[This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Gamasutra and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource GamesPress.]
A festival celebrating one of the most successful video games will help North East parents to keep their youngsters safe online.
Nethermined – an unofficial event around the game Minecraft – will be held in Newcastle for the third time on Feb 11-12 at Northumbria University Students’ Union.
And along with giving fans of the game the opportunity to be involved in a wide range of activities including playing Minecraft, meeting some of the top YouTube gamers and taking part in workshops, special sessions have also been put in place for parents.
A special Parents Zone has been set up as part of this year’s event, where parents can get valuable tips about protecting their children who play games online, as well as learning more about their youngsters’ favourite games.
Organiser Michelle Poller, who set up the festival three years ago for her daughter who was too young to go to official Minecraft events on her own, added that Nethermined also has a strong educational value.
“It’s not just about playing games for fun,” said Michelle, from Newcastle.
“Minecraft is now widely recognised as a virtual reality educational tool and we have brought in a number of experts, including IT Educator of the year 2015, Joel Mills, who will be showcasing the way virtual reality can be used in education.
“We are hoping that this will also attract schools from across the region who should find it extremely useful.”
To allow more people to attend organisers have also now released a family ticket for £60 which can be used by two adults and two children, or one adult and three children.
Meet Snowbox, Another Minecraft Server You Can Be a Part Of
The title of this post makes it seem like Snowbox just arrived into the Minecraft server scene. That’s quite the contrary as the server has been around for five years and counting. They just celebrated their fifth-year anniversary this past February. As with any other server, you want to know what makes them special enough to want to join in on the fun. Well, here are a few reasons:
They have players from different parts of the world. This helps for a number of reasons. First, you can make a new friend from another country. Second, you can feel more comfortable knowing someone speaks the same language as you.
They are on version 11 as of this writing. The new version of course has new features including a Lobby Spawn World which provides access to the new worlds part of the update. Other new features include a Members Creative World and two SandBox Worlds where one features a natural landscape allowing players to build castles.
Minecraft servers are generally for those who want to play in multiplayer mode. While you can absolutely build worlds by yourself, there’s a certain fun factor when you get to play with others. This way, you can team up in creating a world with features you’re all interested in.
While an online server does allow you to play Minecraft with others, there’s a catch: the version of your game should match the one on the server. So if you want to join in on the fun, make sure your game’s version matches theirs.
Minecraft has come out with a couple of changes recently which surely delighted their dedicated fan base. And while you can always enjoy solo play, why not change things up a bit and give Snowbox a go?
It is undeniable that Minecraft has become a very popular game which prompted millions of gamers to play the game. Minecraft which is developed at every platform will soon be available in Apple TV. The good news was highly appreciated by Mac users as the announcement was made public just last week.
Apple CEO Tim Cook released the statement in the confidence that Apple will be bringing bigger games into its top box. Minecraft will soon join Apple’s 8,000 apps and games on both consoles and mobile, Engadget reports. It is reported that Minecraft will be soon be accessible by the end of this year.
Minecraft was developed by Microsoft’s Mojang, and to incorporate Minecraft into the Apple TV is a great milestone for the company. This will not be another pocket version of the game, but it will be released specifically as Apple TV edition, Techcrunch reports.
Although Apple will incorporate the same code base, Apple users will be excited to know that there will be new features that will be present in the Apple edition, which will be different from other versions. With the entry of Minecraft, Apple is willing to invest on more appealing games for its users.
Although there are no further announcements on what to expect on the Minecraft Apple version, Apple gamers may possibly want to purchase a third party controller to maximize playing experience, Forbes reports.
In the meantime, avid Minecraft players will have to wait for more updates.
Most Marvel movies open like Robert Downey Jr.’s stand-up routine in “Iron Man” before it goes south. They deliver quips and silky come-hither nonsense, only to end up like a big green monster stuck on rewind: “Hulk smash!” again and again, ad infinitum. In between start and finish, there are moments of levity and discovery in the machined product, but too often you can’t see the movie for Marvel’s action plan. Its latest, the giddily enjoyable “Doctor Strange,” is part of Marvel’s strategy for world domination, yet it’s also so visually transfixing, so beautiful and nimble that you may even briefly forget the brand.
You don’t need to know Dr. Strange to know his story. A tale of hubris — with foolish pride and an inevitable fall — it opens in contemporary New York, where Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), is flying high as a supersurgeon. After a crippling accident, he abandons his old life (partly embodied by Rachel McAdams, dewy and funny) for a grand exploit, traveling simultaneously into his soul and to the misterioso Far East. He meets leaders and fellow travelers, studies books and unlocks secrets, in time becoming a superhero with magical powers, a dubious goatee and a flirty cape that dries his tears.
Dr. Strange first popped out of the glorious head of Steve Ditko, the comic-book visionary who brought him to life with Stan Lee (a pairing best known for Spider-Man). Dr. Strange’s travels east evoke the inner and outer magical mystery tours of the 1960s, summoning visions of head-tripping and “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” In a, well, yes, strange bit of timing, Dr. Strange appeared in 1963, around the time Harvard fired Timothy Leary and a colleague for conducting experiments with hallucinogens. Five years later, in Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” the Merry Prankster Ken Kesey was downing acid and absorbed in “the plunging purple Steve Ditko shadows of Dr. Strange.”
