The world’s most beloved speedrunning marathon kicks off today (Jan. 7) at 11:30am ET on Twitch.

Games Done Quick (GDQ) is a speedrunning event that only happens twice per year. Thousands of viewers watch their favorite speedrunners destroy some of their beloved games and, in turn, donate millions of dollars to charity. The runners come from all corners of the globe, and it’s easily the world’s biggest speedrunning event.

This year, AGDQ will be benefiting the Prevent Cancer Foundation, an organization that helps to detect and prevent cancer before it spreads.

JHobz is kicking off the event this year with the popular speedgame Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy. The event will then continue for the next seven days without any stops as speedrunners attempt to complete 155 games as fast as possible.

Fans can also support AGDQ this year by buying merchandise from either Fangamer or TheYetee. A percentage of all sales will go towards the Prevent Cancer Foundation.

Now that AGDQ is here, it’s time to rally the speedrunning community to help a great cause.

AGDQ 2018 kicks off today

The Astronauts’ narrative adventure The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is heading to Xbox One with support for Xbox One X. It’ll feature 4K support to bolster the game in the graphical department for Xbox One X players, but it’ll also include a new mode to play through.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter follows a paranormal investigator who receives a letter from a 12-year-old boy named Ethan Carter, whose disappearance he ends up investigating, which spirals into something even darker and more dangerous than he could ever have imagined.

The new version of the game, which was originally released in 2014, will include Free Roam mode, which has been requested by fans looking for ways to explore further than what the game allows. This way you can take in all the sights of the world of Red Creek Valley without having to worry about progressing in the game or what the story will bring next. This way the previous limits imposed on players are removed to make things easier to experience.

The game is up for preorder right now on Xbox One, but it doesn’t launch fully until Jan. 19 with full 4K support. You can go ahead and play the game right now if you’re curious, however, as it’s available on both PC and PlayStation 4 right now.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is coming to Xbox One with 4K support and new mode

Capcom held a livestream from Japan today with a new trailer and additional info about the upcoming Monster Hunter World divulged.

The game is currently scheduled for launch on Jan. 26, and it’s looking especially awesome. The new trailer shows off several of the Elder Dragons from the series, with some new additions and those included from earlier iterations of the series.

You can check out the flame king dragon Teostra with dangerous fires, steel dragon Kushala Daora with an entire body covered in metal plates, the rock-eating Dodogama, and several other dragons that can mess with your hunter if you’re not careful. All are extremely formidable opponents.

There’s also a final beta before release, which Monster Hunter fans on PlayStation 4 will be able to take part in from Jan. 19 to 22. It’ll feature a battle with Nergigante, an enormous and fearsome creature featured in the game’s marketing materials.

Capcom also discussed some additional details about Monster Hunter World’s post-launch content, confirming that there will indeed be major, free updates to the game as well as regular content injections. There’s a major title update planned for spring 2018, which will add the monster Deviljho as well.

If you’re looking to sink your teeth into life as a monster hunter, there isn’t much longer to wait. It looks like it’s certainly going to be worth holding tight for.

Capcom confirms new Monster Hunter World beta and post-launch content updates

The God of War series could leave Norse mythology behind in future installments.

Minecraft and Norse mythology may seem like two very different things, but the two are coming together with the new Norse Mythology Mash-Up Pack, a new DLC release that brings together some familiar pieces together with the blocky goodness of Minecraft.

The mash-up pack includes locations like Hel, the Great Hall, and Yggdrasil from throughout the annals of Norse mythology. You can even dress up as important figures from the stories themselves, like the very same ones you may remember reading about in one of your history classes (the parts you fell asleep during.)

For instance you can dress up as Thor and Odin, or even Heimdall and Sif. There are a few creatures up for grabs as well to complete the package. Enemies get several interesting skins as well, transforming familiar baddies into antagonists based in Norse mythology.

There are plenty of large, fanciful environments found in the expansion as well that really look as though they could transport you, even temporarily, to a faraway place and time. You can see it all in action in the official trailer, and you can download the DLC pack right now across all Minecraft platforms.

