Minecraft Can Now Do In-Game Tutorials
Visually, this Minecraft map is nothing fancy, but it does demonstrate how the game could be used as a teaching tool.
The map’s the result of a collaboration between Marc Watson, who works at Mojang, and Dragnoz, a renowned Minecraft builder. Here’s Marc explaining the goal of their map:
This map is a simple demonstration of a possible new category of Minecraft maps: guided, in-game tutorials. The map shows build progress through step by step instructions, and you can even go back to a previous step! Using a resource pack, I’ve provided voiceovers so players can walk through the build as they listen to the reasoning for that step.
Keep in mind that this is simply a jumping-off point for a new kind of idea- obviously, most of us can build a square house, but please take it a step further and create your own! Maybe you’ve got a villager UI and voiceovers like this map, but maybe you just have pressure plates and text. The idea is to have mapmakers experiment with ways to teach and inspire new groups of creators.
Sounds useful—either, for example, as a way of teaching novice builders new tricks, or giving a neat behind-the-scenes look at some more complex builds.
You can check out the map download here or, if you just want to see what a voiced Minecraft tutorial looks like, you can watch my playthrough below:
Dayshot is an image-based feature that runs every morning, showcasing some of the prettiest, funniest game-related screenshots and art we can find. Send us suggestions if you’ve got them.
‘Minecraft’ Getting Virtual Reality Treatment, Will Come To The Oculus Rift And Gear VR In 2016
Oculus revealed that the popular world-building game will be one of the first games to be made available for the Oculus Rift when it launches into the mainstream market in early 2016.
Minecraft players have long given up the hope of playing their favorite game in virtual reality when Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson ditched his early efforts to create a Minecraft version for VR.
But Microsoft, who purchased Minecraft and its developer company Mojang from Persson in September 2014, surprised everybody at Oculus Connect 2 when it announced that Minecraft Windows 10 Edition will be one of the first games that will be made available for the Oculus Rift, as well as the second-generation Samsung Gear VR, next year.
Details were sparse about the specific launch date of the headset and the game, but Minecraft will be available for download from Microsoft’s Windows 10 Store as soon as the Oculus Rift launches in the first quarter of 2016.
John Carmack, legendary creator of Doom and chief technology officer at the Facebook-owned Oculus, had been personally shipping Oculus Rift and Minecraft since early 2014, tweeting to Persson, who was still part of Mojang at the time, that all he had to do was “ship the source” and he would “make sure it runs well on you-know-what.”
Minecraft is a crucial addition to the Oculus Rift platform. While virtual reality in itself is something to look forward to, the lack of content ready for VR will not help convince mainstream consumers to purchase a new electronics device that is certain to cost a considerable sum.
“I think [Minecraft is] the single most important application that we can do for virtual reality, to make sure that we have an army of fanatic, passionate supporters that will advocate why VR is great,” Carmack said. “This is why you want to do some of it every single day. It’s part of this infinite playability that we’re currently lacking in our current set of titles. So this is a huge, huge win for me.”
With more than 70 million copies sold worldwide as of June 2015, Minecraft is the best-selling PC game to date and the third best-selling video game of all time, only behind Tetris and Wii Sports. Even if only 1 percent of all Minecraft players are interested in purchasing an Oculus Rift right away, that is still a good 700,000 customers picking up the VR headset at launch.
‘Minecraft’ Getting Virtual Reality Treatment, Will Come To The Oculus Rift And Gear VR In 2016
Here’s a Nice “Minecraft: Story Mode” Gameplay Video for you.
If you are a Minecraft: Pocket Edition fan, a Telltale Games fan, or a Telltale Games fan who plays Minecraft in between surviving the zombie apocalypse, then you are probably anxiously awaiting the upcoming Minecraft: Story Mode, Telltale’s episodic treatment of the Minecraft Universe that’s coming out October 15th. In case you don’t know anything about the game, Minecraft: Story Mode has you playing as either male or female (the first time a Minecraft game lets you do that), and you get to be the star of your own story within a Minecraft world. Now, we have the first gameplay video of the game courtesy of last weekend’s Twitchcon, and the game looks really good.
The video shows the opening few minutes of the game, so if you want to avoid spoilers, you should skip it. If you don’t mind the slight spoilers and you decide to watch the video, you’ll see how one, the world you’ll be playing in looks incredibly like Minecraft, and two, your character’s smooth graphics and animations are slightly jarring. I do like the clever touches like the inventory looking like a typical Minecraft inventory. According to the commentary, the game will be an “all-ages” adventure like the Goonies and Ghostbusters, but it will still require players to make some very difficult choices. Also, some of the choices you’ll have to make have to do with building stuff, a very interesting departure from other Telltale games. Are you looking forward to playing the game? I most definitely am.
Here’s a Nice “Minecraft: Story Mode” Gameplay Video for you.
Minecraft’s Windows 10 Edition Playable in Oculus Rift by 2016
Minecraft
Oculus Virtual Reality co-founder Palmer Luckey recently announced the Windows 10 Edition of Minecraft will soon be headed to Oculus Rift by Q1 2016.
Audiences at the second annual Oculus VR Connect 2 developer conference last Thursday were greeted by the news Minecraft Windows 10 Edition will soon be playable in Oculus Rift sometime in spring next year.
Oculus VR’s Palmer Luckey’s announcement at the company’s event in Hollywood, California also revealed the agreement between the virtual reality tech company and Microsoft to bring the game to the Oculus Rift headset before summer 2016.
The Mojang-developed sandbox video game for Windows 10 beta was recently launched in late July, and while the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset has yet to have an official release date scheduled, it is expected to be launched next spring, as well.
A Minecraft version for HoloLens was recently announced as being developed as early as January this year, and a demo was played using both the Surface Pro 3 and the augmented reality of HoloLens at a Microsoft press conference during the E3 2015 expo in June, where both devices were observed running the Minecraft Windows 10 Edition.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Microsoft, which bought Minecraft for $2.5 billion in September 2014, has chosen to extend the popular 3D cube building game to Oculus VR’s Rift platform, just as it had earlier pledged to support both Oculus and HTC Vive virtual reality technology.
For users to play the game on Oculus Rift, they will need to get a Minecraft Windows 10 Edition to explore the block world in full 3D, either in survival or creative mode. As the Windows 10 Edition supports multiplayer, users will be able to cooperatively explore, build, mine, and play in the virtual world with fellow players.
Minecraft Windows 10 Edition for Oculus Rift is expected to debut in both the Windows Store and Oculus Store in Spring 2016.
Minecraft’s Windows 10 Edition Playable in Oculus Rift by 2016
For the Hesitant Teacher: Leveraging the Power of Minecraft
Teachers who already use Minecraft in the classroom love it because of the flexibility it offers — almost any subject can be taught with a little creativity. And like other powerful learning games, well-structured Minecraft lessons give students opportunities to fail and try again, improve their skills, and participate in an immersive environment that aids retention because students can attach the academic concepts to their personal experiences within the game.
