Minecraft and they can’t even tell you – they’re doing dozens of things no one has told them to. They’re just playing. As a veteran gamer, you almost feel guilty doing this. Oh I’m wasting time, what have I achieved? What’s my score? Tell me Xbox! Validate what I’m doing! Legitimatise me!”
Murray is keen to stress that No Man’s Sky will provide a familiar “core experience” to players. It has space combat, it has first-person shooter action on the planets; there is a structure that will guide players toward some sort of resolution at the centre of the galaxy. There are also hints of some sort of darker threat lurking out there in space.
But everything will be more esoteric than many are used to now. The Hello Games team are all computer gaming veterans; they grew up playing weird obtuse adventures on the Commodore 64, Spectrum and Amstrad. In those days the possibilities were not always signposted for the player. It was all about discovery; you had to draw your own maps and figure things out. Minecraft has retained an element of this, on the PC at least, by not spelling out to players how everything has to be crafted. It has allowed the community to flourish through the sharing of arcane knowledge.
The plan with No Man’s Sky is to fill the game with experiences that the player will have to figure out for themselves. As Sean Murray explains: “When I play Battlefield, I actually find it really engaging; you’re in this astonishing war scenario, you have a tightness in your stomach, a tension. But then you shoot someone and you get a headshot bonus; and then it’s ‘oh of course, I’m just playing an arcade game, I’m just playing Virtual Cop again. It won’t let you let go.”
“Most of the games at E3, no YouTuber is going to play them,” says Murray. “The Last of Us is a favourite game of mine, but there is almost no point in doing a Let’s Play of that: there will be no differentiation between your playthough and mine. Did you complete it? Yes I did. Did you see the giraffe? Yes I did. That’s lovely but what’s different about games is that they’re intereractive; we shouldn’t remove that, or try to corral it and constrain it.”
For Murray, the places where mainstream games get closest to their more obtuse and demanding ancestors is in their hidden elements; their Easter eggs and secrets, the stuff put in for the real fans to discover and decipher. No Man’s Sky is that stuff stretched out again into a whole game.
“The mythology that surrounds the yeti in GTA – we’re sort of making a game that is about that,” he says. “It should appeal to the people who that appeals to. This is slightly embarrassing, but we have a whole lore, a mythology mapped out, and every design decision we make, we make it with that in mind.
“So choosing the insignia on ships or the type of architecture – if people lived on these types of planets, what kind of buildings would they have? How many different races are there? We have it all mapped up, but we won’t tell you any of it; and you probably won’t be able to figure it out.
“But if it happens that people start a wiki to map the whole thing out, that’s fantastic – that’s so much more interesting than us just trying to ram it down your throat, or having a little AI that travels around with you in your ship, telling you the name of everything. It’s not our story.”
One of the game’s trading posts, where players will be able to buy upgrades to items – and learn more about other inhabitants. “There will be consistency to the universe so you can gain some insight,” says Murray. “You’ll see that the insignia on a certain ship will match a certain space station, in a certain quadrant.”
Maybe there is no goal; maybe the experience is the destination. That will be hard for some people to accept. But perhaps there is another way to think about No Man’s Sky. While big ambitious space games like Mass Effect and Star Citizen are perhaps looking to the likes of Star Trek and Star Wars, Hello Games is more closely referencing those weird, disoptian sci-fi films of the 60s and 70s: Silent Running, Solaris, 2001 – movies that explored the surreality and mysticism of space.
“There’s a natural, almost horror element to all those films, where loneliness is something dangerous in itself,” says Murray. “That’s the feeling we want you to have all the time; that you are vulnerable and tiny in this universe.
“Then you can really lose yourself in it … just a little bit.”
No Man’s Sky is due out in 2015 on PC and PlayStation 4
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by Stone Marshall | Dec 13, 2014 | Minecraft News |
Not too long ago, we heard that Microsoft is working on a Windows Phone edition of the popular Minecraft. If you were eagerly waiting for the game to hit the Windows Phone Store, today is your lucky day. Microsoft has released Minecraft Pocket Edition for Windows Phone, but it carries a hefty $6.99 price tag.
The game is similar to the version found on iOS and Android, and features survival and creative modes, multiplayer support over a local Wi-Fi network, infinite worlds, caves, new biomes, mobs, villages and lots more.
The app description reads,
Welcome to Minecraft: Pocket Edition! Minecraft is a game about placing blocks and going on adventures. Pocket Edition includes Survival and Creative modes, multiplayer over a local Wi-Fi network, infinite worlds, caves, new biomes, mobs, villages and lots more. Craft create and explore anywhere in the world so long as you have hands spare and battery to burn. There’s never been a better time to enjoy Minecraft on the move.
Head over to the Windows Phone Store to grab the game, it costs $6.99.
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