If you like reskinning Minecraft with lots of different looks, be on the lookout for a new Festive Mash-Up DLC pack, which is releasing later this week just in time for the holidays. It will transform your favorite world with candy canes, Santa hats, reindeer, and more!

Minecraft welcomes new Norse Mythology DLC pack

Nearly six months ago, the first episode of Minecraft: Story Mode – Season Two released. Jesse’s story carried on from the first season as he/she met new friends, went on exciting new adventures and came face to face with strong, fearless enemies. It was all about to come to a head in this final episode, so just how would Jesse and friends defeat the Admin once and for all?

How exactly do you defeat the Admin?

We left Jesse and friends at the end of the last episode as they’d managed to make their way back to Beacontown. After sneaking into the town through some tunnels, we then get a real look at what has happened to Beacontown and see what it had been turned into by the Admin posing as Jesse. Even in block form, the town still manages to look run down and almost abandoned, a shell of what it used to be like. This is reflected in the especially dullen look of this episode, with the darkened skies, colours and streets.

Once inside Beacontown, your aim is to get to the primary terminal to enter the word of passage. In order to get there, you are given a number of different choices along the way that may help or hinder you depending on what you pick. The game offers you lots of chances to make decisions that, whilst they may not affect the ultimate outcome of the episode, will determine how the other characters in the game react to you. This gives you the choice of whether you can trust old and new friends with what you decide to do.

Aside from these smaller choices scattered about the episode, you also have some big decisions to make when it gets to the end of the episode too. No matter what you’ve done earlier in the episode or the season, these choices stand alone and can be made however you see fit. The ultimate last decision you make will decide how the episode ends, and either choice rounds things off nicely while still leaving the story open for potentially more episodes, as the first season ended up having.

No-one ever said it was going to be easy

This episode is another that is quite short compared to other episodes in the season, but it still ends up being largely focused on conversation. For the rest of the time, you have the expected bit of wandering about, combined with a bit of crafting and also a little bit of puzzle solving. A puzzle towards the end of the episode might cause you a little bit of a problem as you aren’t really given much help, but this offers a nice change from the conversation filling the rest of the episode.

With this being the finale, you’d be expecting some kind of boss fight to occur and you’d be right. The boss fight does not disappoint for the large part, taking place across a number of different locations with the boss having a handful of different forms as well. It’s an impressive boss fight and while the game does tease you for a little while that there may not be any fight at all, it is an enjoyable one that only has one outcome.

Another thing that this episode does well is to tie up some of the loose ends from previous episodes. Old friends that have made appearances in other episodes reappear and allow their stories to tie up, and people that you may have lost or left behind along the way also have their stories finished off. This is a nice touch and the episode perfectly brings everything together, which makes it feel like the ideal finale it is aiming to be.

Finally, the six achievements of the episode will unlock with natural progression through the story, offering the expected 200 gamerscore upon completion.

Summary

“Episode 5 – Above and Beyond” is an appropriate end to another good Telltale season. The episode does a brilliant job of bringing everything together and tying up a number of loose ends across the season. The episode is scattered with important choices and either choice at the end offers closure for the gamer. Aside from the episode feeling a little short, there’s not a lot wrong here. It may not be non-stop action, or blow you completely away, but it is a solid end to an enjoyable season.

Minecraft: Story Mode – Season Two Episode 5 Review

People can step back in time and experience what it would have been like to live in Roman Exeter thanks to virtual reality and the video game Minecraft.

The city’s rich history – and the treasures at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery – are now part of the hugely popular and addictive Minecraft game.

A new map shows what Exeter’s Roman fortress could have looked like and is available to download for free while playing Minecraft. This joins another map, also inspired by RAMM’s collections , designed to represent 18th-century Exeter when the city walls still stood.

Minecraft is like a form of virtual Lego and has fans of all ages. Players build towns or cities together in virtual groups and complete buildings by selecting blocks with different textures and uses. They can also download existing buildings, or whole conurbations and change them and add to them.

This map is produced as part of the A Place in Time Project, a partnership between the universities of Exeter and Reading, Exeter City Council and Cotswold Archaeology. The Minecraft maps include recent discoveries and new interpretations of archaeological evidence found in the 1970s and 80s.