“When you are in a game, all that information in the immersive world is tied to your heart and your emotions and that becomes a very powerful retention tool,” said Garrett Zimmer, president of MineGage, a company that makes Minecraft lessons with extra programming to track progress. Zimmer became famous among Minecraft players for videos of his own play and has since turned his coding abilities and Minecraft prowess towards creating pre-made worlds and lessons for teachers to use.
Zimmer and other experienced Minecraft teachers say it’s important to manage expectations when using Minecraft in the classroom. Many students already have experience playing the game for fun, so the teacher needs to explicitly set the goals and expectations for conduct within the game at the outset. Zimmer says most kids will be so excited to be playing the game in school that they won’t mind the extra rules.
MINECRAFT IN HISTORY
John Miller has been using Minecraft to teach 7th grade history at Chalone Peaks Middle School in California for the past three years. Designing lessons in Minecraft has reinfused his teaching style with creativity and has helped his students become independent thinkers. “We’re not really teaching them to be independent,” Miller said. “So that’s what got me thinking about putting kids in a virtual world and letting them explore.”
Teachers are finding ways to use Minecraft in every subject, but in some ways the game is best suited to history because it’s so easy to download worlds other people have already made in Minecraft. Without much effort or time, a teacher can have a three-dimensional, accurate map of medieval London at his fingertips. Students can then see and experience the time and place in a new way, bringing history to life and giving them a personal stake in it.
Miller’s students are generally poor at reading and writing, so it was important for him to inject lots of literacy skills into his content teaching about medieval world history. He collaborated with Robert Walton, a former teacher and current young adult fiction writer, to write vignettes introducing each part of his curriculum. Then he’d set his students loose in Minecraft to explore a “map” that he’d downloaded from the MinecraftEDU website and customized for his purposes.
Each vignettes tells a loose story about some aspect of Dark Ages history. The quests Miller designed take the narrative further and ultimately lead students through the Minecraft map and into the next story and part of history. For example, Walton wrote a story about the first Viking raid in England, told from the Viking viewpoint. Miller had his students close-read and annotate the story to be sure they understood it. Then he set the kids loose in Minecraft to wander around the village post-raid, interacting with various characters who told them a different side of the story.
Miller asked his students to write reflections about what they’d seen and learned about each period of history. “I’ve gotten the best writing I’ve ever gotten in 21 years from kids,” Miller said. Normally he would dread reading 160 essays about the same moment in history, but because each kid wrote from his or her own perspective, each piece of writing was different. “I enjoyed it so much because every kid wrote from a different perspective, from how they saw it,” Miller said. And by the end, kids had written much more than they ever thought they could.
“Kids who were struggling to write a paragraph at the beginning of the year had written 40 pages of amazing storytelling,” Miller said.
Like many public schools, Chalone Peaks doesn’t have an art or music program. Miller has found that Minecraft has not only helped fuel a passion for history in some of his students, but it also provides a creative outlet for them. When he teaches about medieval Japan, he asks students to write Tanka poems, a precursor to the haiku usually focusing on nature of emotions. Then in Minecraft, students built paths that represented the themes of their poem. As a player moved down the path and stepped on each block a line from the poem would pop up.
“When the kids are creating these things, I’m not only seeing on the screen what they are creating, but in a way I can see their thinking,” Miller said. He plays the game with them, interacting with them there, which also allows him the time to build relationships through a medium that they like. Talking with them about what they are making and why is also a great way to assess their learning. The game also allows for differentiation – more advanced students are free to make more detailed and impressive projects.
“The creative aspect was critical to see if they really understood what the words of the poem really meant,” Miller said. Even though his students speak English, about half of them come into 7th grade writing and reading at a 3rd grade level. Writing verse is a particularly hard task for them. The middle school textbooks and primary source documents are often inaccessible to them, but Miller has found that Minecraft helps them experience the history and then participate more in constructing new knowledge about it.
Miller understands that some teachers may feel intimidated to get started with Minecraft, but he’s never regretted taking the leap. He suggests starting a Minecraft club after school to build interest and give the teacher time to familiarize herself with the game. The MinecraftEDU teacher community is also robust and generous. Most teachers freely allow downloading of worlds and lessons they’ve created and Miller often copies parts of other worlds and then positions them in his own map for a specific lesson.
“It’s surprising how much is out there and the vast majority of it is free,” Miller said. And if it doesn’t already exist, many Minecraft enthusiasts are happy to build it. That network of educators has also been an inspiration to Miller who likes having a cohort of colleagues with whom he shares ideas and gets feedback. He does note that schools need computers to run the MinecraftEDU software, not iPads or Chromebooks. But MinecraftEDU is affordable (roughly $18 per seat) and doesn’t require that a school have its own server.
MINECRAFT IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE
Minecraft might not be an obvious teaching tool for a Spanish language teacher, but Glen Irvin has found that his high school students are using language more often and in more complex ways since he started using the game. He was worried teenagers would find Minecraft stupid, but was blown away by its success when he gave it a try.
“There’s nothing built for second language teachers, so I had to come up with some scenarios myself,” Irvin said. For example, in a unit about the language of business, Irvin asked students to collect resources like lumber and iron in Minecraft’s “creative mode.” Students then set up businesses, bartered with one another and posted prices in Spanish, all the while speaking to each other and conducting business in Spanish.
“It was way better than what we normally what we would have done, which would be a fake skit,” Irvin said. “It blew that thing away.” Students were so into the project they even started looking up extra vocabulary words and grammatical constructions so they could communicate better with one another. Irvin also always stops the play with enough time for students to write a reflection of what they’ve done in the game in their online journals. He finds the reflection helps solidify their learning and gives them practice with both oral and written communication skills.
Because none of the pre-built lessons in MinecraftEDU are explicitly for language teachers, Irvin finds himself purusing what’s out there and generating lots of creative ways to work his curriculum into what he finds.
For example, in an upper level Spanish course students take for college credit, Irvin assigned a survival world created by MinecraftEDU founder Joel Levin for the unit on environmental conservation. In Levin’s scenario, classmates are the last remaining people on earth and there is only one tree still alive. The rest of the human race is waiting for the world to be inhabitable in outer space. To win the challenge the team must repopulate the forest and make earth safe for life again. But the only way the class can alert survivors in space that earth is safe again is to send up a rocket, which they must make by smelting iron. That can only be done by burning trees to make a hot fire. The goals are at cross purposes and students have to decide the best course of action.
“In my class they’re discussing all these scenarios and what to do or not do in Spanish, which is awesome because it’s super high level thinking,” Irvin said. “It’s way beyond anything I would have expected them to do.” And it was easy for Irvin to set up. He downloaded the pre-built world and then went in and changed all the signs from English to Spanish. It took him ten minutes and he got an engaging lesson that gave students a chance to use new vocabulary and language skills to argue their position.
“A teacher who doesn’t really have experience playing a lot can still do awesome things because the kids are going to be so fired up,” Irvin said. Experienced players in his classes often offer to be teaching-aids, helping other students hone their basic Minecraft skills. Irvin often records what his students do in the game, both for assessment and to keep a record of the awesome things they’ve built.