“Doctor Strange” tethers its plunging purples, acid greens and altered states to a hero’s journey with its call to adventure, its mentor, its allies and its enemies. After his crisis, Dr. Strange lands in Nepal, where he meets a guide (Chiwetel Ejiofor, as brooding and sincere as Hamlet). There, he studies the way of the hero with the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton), a Celtic sorcerer, who in the comics emerged from the Himalayas and the West’s long fascination with, and appropriation of, Eastern mysticism. (The screenwriter C. Robert Cargill has said that some of the changes involving the sorcerer, originally from Tibet, stemmed from concerns that depictions of Tibetans might anger China, a movie market powerhouse.)
Dr. Strange’s voyage of self-discovery is as old as the ancients and as familiar as Christopher Nolan’s 2005 “Batman Begins,” where men become near-gods while training amid hazy, low-key lighting. And just as Mr. Nolan borrows from the original Dr. Strange, this “Doctor Strange” borrows from Mr. Nolan. It owes a conspicuous debt to his delirious 2010 fantasy, “Inception,” and that movie’s vision of a city folding in on itself. In “Doctor Strange,” the director Scott Derrickson and his crew push the medium’s plasticity further, creating spaces that bend, splinter and multiply. A wall folds open like a spreading hand fan while cityscapes fragment into whirring, shifting fractal forms.
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Tilda Swinton and Chiwetel Ejiofor in “Doctor Strange.”Credit Jay Maidment/Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
These impossible visions at times evoke the work of M. C. Escher, who used perspective to destabilize otherwise realistic images. Elsewhere, the movie’s pinging-ponging characters seem caught in one of Rube Goldberg’s mischievous machines, like the witty chase in which Dr. Strange runs atop a platform while an enemy runs below him upside down, transformed into a gravity-defying doppelgänger. And, as with the dreamscapes in “Inception,” the special effects in “Doctor Strange” serve beauty and meaning rather than the grimly tedious destruction that drains energy out of most contemporary superhero movies. Here, you remember the wit, not the rubble.
The space-and-time warping and mirrored realities in “Doctor Strange” are a blast. They’re inventive enough that they awaken wonder, provoking that delicious question: How did they do that? At the same time, Mr. Derrickson resists the temptation to loiter. Drawn-out set pieces have become endemic in effects-driven vehicles and can stop a movie dead as filmmakers show off their cool toys (and budget) and ignore everything else, the story and restive audience included. In the modern-era superhero movie, this kind of grandstanding has nearly assumed the level of a genre prerequisite, especially in finales that never seem to end, but end and end and end (then die).
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Everyone wants to rule the world: Mads Mikkelsen, center, and some villainous pals in “Doctor Strange.”Credit Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Mr. Cumberbatch’s affable screen presence works up a strong, steady counterbeat to his character’s narcissism. As is the case when he plays characters like Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Cumberbatch comes across in this movie as at once supremely capable (it’s easy to accept him as a neurosurgeon) and more than a little goofy, with the kind of lopsided beauty and spring-loaded physicality that seem ready-made for silly faces and walks. Dr. Strange’s arrogance ruins his career, but Mr. Derrickson makes sure that it doesn’t weigh down the story. The character’s conceit is a mask that’s always in danger of slipping, which complicates his heroism with moments of bluffing, comedy and doubt.
Mr. Derrickson does a lot right, including with his lineup of strong actors (the cast also includes Benedict Wong and Mads Mikkelsen) who hold your attention even as the ground shifts below their feet. They help elevate the more generic beats in “Doctor Strange” because, for all the phantasmagoria and time-skipping, there is also much by the book, including the vaguely Christ-like, fallen and risen savior. The movie’s more lysergic sections are followed with carefully aligned narrative bricks and mortar and sometimes sealed with a quip, as if to reassure you that there’s nothing too far out about any of this. That’s hardly unexpected, and it also scarcely matters because when a good fantasy fiction like this opens that door of perception called imagination it’s a total trip.
“Doctor Strange” is rated PG-13 (parents strongly cautioned) for supernatural violence. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes.
Meet Count Olaf in the New ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ Teaser
The first teaser trailer for Netflix’s upcoming adaptation of “A Series of Unfortunate Events” was all build-up, promising “cruel whimsy and whimsical cruelty ” to come. Now, another teaser, featuring footage from the actual series, in finally here, and it certainly delivers on that promise.
The short clip gives viewers a brief synopsis of the story, which focuses on the three orphaned Baudelaire siblings, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, who are sent to live with their mysterious uncle, Count Olaf (Neil Patrick Harris). Unfortunately for the kids — and the word “unfortunate” will almost certainly pop up again and again in this series — Olaf is a cruel, greedy man, whose only aim is to swindle the children out of their parents’ inheritance.
Olaf proves to be a formidable foe for the Baudelaires, described by others as “a vile, terrible person” and “a thief and a murderer.” Thankfully, the kids can more than hold their own against their uncle, and band together to outsmart him at every turn, while also working to solve their the mystery behind their parents’ death.
The eight-episode series is set to debut on Netflix on January 13.
The best part about Minecraft is the ability to express and create. Mojang’s sandbox has been used for some pretty impressive builds such as the Kingdom of Galekin that took over five years to build and is still going. Even sports fans can dive into the blocky world and give their support through creativity.
Sam is only 11 years old, and in Minecraft, he is a master architect. He is also a big fan of the CelticFootball Club from Glasgow and proved by building up their home turf in the video ground. The 3D tour of the stadium moves through the tunnel and welcomes the player with bright green field and seats. The build is even complete with a 5-1 score mocking Celtics rivals, the Rangers, from earlier in the season.
It was a creation made specifically for #BuildItScotland, an initiative to introduce children to new technology and ways to recreate monuments and landmarks from Scotland. Maybe we’ll see some other fun builds from the hashtag, but Sam’s Celtic Park in Minecraft scores major points with us!