The Roman map shows the barracks and military buildings of the Roman settlement in what is now Exeter, and includes links to Roman objects excavated in Exeter. Players can use these to find out more about the objects in the game.

RAMM worked with digital producer Adam Clarke AKA Wizard Keen and blockworks to produce the maps. The first is based on the Hedgeland model, which was constructed between 1817 and 1824 by Caleb Hedgeland and is one of the earliest surviving models of any town in Britain. The model is the only surviving record of many of the city’s buildings and streets. It is on permanent display in RAMM’s Making History gallery.

Sofia Romualdo, a researcher at the University of Exeter, who is working on the project, said: “The beauty of these new maps is they allow people to explore real places in different ways that are fun and educational.”

You can now take a stroll around Roman Exeter on Minecraft

“‘Mom, you are crouching again!”

“I can’t help it!” I said. “I can’t figure out how to stand up straight.”

Sure enough, my character was tramping across the green block landscape slumped forward like a sulky teen who just broke up with her boyfriend.

We got an Xbox for Christmas, the goal, of course, being to insinuate ourselves into the lives of our children so that even their virtual reality is not safe from their parents’ antics.

“Just get in the house and stop wandering off!” advised my 10-year-old, who was teaching me how to play Minecraft. By “teaching,” I mean yelling at me continually as I stabbed at buttons.

But I didn’t go inside the house he had built for us. I was feeling rather full of myself, having just slaughtered a pig with a few swipes of my bare, block hands, earning my household pork chops. I was now off to chop down trees for an addition.

There was only one problem.

“I can’t figure out how to put this pork chop down,” I lamented.

My boy was too busy killing a spider with glowing red eyes to help me, so I just went with it.

I chopped down that tree with a pork chop. Who knew the other white meat could be so versatile?

“I got us more wood for the house!” I announced.

I only got a grunt. It was starting to get dark in our virtual world, and my son was killing another spider.

I moved across the screen, getting stuck in holes, stuck under tree branches, falling off cliffs.

The first-person vantage point of the game, like all modern offerings, messes with me. I grew up on a steady diet of old-school Nintendo, not this herky, jerky Blair Witch Project-meets-Luigi madness. Still, I wasn’t ready to give up. I wanted to make my boy proud, and that’s when I saw the llama. Eager to get the sort of accolades earned by my pig slaughter, I chased down the llama, and by “chased” I mean I stumbled and crouched across the screen until the llama was eventually cornered by some square blocks of earth. Then I began mowing down the animal with my pork chop.

The llama, however, was not going down without a fight. It kicked me and made angry llama noises. But I kept at it and eventually I killed that llama.

“I killed a llama!” I chirped. “What do I get for killing a llama?!”

“Ummm, you get nothing,” said my kid, giving me a look that said, “what kind of sicko kills a llama?”

“OK, now we have standards?” I said. “That’s the line we don’t cross? Llamas? It is not like it was a unicorn or something.”

I sulked back to the house to call it a night.

I jumped into bed and pushed a button, destroying the bed in one swipe.

“What did you do?” he yelled.

“I don’t know … I just pushed a button. I was trying to … ” I said, looking down at the controller that had, no lie, 11 buttons! Plus two joysticks and an up-down-side-to-side tossed in for good measure. “I am sorry … I …”

I stopped talking and walked to the corner with my pork chop.

“I am just going to crouch over here till morning.”

COLUMN: Minecraft mom

Alice Maz was part of a small group of players who came to have near-total mastery over the internal economy of a popular Minecraft; Maz describes how her early fascination with the mechanics of complex multiplayer games carried over into an interest in economics and games, and that let her become a virtuoso player, and brilliant thinker, about games and economics.

Maz’s long, fascinating essay about her business ventures in Minecraft are a potted lesson in economics, one that shows where financial engineering actually does something useful (providing liquidity, matching supply and demand) and the places where it becomes nothing more than a predatory drag on the “real economy” of people making amazing things in Minecraft.