Irvin says it’s easy to keep students on task in the game because as a teacher-player in the game he has more powers than other players. He can instantly teleport to wherever a student is working and remind them to stay on task, or freeze a player who has wandered. He can also go into an invisible mode to see what students are doing when they don’t know he’s there.
Irvin has three tips for teachers looking to get started.
- Use MinecraftEDU. It’s cheap, easy, and there are a lot of worlds to steal from or use, along with lesson tips.
- Get a more experienced player to walk you through the basics and mess around a little in the game to become familiar.
- Start with a single project that you’d like to improve, maybe a poster project. Tell the students they will be able to demonstrate their knowledge in three dimensions instead. Set parameters and guidelines for how students should interact within the game.
MINECRAFT WITH MATH AND SCIENCE
Minecraft lends itself well to teaching math because everything is built out of blocks, making it easy to do geometry. Area and volume problems at the bare minimum. Math is also a subject many students find difficult and a different way of engaging them could help spark enthusiasm.
Stephen Elford is a secondary math and science teacher at a rural public school in Victoria, Australia. He played Minecraft for fun at first, but then realized how much math was involved and began experimenting with using it as a classroom tool.
Elford has found Minecraft’s “crafting mode” to be an effective way to teach basic algebra because Minecraft players have to craft all the tools they use to build out of raw materials harvested in the world. Different implements like an axe or a torch require different raw material recipes. Elford’s students wrote their own recipes (which look a lot like equations) using base materials. For example, one log = 4 planks. If you had 52 logs how many planks would you have and what formula would be used to represent the problem?
Elford doesn’t ever force students to use Minecraft for projects, but he likes to offer it as an option because he’s noticed that some of his most disengaged learners excel when given an alternative to traditional pen and paper equations.
“The four students who did that project got a very good understanding of how algebra can be used in virtual life situations and how to go about converting and simplifying units,” Elford said. In other lessons Elford has used a more straightforward method, asking students to solve problems to earn access to new parts of the world. Elford says one student in particular stands out because he had done almost no work in school for more than three years. But when Minecraft was involved he perked up.
“He showed a depth of understanding that I just didn’t think was possible given his participation,” Elford said. “It blew my mind.” It was that “ah ha” moment many teachers live for, but that doesn’t always come easily or often.
Elford has found Minecraft to be powerful in science as well, where he mostly uses the game to simulate scientific experiences that kids wouldn’t otherwise get in public school. For example, in his senior biology class, Elford uses Minecraft to give students a tour of an animal cell. Then, they get to watch as a single strand of DNA is transcribed into mRNA, which conveys the instructions to create complex proteins that do most of the work in the body.
“When I’ve done this lesson in the past it’s been a lot more powerful and longer lasting for the students,” Elford said. He’s also uses Minecraft to start discussions. For example, his rural school doesn’t have the tools to measure Earth’s gravity, but his students can measure the gravity in Minecraft and then discuss what their findings mean for earth. Or, Elford might let students destroy the world with a plague in Minecraft as a way to discuss evolution.
Elford, like Irvin and Miller, is clear that Minecraft is just one more tool he can use to effectively communicate his content and the skills that accompany it. However, he’s encouraged by the staying power of lessons he’s taught using Minecraft and by the excitement even poor students often show for projects within the game.
GET STARTED
Any new initiative feels daunting, but the only way to get started is to jump in. The educators profiled here saw Minecraft as a potentially powerful tool and started experimenting with how it could fit their pre-determined curriculum. They continue to seek help and ideas from peers and use the many free resources available to them. In addition to the positive changes they describe in their students, many teachers noted that Minecraft has helped reignite the creativity and passion that first brought them to teaching.
Minecraft mobile builds towards desktop version with latest update
The smartphone and tablet edition of Minecraft is now much closer to its desktop and console versions, after developer Mojang launched one of the biggest updates in its history.
The Minecraft: Pocket Edition 0.12 update adds some prominent features that had previously been missing from the mobile version including hunger; sneaking and sprinting; the game’s Nether zone; and tameable ocelots.
Mobile gamers will also be able to play against people on PCs using the new Windows 10 version of Minecraft, and use physical controllers paired with their iOS device. The update has also launched for Windows Phone, with Android to follow.
The update is a significant moment for Minecraft’s Pocket Edition, which reached the milestone of 30m sales in January 2015, but has always lagged behind the versions for computers and consoles in its features.
The game has been improving rapidly, though, in response to its increasingly large audience: many of whom have only ever played Minecraft on a mobile device.
Previous significant updates included 0.95 in July 2014 which added infinite worlds, caves and wolves, and 0.11 in June 2015 which added a skins feature for players to customise their characters.Mojang announced plans for the 0.12 update at its Minecon conference in July, with the addition of The Nether getting the biggest cheer from the thousands of attendees.
The next major improvement will be full use of the virtual redstone material to create circuits that transmit power, which Mojang promised would come in a Pocket Edition update by the end of 2015.
The developer, which was acquired by Microsoft for $2.5bn in 2014, is also planning to launch its Realms service – where players pay a monthly subscription to manage their own private Minecraft servers to play on with friends – for the Pocket Edition.
Mojang is also working with developer Telltale Games on a new “narrative-driven adventure” called Minecraft: Story Mode, which is expected to debut by the end of 2015.
Minecraft mobile builds towards desktop version with latest update
Minecraft 1.20 Update Released Along With Doctor Who Skin Pack, Oculus Rift Support To Be Added In 2016
Latest reports indicate that Minecraft is getting revolutionized from a 2D world to a 3 dimensional feel, thanks to the Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headset. In case you are a Minecraft fan, you are already aware that very soon, you can play Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition by making use of the Virtual Reality Headset.
However, The Verge revealed that gamers will not be able to use the Virtual Reality Headset in Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition until sometime in 2016. This is the second time that the developers have connected a Virtual Reality Headset to their game and then made it work.
This was done for the first time in 2015 June, during the E3 Expo. At that time, the Minecraft developers connected Microsoft’s HoloLens virtual reality headset to the game and then experienced it in 3D.
From the looks of it, Minecraft developers are planning to bring Virtual Reality to Minecraft through more than just a specific VR device. Meanwhile, Sony is also progressing with PlayStation VR technology and therefore, PlayStation Gamers can play Minecraft in 3D on PlayStation Vita, PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation 4.
In the meantime, the Microsoft gamers who played the game on PS Vita, PS3 and PS4 have already received the Doctor Who DLC. This new DLC comes with 100 new skins from the Doctor Who series and people and a lot of fans will definitely wish to buy them. Furthermore, the Minecraft: PlayStation 3 version received an additional 23 trophies.
Recently, Username BruceKnowsHow, an YouTuber managed to make Minecraft rides 100% more interesting by modding in a few graphical shaders and transforming the game into an exciting dream journey. The experience is quite psychedelic even without the use of any VR headset or watching it in 360 degrees.
BruceKnowsHow declared that the video was a complete nightmare and he spent a long time on it than he did on the original. According to him, it was all supposed to take seven nights to record but in the end, it turned out to be a month.
At the same time, recording the omnidirectional files was quite unreliable and needed multiple workarounds that he didn’t know about at the outset. He further messed up with the fact that he didn’t check if a recording was in sync and later ended up wasting 100 hours on bad recordings. He further added that the torch beats were done from scratch.
Meanwhile, thanks to Telltale Games, the massively popular multiplayer game, Minecraft is getting a proper story for the first time. Job J. Stauffer of Telltale spoke with spoke with Todd Kenreck, a Forbes contributor, regarding the challenges of bringing a story to the Minecraft Universe and further adding crafting to the Telltale-style game.
The Story Mode’s first chapter for Minecraft is supposed to release on 13th October on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, PC, Mac and PlayStation 4. Meanwhile, it will release on 13th October for Android, Amazon Fire TV and other iOS Devices.
We all know that Minecraft is one of the most played games in the world, be it the console or the PC version. This is one of those games, not unlike Clash of Clans, that is popular among both adults and children of today. In other words, Minecraft is a game that one can play with their kids and have a great time while at it.
You and your kids will need to make weapons and buildings in Minecraft while getting ready for the dreaded night when Evil creatures wake up and try to harm you. In case you don’t feel like playing the survival mode, you can play the Creator Mode instead, where you need to build a complete city if you wanted to.
At the moment, we are going to talk about the version 1.20 Minecraft update which was released for PlayStation 3, PS Vita and PlayStation 4 consoles. Presently, the patch is only available in North America and Europe but Japan will follow suit later on.
There were some problems earlier, like the memory leak issue which further caused frame-rate problems in Minecraft. Besides fixes, the new Minecraft update also comes with the Doctor Who Skin pack. We have already talked about it and it is clear that it’s nothing short exciting.
These are the new additions with the Minecraft Update Version 1.20:-
- Doctor Who Skin Pack Bundle Trial Content with 100 exciting new skins from Doctor Who.
- Memory leak issue causing FPS problems have been fixed.
- There was an issue which causing signs to go blank for the network players and they have been fixed.
- The trophies have now been updated and this includes all those which are already available on all other platforms. These are 23 new ones added to PS3 only.
Meanwhile, Developers of the console version of Minecraft, 4J Studios is presently working on a few other minor updates before finally getting the 1.8 version. If you wish to purchase the Doctor Who Bundle Skin Pack, you can acquire it from PlayStation Store for a price of 5.99 dollars.
Stay tuned for more updates on Minecraft!
Minecraft Update 1.20 Today on PS4, PS3 & PS Vita Adds Doctor Who Skin Pack, Fixes Frame-Rate Issues
Available now in Europe, with North America and Japan getting it later today (Update: It’s out now in North America), Minecraft update 1.20 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation Vita adds support for the new Doctor Who Skin Pack, while also fixing a couple of issues, including a memory leak that caused frame-rate problems.
Here’s the full list of patch notes for today’s update, which apply to all platforms unless otherwise noted:
Additions
- Added Doctor Who Skin Pack Bundle trial content.
Fixes
- Fixed a memory leak causing frame-rate issues.
- Fixed an issue causing signs to go blank for network players.
- Updated trophies to include all those already on other platforms. 23 added in total. (PS3 only)
Discussing the future of big Minecraft updates on consoles, developer 4J Studios said earlier this month:
No news yet, other than we’re working on it. The next few updates will be small, while we get the 1.8 update ready.
If you’re looking to purchase the Doctor Who Bundle, it’s available through the PlayStation Store for $5.99 (PS4, PS3, PS Vita).
Here’s the description:
Launch yourself on an epic adventure in space and time with this bundle of Minecraft Doctor Who Skins Volume I and Volume II. With the combination of these two skin packs you will have over 100 characters from all eras of the show’s history including all the Doctors, Amy Pond, Clara Oswald, Rose Tyler, Zygons, The Master, Weeping Angels, the Daleks, Davros, Donna Noble, Captain Jack Harkness, K9, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, the Sea Devil and the Cybermen.
You can check out some screenshots in the gallery below.
As Telltale Games and Mojang announced recently, Minecraft: Story Mode is coming to PS4 and PS3 this October through digital and retail stores.
Minecraft Update 1.20 Today on PS4, PS3 & PS Vita Adds Doctor Who Skin Pack, Fixes Frame-Rate Issues
Minecraft 1.20 Update Released for PS3, PS4 and PS Vita – A New Skin Pack And Top Features
Minecraft is one of the most played games out there, whether we’re talking about the PC version or the console version. It is one of those games where both kids and mature people can have fun while playing it. With other words, Minecraft is one of those games that you can play with your kids and have a great time.
In Minecraft, you and your kids will need to craft weapons, create buildings and get ready for the night when “evil” creatures wake up and will try to harm you. If you don’t want to play the survival mode, you can also play the creative mode, where you will have to use your creativity and build an entire city (if you want to).
However, today we’re going to talk about the new Minecraft update version 1.20 which was released for PS3, PS4 and PS Vita consoles. This patch is currently available only in the Northern America and Europe, but Japan will follow later today.
The new Minecraft update comes with Doctor Who Skin pack, but also includes some fixes such as the memory leak which was causing the FPS (frame rate per second) problems.
Minecraft Update version 1.20: What’s New?
– Doctor Who Skin Pack Bundle Trial Content;
– The memory leak that was causing the FPS issues has been fixed;
– An issue that was causing signs to go blank for the network players has been fixed;
– The trophies have been updated and now include all those that are already on other platforms (23 new trophies have been added) (PS3 only).
4J Studios, the developers of the console version of Minecraft, said that they are currently working on some other small updates before they get the 1.8 version.
If you want to purchase the Doctor Who Bundle skin pack, you will be able to buy it from the PlayStation store for 5.99 dollars.
Minecraft 1.20 Update Released for PS3, PS4 and PS Vita – A New Skin Pack And Top Features
Everything Parents Need to Know About Minecraft (as Told by Kids)
Everything Parents Need to Know About Minecraft (as Told by Kids)
It’s one of the most popular games out there, but ask any parent of a Minecraft-lover what it’s all about and you’ll likely get a blank stare. That’s OK, your kids know a Steve from the Ender Dragon and you know that the addictive building-blocks game is one of the few that successfully educate and entertain their players. But for parents who want to decipher their kids’ conversations, Lego’s here to help. In its new “What Parents Need to Know About Minecraft” tutorial, the brick-building company explains Minecraft lingo and characters and provides some important “Dos and Don’ts” for parents when it comes to Minecraft etiquette. Watch and absorb — and feel some satisfaction when you actually understand what your kids are talking about!