Back when I was working on For the Win, my YA novel about gold farming, I read pretty much every book and academic paper on the subject of games and economics, and Maz’s essay is among the best pieces of writing on the subject I’ve encountered. It’s especially interesting because all the economic activities are aimed at dominating a server, but Maz never talks about whether, how, or if any of the in-game wealth can be converted to cash money, giving the whole thing a kind of abstract clarity that is sometimes obfuscated in the literature on in-game economics.

Diamonds being not the most valuable but certainly the most valued item in the game, both for their utility and their price stability, the server was littered with buy chests for them. These were mostly of the fling and a prayer sort, offering prices low enough that anyone selling to them was a noob or a fool. But not so low that I couldn’t sell them Charlotte’s. I bought from her all I could afford, bankrupted every single person who had a buy chest at any price, then went back for more. Buy chests in the market shops, scattered on the roadsides, nestled in secluded towns no one remembered the names of, I hit them all. If you were buying diamonds at the bottom of the ocean, I would find you and take all of your money.

At the same time, I dropped my sell price in the market to 16M and did pretty good business for a few weeks. I had the advantage of one of the two best plots there were, the other belonging to Emma. (This I’d gotten via inside knowledge that Zel’s to-be partner was shuttering his store and gifting the plot to a friend. I offered to swap my plot as the gift, help with the deconstruction process, and advise on pricing in the Emporium in exchange, thus getting the prized location without it ever going up for sale.) QuickShop provided a console command to show the closest shop selling an item, and these two plots, though behind hedge walls and not immediately visible, were the closest as the crow flies to the market’s warp-in point. So anyone using the command–and this was most people, traipsing through the market looking for deals being a rare activity mostly limited to speculators–got directed to me or Emma for anything either of us sold.

This all made me a lot of money. I drove a portion of profits into bolstering my diamond and beacon reserves, bought basically any building material I thought I’d ever need in bulk, and still watched my marble balance grow. Up til the diamond bonanza, I’d been making money on a dozen different side hustles. A bit here, a bit there, doing better than most, but regardless the day-in day-out of working the market took up the majority of my time on the game. That made me rich; this is what made me wealthy.

But soon 16M became 14M, and 14M became 12M. A few people started to notice Charlotte’s store, and she restocked faster than I, or anyone, could recoup enough to buy out. Mostly though, it was clear to everyone the price of diamond was falling, even if they had no idea why. I diversified into selling enchanted diamond equipment of all types, priced just so that I could break even on the enchant and move the component diamonds at the same price I sold them for raw. A few of the buy chest people I’d tanked tried recovering some of their money by putting up at a loss the diamonds I’d sold them, but they still couldn’t move product faster than a trickle. Eventually even Charlotte had to cut her prices to keep selling. It was bad.

The internal economics of a popular Minecraft server are an object lesson in everything great and terrible about markets

A post by a Reddit user has revealed some new information about Destiny 2’s playerbase and how much it has dropped off since the game launched in September.

The user, named “stevetheimpact,” used Bungie’s application programming interface from its web site to find when players last logged into the game. The chart below shows a steady decline in players since launch, with it recently reaching an all-time low at the end of 2017.
Image via u/stevetheimpact – Full size

According to stevetheimpact, the total player count dropped from around 1.3 million at launch to just over 321,000 at the end of year, which is a drop of 75.37 percent.

The percentages were even higher on each individual platform, too. PlayStation 4 player count dropped from 712,431 to 158,523 for a drop of 77.74 percent, Xbox One dropped from 594,987 to 127,428 for a total of 78.58 percent, and the PC player count dropped from 194,607 at launch on Oct. 24 to 35,892 at the end of the year, which is a drop of a whopping 81.55 percent.

The chart comes with warnings, though, as stevetheimpact says they were not able to account for players returning for the Curse of Osiris DLC in December, but the final endpoint shows the correct player dropoff regardless.

While this information is not official or entirely accurate, the Bungie API does not lie when it comes to data. In 2018, fans of the series will be looking for reasons to boot the game back up again.

This chart shows how much Destiny 2’s playerbase has dropped off since launch