Everything Parents Need to Know About Minecraft (as Told by Kids)
‘Minecraft: Story Mode’ Is Building A Plot From Scratch
The massively popular game Minecraft is getting a story for the very first time, thanks to Telltale Games. Telltale’s Job J. Stauffer speaks with Forbes contributor Todd Kenreck on the challenges of bringing story to the Minecraft universe and adding crafting to a Telltale-style game. Minecraft: Story Mode’s first chapter is due out October 13th on Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PC, Mac and on October 13th for iOS Devices, Android and Amazon Fire TV.
How John Carmack pestered Microsoft to let him make Minecraft for Gear VR
Oculus VR chief technology officer John Carmack was desperate to get the block-building open-world game Minecraft into virtual reality, but it took a lot of effort and a meeting between two of the most powerful people in tech to make that happen.
At the Oculus Connect developer conference in Hollywood today, Carmack explained that, for him, VR gaming is all about exploring worlds. He explained that cresting a hill to see a beautiful vista “means something” when you’re in a head-mounted display, and he could think of no better game to bring that kind of experience alive than Mojang’s exploration-heavy phenomenon. So he got to work convincing Mojang and, eventually, Microsoft to let him make that happen — but he needed the power of Mark Zuckerberg to finally seal the deal.
“Minecraft was my quest, really, for the last year and a half,” Carmack said. “Before Gear VR even existed, Minecraft was something I was desperate to get into virtual reality because I thought it would be critically important.”
From VentureBeat
Carmack explained that while Minecraft is a game about exploring, it also has a number of other aspects that make it ideal for VR. It’s a metaverse with an infinite number of worlds where people can put on different skins to play as different characters. And it was with that stuff in mind that Oculus invited Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson into the office to talk about putting a version of the game into the Rift.
“We had Notch over,” said Carmack. “And we showed him early prototype stuff, and I talked with him about geeky programmer stuff for a long time. We were trying to get into a situation where he would let us try to put the [mobile] game on Gear VR — if it’s great, then we’ll see where we can go from there.”
But that didn’t work out right away. You might remember that when Facebook acquired Oculus in July 2014, Notch “blew up about it,” as Carmack puts it. Notch referred to the social media company as “creepy” and publicly stated that it wasn’t the partner he was envisioning when he backed the original Oculus Rift when it was just a Kickstarter project.
“Notch eventually got over that, and then there was the Microsoft acquisition,” said Carmack. “I started pestering Mojang about it. I would drive home this case that ‘we don’t want to ask anything from you. Just let me try to build this, and if you think it’s cool, then we’ll figure it out from there.’”
Carmack said he was so confident that Minecraft would work that he would agree to just about anything with Microsoft — and that seemed to do the trick.
“Microsoft actually got me GitHub access to the Minecraft: Pocket Edition code base,” he said. “But we signed a contract that our lawyers said was terrible. ‘They own everything you do. John, you’re basically working for Microsoft when you’re working on this.’”
But the CTO assured Facebook and Oculus’s legal team that this was worth it, and he got to work. Now, it’s up to him to get it up and running. He says he’s already given the framerate a boost and implemented head-tracking, which are the “fundamentals of VR.” But he’s also considering all kinds of other technical improvements — although, he notes that a lot of that stuff isn’t critical.
“It was amazing how quickly I was thinking to myself that I’m in the game and having fun,” he said. “I’ve played more hours of Minecraft in [Samsung’s] Gear VR than all other games put together. I still want to fix everything — I’ve talked to Mojang’s engineers about it. But it turns out that I wouldn’t say they are at all necessary for an initial release because I had an immense amount of fun with it.”
But despite all of that, Minecraft almost didn’t end up on the Oculus stage today. It took a last-minute emergency meeting to make that happen.
“I guess I can say this now. I got the email at 12:30 a.m. this morning that the deal was signed,” said Carmack. “We did all this preparation about how to announce it with the assumption that we would get to, but it really came down to the wire.”
Carmack said that after he did the initial work on Minecraft for VR about eight months ago, Oculus and Facebook spent the rest of the time trying to reach a deal with Mojang.
“I was willing to do just about anything,” he said. “On the phone I said that if this doesn’t happen, I’m going to cry. This will just be so terrible. This will be the best thing that we can do for the platform. But there are some problems that compilers can’t solve.”
It turns out that the solution was to get the top executives from Facebook and Microsoft together.
“Mark [Zuckerberg] and Satya [Nadella] were able to sit down and make sure that the deal happened,” said Carmack.
“I’ve called this my grail,” he continued. “I think it’s the single most important application that we can have to ensure we have an army of fanatic, passionate supporters that will advocate why VR is great. It’s part of this infinite playability that our current ecosystem is missing.”
How John Carmack pestered Microsoft to let him make Minecraft for Gear VR
Everything Teachers, Parents (And Players) Need To Know About ‘Minecraft’
You have probably heard of Minecraft. It is the most popular video game of all time, played by both kids and adults. It is more than just a game. In fact, because the objectives are user generated, the rules flexible, and the components modifiable, it may not be a game at all. At least not in the structured sense that, say, baseball is a game. Minecraft is more like a platform on which games can be played. Players build, socialize, explore and learn with Minecraft. It is more sandbox than sandlot.
Today’s kids are completely absorbed into the world of Minecraft, and many parents are worried.Where ever I go, moms and dads haphazardly toss around words like “addiction” and “obsession.”
“My kid just watches videos on YouTube all day,” they complain, “or she’s on some server or something, doing whatever it is that they do. I can’t get her to stop!”
I patiently explain that their children are using creative problem solving abilities, number sense, spatial conceptualization, aesthetic sensibility, social-emotional skills, complex imaginative reasoning and more. Additionally, they’re doing all of this in a multiplayer mode that’s sophisticated and collaborative. They’re interacting with kids all over the world, sharing projects and perspectives.
I suspect that these Generation Blockhead Minecraft kids will grow up to change the life-world in ways that we can barely begin to imagine. But they need more guidance and support—less panic and paranoia.
1. Parents Are Over-reacting
Please don’t try to exorcise the game from your kids’ lives like it is some sort of evil satanic temptation. Remember that when parents turn away from their children’s world, children turn away from their parents. Certainly, Generation Blockhead kids shouldn’t play all day; moderation is key. And parents need to teach them reasonable limits. But don’t use the word “addiction” or “obsession.” It just reinforces helplessness, disempowers humanity, and teaches our children to surrender their autonomy to the sensational appeal of digital machines.
Kids need your help learning to manage their time, figuring out how to play responsibly, and understanding how to make meaning out of a complex virtual world. So try playing with them; or just play by yourselves. Download the pocket edition to your smart phone. Ask your kids to explain how it works. Talk to them about the game. When parents take an interest in their children’s world, human progress reaches its apex. One foot stays firmly planted in the mature values of the past, while the other skips youthfully into the technological future.
Kids need your help learning to manage their time, figuring out how to play responsibly, and understanding how to make meaning out of a complex virtual world. So try playing with them; or just play by yourselves. Download the pocket edition to your smart phone. Ask your kids to explain how it works. Talk to them about the game. When parents take an interest in their children’s world, human progress reaches its apex. One foot stays firmly planted in the mature values of the past, while the other skips youthfully into the technological future.
2. Minecraft Belongs In The Classroom
Some adults get it. There are teachers that see the power of Minecraft. They recognize the possibilities. All around the globe, there are classrooms in which MinecraftEDU has become a teaching tool as fundamental as the chalkboard. Using a version specifically designed for the classroom—fitted out with teacher controls—classroom innovators imagine creative activities that take place with students crowded around PCs and tablet computers. They collaborate as a cohort of peers, navigating blockheaded avatars through a user-generated pixelated universe.
In Northern Ireland, in fact, all of the schools use Minecraft. They’ve made a system-wide decision to integrate it into ordinary curricula. I visited classrooms in Derry/Londonderry where students were recreating the country’s landmarks, discussing history, geography, and culture. The kids were engaged and excited. It was precisely the kind of experiential project-based activity that education experts have been praising for decades. The kids weren’t hindered by the limits of life-word space. It didn’t require access to expensive materials and well maintained model-building tools. There was no learning curve to acquire the necessary construction skills. The students just did it. They jumped right in to rigorous hands-on learning.
3. Stop Complaining And Start Embracing
Back in the United States, however, I often meet teachers who protest that their students get enough Minecraft time at home. School, they argue, is a place for pencils and books. To this “sanctity-of-school” argument, I ask, do we make the same school/home division when it comes to literacy, social/emotional skills, science, art, music, math, or conflict resolution? Do we tell them not to use these things at home? Why would we relegate the use of certain tools and proficiencies to one place and not welcome them into another?
Remember, school is not the temple at which we worship the technological landscape of the past. It is a safe space where we teach young people to how to responsibly integrate millennia’s worth of human wisdom and knowledge into current everyday lived experiences. Schools shouldn’t fear technological cross-contamination; they should embrace it. We should encourage Generation Blockhead to practice using philosophy, economics, political science, and engineering on Minecraft servers.
If you talk to grown-up Minecraft fans, you’ll discover that, just like the curmudgeonly teachers, many also object to moving it into schools. For these folks, however, it is all about the sanctity of the video games. “Please don’t educationalize it,” they plead, “school will strip the game of everything that makes it fun.” My heart breaks for these naysayers. Their argument reveals a lot about the miserable experience they must have had in the classroom.
School only feels frustrating to students when academic content is presented for the sake of obedience, rather than empowerment. School should be enjoyable. Arguing that we should divorce creativity and fun from academia—for fear that school will contaminate the purity of play—is absurd. It reinforces the misguided conception of play-as-superficial that’s already threatening to eliminate recess, music, painting, and the performing arts from all non-elite institutions.
Our schools need more playgrounds, not less. More slides. More swing sets. More sandboxes.
4. Sandboxes Once Changed The World
One could argue that sandboxes—the real ones, not the digital kind—were a fundamental part of the social progress that came about during the 20th Century.
You may be surprised to learn that sandboxes have not always been a part of childhood. They are relatively recent, dating back to Friedrich Froebel’s 19th Century Kindergarten movement. Back then, “Sand Bergs” were new features in Germany’s playgrounds and parks. They first showed up in the United States around 1885. Physician Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska visited Berlin and, upon her return to Massachusetts, reproduced the play spaces at home. They were known as Boston’s “sand gardens.”
These “sand gardens” became so popular, so quickly, that in 1897 child psychologist G. Stanley Hall undertook a focused case study of one such “sand-pile.” It was located in “a quiet community of a few score families of farmers, some twenty or thirty miles from Boston.” Hall wrote an account of his observations entitled: The Story Of A Sand-Pile. In the book, he tells of children building “wells and tunnels; hills and roads like those in town; islands and capes and bays with imagined water” as well as “mines of ore and coal, and quarries of stone, buried to be rediscovered and carted to imaginary markets.”
Of course, there’s nothing particularly profound in realizing just how easily the internet allows us to interact with people around the globe. But when you think of Minecraft as a global sandbox, Generation Blockhead becomes even more amazing.
See, Hall discovered something really important in that sand-pile outside of Boston in the 1890s. He found a community of boys that was not only cultivating an enriched, playful, and adaptive sense of the individual self. They were also, in effect, practicing local civics. They were applying and experimenting with the sorts of individual cognitive skills that we teach in schools. And simultaneously, they were using that academic content, those practical skills, and a unique sense of identity in order to practice being meaningful contributors to a local democratic society.
I suspect that those children eventually grew up into a community that was just as regional as the sand-pile. Today’s students, alternatively, will grow up to discover themselves in a world that demands they participate in a global economy. Our 21st Century children’s civic responsibility, their ability to contribute, and their capacity to collaborate with a diverse group of people, therefore, requires a different kind of sandbox. The internet is rapidly creating communities that transcend geographical limitations. We are no longer tethered to land. Thus, education is now responsible for training workers, cultivating thoughtful individual citizens, and preparing people to live a fulfilled life within the first-ever truly global civilization.
Lucky for us, Minecraft already provides the perfect sandbox, now we just need all of our schools to help kids realize it’s potential.
Everything Teachers, Parents (And Players) Need To Know About ‘Minecraft’
VR Minecraft announced for 2016 at Oculus Connect conference
The second day of this year’s Oculus Connect conference for virtual reality developers kicked off with an announcement-rich keynote presentation. While the event was short on new game announcements, one big one got the crowd’s attention: Minecraft. A brief video confirmed that the hit game’s Windows 10 edition will launch on the Oculus Rift “next year,” and it will allow players to navigate their blocky worlds in VR with the Xbox One controller.
Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe confirmed that the Oculus Touch handheld controller system will launch in the “second quarter next year,” which is a firmer confirmation than a previous “first half of 2016” estimate. After showing off that system’s impressive “toybox” demo, Iribe confirmed that the Touch controllers will require a second motion sensor “for improved sensing,” so be ready to make room in your home’s potential VR room should you want to try the tech out.
The Touch sizzle reel confirmed that a few previously SteamVR exclusive games would now also launch for Oculus Touch, including Job Simulator and The Gallery: Six Elements. It also had Oculus’ own answer to SteamVR’s Tilt Brush, a “digital clay molding” art app called Medium. “Every great platform has to have a paint app, and this is our paint app,” Iribe told the Oculus Connect crowd.
Additionally, Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney took the stage to show off Bullet Train, an upcoming VR action game for Oculus Touch that includes a warping mechanic much like SteamVR’s The Gallery: Six Elements, meaning characters may potentially be able to move around the world without experiencing VR nausea.
Since virtual reality gaming on PCs demands incredibly powerful performance—particularly to support a 90 frames-per-second visual refresh, in order to reduce nausea and discomfort—Oculus announced a new “Oculus Ready” initiative through which computer manufacturers can slap a sticker on a PC that meets Oculus Rift’s performance minimums. Announced partners for the program include Asus, Dell, and Alienware (itself a wholly owned Dell subsidiary).
Oculus wanted the crowd to know that there’s no shortage of interested Oculus developers, so they took the opportunity to announce that “over 200,000” developers had registered to create games for the new VR platform. The company announced that those developers will see version 1.0 of the Oculus Rift SDK in “December,” ahead of the headset’s launch early next year.
The keynote began with Samsung Senior Vice President Peter Koo announcing an updated GearVR headset coming in November for $99. Like the prior “innovator edition” of GearVR, this will allow users to insert certain Samsung phones into a wearable headset to experience a more rudimentary version of virtual reality. That announcement also touched upon virtual-reality versions of video-streaming apps like Netflix and Hulu coming to GearVR “in the next few months.”
VR Minecraft announced for 2016 at Oculus Connect conference
Check out the new video trailer for my Minecraft Comic Books!
Read Issue 1 – Free now! The Blacksmith and the Apprentice
Dragon Quest Builders: Minecraft Clone Or Is It Much More? Release Date Revealed
Square Enix introduced Dragon Quest Builders in demo mode at TGS 2015, and it was full of surprises. Even if it made consistent efforts to polish its looks and add new elements, the game still shows its heritage.
Minecraft is the first thing that comes to mind when starting to play Dragon Quest Builders, but until the latter becomes a true rival for the Mojang and 4J Studios’ creation, some improvements are mandatory.
Common elements are easily discernable, the inventory bar being the first that pops out. Also, there is an equipment belt where you can holster various weapons and tools, and you can browse through it by pressing up/down on the D-pad. To dig, you generally use the hammer just as in the trailer of the game.
If you believe all actions are intuitive, think again. Even for such an elementary task as digging, gamers should know that a simple attack/dig (square button) only hits objects positioned on the same level as you. L1 and R1 buttons allow you to aim the hammer at block situated higher or lower than you, whereas if you want to aim and hit enemies or blocks that are above or below, the shoulder buttons do the trick. Speaking of digging, the demo limits the vertical mobility to about four levels downward and 40 levels upward, making it way less open world than its predecessors.
Moving on to the unique aspects of the game, the general visuals are cute and stay true to the Dragon Quest spirit. Moving around and performing actions feels flawless. As opposed to Minecraft’s “jump in the water and learn to swim” approach, Dragon Quest Builders has a soft learning curve due to its schematic system that shows you how to easily build stuff. An interesting addition is that the settlements that you construct will gradually attract NPCs.
The gameplay would benefit from a first-person mode. From the fiddling with the controls in third-person, it is blatantly clear that for precise aiming and efficient working in closed spaces, first-person is paramount.
Developers announced that the game will feature a story mode and a campaign objective, but it’s the players’ choice how and when it accomplishes them. Building your cube-spaced-world can continue indefinitely after the ultimate boss fight. However, for those who only desire to share their creations with the community, a pacifistic mode will be available.
The demo offers only a fraction of the game’s full potential. Some gameplay adjustments and a couple novel elements might help the open-world RPG construction game depart from the nagging comparisons with Minecraft.
On Jan. 28, 2016, Dragon Quest Builders will be released in Japan on the PS4, PS3, and PS Vita. For now, there is no information about an international launch.
Dragon Quest Builders: Minecraft Clone Or Is It Much More? Release Date Revealed
Minecraft Novelist Slated to Visit
Rethinking a Virtual World
Sean Fay Wolfe said his book, the Elementia Chronicles, isn’t totally dependent on the Minecraft computer game.
For Sean Fay Wolfe, his senior year of high school at South Kingstown in Rhode Island was not par for the course. Instead of counting down the days until graduation and summer, Fay Wolfe self-published the Elementia Chronicles, the first book of a fan fiction trilogy based on the ever so popular video game Minecraft.
Because Minecraft is all the craze at some of the local libraries here in Tompkins County, Groton Public Library and Southworth Public Library were lucky enough to have Fay Wolfe come visit.
How old are you?
I am eighteen years old.
Where are you from?
I am from West Kingston, Rhode Island, and I currently attend the University of Rhode Island.
When did you start writing?
I’ve been writing short stories for as long as I can remember; when I was in elementary school I would write short stories in the back of my notebooks.
When did you start writing these books?
I began writing the Elementia Chronicles in early 2012, not long after the release of the official version of Minecraft. I was 14 years old at the time.
How did you come up with the idea?
I came up with the idea of the Elementia Chronicles through playing Minecraft on online servers. I see Minecraft as more of a virtual world than a video game, and I figured that this virtual world would make a fascinating place to set a story. I came up with the idea of a story of new players fighting against the greedy older players, and proceeded to outline a detailed plot that turned into Quest for Justice. Halfway through writing Quest for Justice, I decided to continue the story, and I planned out two sequels.
Did it surprise you to watch it have the success that it has?
I’ve been amazed and grateful that the series has had so much success. I figured that there would be a lot of people, especially kids, willing to give it a try because it’s based on Minecraft, but I never imagined the book would have such positive critical reception, or that it would get this big.
What was it like having them be picked up by a major publisher?
I still can’t totally believe that I’ve been picked up by Harper Collins. They have expertise and resources that I never had access to when I was self-published, and I can’t thank them enough for believing in me.
Personally, what are you most proud of about the books ?
I’m most proud of the books for having a story that isn’t totally dependent on the fact that it’s set in the world of Minecraft. I attempted to write a story that would be interesting even if it was disconnected from the game, and I think that I succeeded.
What are you hoping to accomplish when you come visit libraries like Groton and Dryden?
By visiting schools and libraries, there are two things that I would like to accomplish. I would like to spread the word about my trilogy. Also, I want to teach people about the process of writing a story, and how to start if you’re not sure how. I have found that I really enjoy teaching (I hope to be a teacher if I don’t end up being a full-time writer). .
What book are you currently writing or want to write next? — More Minecraft, or something else?
My next book will be part of a new middle-grade action-adventure series, independent from the Elementia Chronicles series. It will not take place in the world of Minecraft, or any other video game, but rather a totally original world. Without giving too much away, the book series tells of two twins who traveling back and forth between our world and an alternate realm, and learn magic to fight off an ancient evil while adapting to a new town and school. I also have another book in the works, this one a Young Adult novel that I started in the middle of the Elementia Chronicles series. This book is a stand-alone title about a teenage girl who starts seeing spectral spirits that she soon learns are the cause of death, and takes it upon herself to learn how to destroy them.
What is one piece of advice you would give to young writers?
One of the hardest things about writing a story is to constantly make it interesting and engaging. My biggest piece of advice is to draw from real life experience in your writing. Interesting things happen to us every day, and we can draw from those experiences to make the book more engaging; since you’re writing based on something that’s actually happened to you, you can be more detailed since you’re describing your own experiences. For example, the characters in the Elementia Chronicles are based on the different types of people that I found when playing on Minecraft servers.
Is there anything you’d like to add that these questions didn’t cover but you feel like might be relevant to your story?
I would love to be a full-time writer eventually, and use my writing to expand ‘s mindsets by helping them look at the world in different ways through fiction. If I’m not able to write full time, then I will pursue a career as an elementary school teacher. This is because, through my book presentations at Elementary Schools, I learned that I really love working with kids.
There’s someone creating the entire map of GTA 5 in Minecraft
YouTuber N11cK has been working on creating the entire map of GTA 5 in Minecraft for eight months. He’s been uploading videos everyday starting with the map layout and working around the limitations of Minecraft, to the most recent ones in which entire sections were built.
For illustration, watch the very first video to get an idea of what he’s looking to do.
Now watch one of the more recent ones, that’s number 127, where you’ll really start to see the progress and appreciate all the details he’s keeping tracking of.
If you want to binge watch the whole series, here’s the full playlist.
There’s someone creating the entire map of GTA 5 in Minecraft
Minecraft in Communist Russia Would Be The Tomorrow Children
I’m alone in a cave. Well, it’s not exactly a cave–it’s a narrow passageway cut into the sides of a massive chunk of crystal, the remains of a monster my comrades felled. I’m not looking for anything in particular, but I’m hoping to pick up some resources on my journey. Perhaps a small bush that, when consumed, makes my little body glow. Or maybe I’ll find some hidden food or building materials. I strap on my jetpack and fly up a vertical slice in the rock, and there it is in front of me: nestled into a crevasse is a small golden Russian doll. Another lost soul to revive in the world of The Tomorrow Children.
The Tomorrow Children–set to launch this fall–is like Minecraft in that your main goals are to collect materials and construct things like shops and consumable stores. But unlike Minecraft, you’re not doing this strictly for yourself: you’re doing this for the greater good, for the remains of mankind that are depending on you for survival.
The game takes place in an alternate timeline where a 1960s Russian experiment to unify all human minds into a single consciousness failed and destroyed the universe. You wander through the endless white Void as a projection clone, a small Russian doll with an appearance that is both cute and unsettling in turns.
Projection clones make the remains of the world go round by hunting for resources and building and maintaining towns. And since The Tomorrow Children alpha earlier this year, developer Q-Games has added a bunch of new features that add layers of responsibility to your projection clone’s lifestyle.
“In the early days, when [Sony was] talking about the early concepts of the PS4, they were talking about sharing features and having the ‘Share’ button on the controller,” Q-Games president and founder Dylan Cuthbert told me. “And we thought, sharing, communism… That sort of communal thing. And I grew up in the U.K., and we always had the Cold War going on in the background, the Iron Curtain and that sort of thing. And I thought, well, maybe I can make a game using those Neo-Soviet kind of things. And we started building and pushed it all on in that direction. We really pulled on all that brutalism architecture of the era as well in designing the towns.”
As your projection clone moves about its daily business, it may find the aforementioned Russian dolls hidden away in the world’s cracks. These Russian dolls are physical manifestations of the souls lost to the failed thought experiment, tangible pieces of human consciousness waiting to be awakened. The dolls must be brought back to towns and placed on a special device that will turn them human again; in the small base I called home, there were three such humans wandering around, thankful to my kin and I for saving them.
As projection clones complete more tasks and gather more resources, their personal prestige will increase as well as their ability to complete more complex tasks. Since the alpha phase, Q-Games has also added full control in customizing towns. You can build it out anyway you like, customize structures with new colors, and rearrange them. You can also add more recreational structures like benches and slides. You–along with everyone else–can customize these tiny villages to suit your comfort and needs.
In the demo I played at Tokyo Game Show, I purchased the means to build an electronics kiosk, where I could buy jetpacks and jackhammers to help me on my quest. I then used my jetpack to fly across the rippling white wasteland, because were I to walk on foot I would sink and drown in the nothingness. I shut off my jets and touched down on a tiny island occupied by another crystallized monster corpse, and as the sun set on the horizon I began chipping away at its bulk with my shovel, hopeful for crystals and food.
The aforementioned nothingness takes up most of the world of The Tomorrow Children. Occasionally you’ll come across giant structures like the crystallized monsters and can mine them. Some of these landmarks err on the odder side–in the demo I played, one was a giant blue big. Another was a red human face sticking up out of the ground. These sort of oddities were designed to be surreal and interesting to look at, according to Cuthbert.
Any of these tasks I could complete with a partner in The Tomorrow Children’s online aspect. Any number of projection clones–controlled by players from different regions—can be working in the same caves or working to build kiosks or repaint buildings. I love that this socialist aspect has been woven into the gameplay; some things you can do on your own, but since you’re working for the greater good, it seems natural that the greater good itself (a.k.a. other people) should be working alongside you. I gathered resources to build my electronics store, and just as I put it up, another projection clone walked up and gave me a praising salute. There’s no voice chat or way to communicate in The Tomorrow Children other than this gestures, which I find to be a nice touch; this preserves the mystery and etherealness of the projection clones while still giving them a way to assist and warn each other.
And if you don’t want to put the hard labor in to collect items, you can always buy the on the black market. These contraband items cost more in-game currency, but they will get you the necessary skills to get things done faster. You can also purchase Void Powers, a set of upgrades you can use only a few times after purchasing. One such power will allow you to build large blocks very quickly, while another will actually slow down time, giving you more hours of sunlight.
The Tomorrow Children is a unique take on the sandbox genre, and while it’s fun to tinker around in its post-apocalyptic socialist world, it’s also incredibly sad. A sense of futility sits over everything, a feeling of, “We did this to ourselves and now we have to rebuild.” But it’s also tinged with hope, because working together to reestablish humanity’s foothold into the universe is a noble quest, and because we ourselves are only human, the story calls to us directly, telling us to be grateful and careful with what we have.
Minecraft in Communist Russia Would Be The Tomorrow Children
‘Dragon Quest Builders’ is a shallower, more polished ‘Minecraft’
It’s like a very, very well-done mod. In Dragon Quest Builders, Square Enix has taken the thrill and almost tangible joy of building your own world, and coated it in a deep, glossy layer of Dragon Quest paint. If you don’t know Dragon Quest, it was the sworn rival of Final Fantasy in the Japanese RPG golden age. Then Squaresoft (FF) and Enix (DQ) became the same company. Oh, and if you don’t know Minecraft, where have you been, you monster?
And that’s great. What’s not so great is how shallow it feels. There’s no first-person mode to admire creations (although the PS4 is at least capable of sharing creations easily enough), and while Minecraft typically felt limitless, in DQ:B, you can only dig down four layers before that typical video game barrier of invisibility stops your pickaxe. That said, maybe you want more direction in a Minecraft-style game. If so, then DQ:B could be a fit. In the trailer, you can see what looks like an appropriate protagonist, an aim (shady kingdom on the horizon) and a whole world to explore — if only just past the surface.
Dragon Quest Builders launches on PS4, PS3 and Vita in January 2015, but only in Japan. Square Enix hasn’t yet announced any plans for a wider release.
‘Dragon Quest Builders’ is a shallower, more polished ‘Minecraft’
Enter to win Flynn’s Log 1 in Paperback
Enter by Oct 31