VentureBeat » Minecraft

iOS game ‘borrows’ assets from Fez and Minecraft

Jeffrey Grubb — Fri, 10 May 2013 18:23:45 +0000

If imitation is flattery and great artists steal, then I think we found the most celebratory work of genius currently available on the App Store.

Ace Block Jump is a 2D base-jumping game with more than a passing resemblance to some popular indie titles. In fact, it looks like the mobile game, available now for iPhone and iPad for 99 cents, directly lifts assets from PC and Xbox Live Arcade puzzle-platformer Fez.

For its background, Ace Block Jump uses art that is identical to Fez.

For its characters, however, it uses the distinct Minecraft style that is popular in knockoff mobile titles.

An image from Fez.

The App Store lists the game’s developer as Infocom Games. This does not appear to be the same Infocom that made classic PC game Zork I, but we’ve reached out to the studio to ask if it got permission to use Fez’s art

Developer Polytron posted to Twitter about Ace Block Jump with the following message:

it finally happened to us! somebody stole our pixels! itunes.apple.com/us/app/ace-blo…

— Polytron (@Polytron) May 10, 2013

“The first action game in which we mixed pixel and Minecraft-style — called [Pixelcraft],” reads the game’s description on the App Store. “[Ace Block Jump] is the most exciting and amusing game ever — especially in this new style.”

The title also has a list of mind-blowing features that include “explosive gameplay,” “various characters,” and “widescreen support.” You’re definitely getting your money’s worth here.

Filed under: Games

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GamesBeat weekly roundup: Minecraft sells 10M on mobile, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Apple hits 50B apps, and more

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Fri, 03 May 2013 15:54:50 +0000

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Activision confirms Call of Duty: Ghosts is a real thing after British retailer Tesco leaked that information last week, Mojang sells 10 million copies of Minecraft on mobile devices, and Re-Mission 2 explores how games can help kids survive cancer.

You’ll also find interviews with Quantic Dream’s David Cage and Gree’s search for a billion-dollar game. Also, be sure to check out our feature on fighting game special attacks so long you could make a sandwich before they finish.

News

Mobile News

Strange News

Fighting Words

LaunchPad toys is making educational games, not Angry Birds-like ‘digital pacifiers’

Going Online

Tech

Indies

Indie developer invites everyone to learn bathroom etiquette in Men’s Room Mayhem for PS Vita

Interviews

Pieces of Flair

Filed under: Games

Mojang sells 10 million copies of Minecraft on mobile devices alone

Jeffrey Grubb — Thu, 02 May 2013 19:23:09 +0000

Mojang’s ~~money factory~~ Minecraft is megapopular. On PC and Xbox 360, the title continues to soak up metric tons of cash from gamers that live and breathe for the block-building game.

Today, the developer revealed that Minecraft: Pocket Edition, which brings the Lego-like world to mobile devices, has sold more than 10 million copies on the iOS and Android markets. To celebrate this milestone, Mojang is revealing some plans for future upgrades to the smartphone game.

“We have been working hard on restructuring the backend of a lot of things for Minecraft: Pocket Edition to make future updates smoother,” Mojang spokesperson Daniel Kaplan said in a statement. “For instance, you can now change options without jumping back to the main menu.”

The developer also plans to add an option in the menu that will turn on some experimental features specifically designed for high-end devices like the HTC One, iPhone 5, and Samsung Galaxy S 4.

Finally, Kaplan revealed that an upcoming update to Pocket Edition will bring buckets to Minecraft. These tools enables players to carry water, lava, and other liquids/plasmas.

Filed under: Games, Mobile

Ace of Spades, Brick-Force, and Guncraft fire away in a block-shooter faceoff

Giancarlo Valdes — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 23:30:14 +0000

Like movies, games tend to follow certain trends. Action games became more cinematic after the bloody debut of God of War. Cover-based third-person shooters proliferated after the success of Gears of War. And more recently, some indie developers are flocking to the blocky graphics made popular by Minecraft.

Specifically, they’re adding guns and explosions to the basic block-building gameplay. On the PC, at least three first-person multiplayer shooters use this same premise: Jagex’s Ace of Spades (out now for $9.99), Infernum Productions’s Brick-Force (free-to-play as either a download or in your browser), and Exato Game Studios’s Guncraft (releasing this spring for $15). You can carve and shape the battlefield in hundreds of ways in each game, making it hard to tell what the differences are just from looking at videos or screenshots. So we decided to see for ourselves what each one has to offer.

Crafting

Ace of Spades

Ace of Spades uses a class-based system: The choices are the Miner, Commando, Marksman, or Rocketeer. Though each one comes with their own arsenal, all of them can build and destroy levels using guns and melee weapons like spades and pickaxes (the only mode you can’t build anything in is in “classic” capture-the-flag matches). The Miner can get through more blocks — his spade can take out whole walls at a time – than the others, who can only dismantle one or two blocks per hit.

Besides building with individual blocks, you can use premade structures called prefabs to improve your defenses or to lay down a new path, such as small platforms, towers, and staircases. However, nearly five months after its launch on Steam, Ace of Spades still doesn’t have the tools to let players create their own maps.

Brick-Force

Brick-Force has an elegant setup for community-made maps – Infernum highlights a new one every week on its website, and the most popular maps are in regular rotation on the servers. Level building is fairly straightforward: You plop down into a barren landscape and choose different brick types from a menu. You can use specialized abilities and items, like lighting bricks on fire or placing gun turrets, but you can only put down a small number of them. You can also join or create specific “build rooms” so others can come in and help you build a new map.

Guncraft

Guncraft also emphasizes player-made maps. You’ll often find matches based on custom maps rather than those created by the developers. One neat feature in the map editor is that you can generate random terrain like a river, a desert, or frozen tundra. You can even design your own custom prefabs.

What may become the most impressive part of Guncraft is the actual gun crafting, a feature that’s not out yet (it’s coming after launch). By using a similar grid-like interface from the map editor, you can customize the look of your weapon before you bring it online. You’ll have points that you can pour into different stats — vehicle damage, player damage, bullets per shot, and such — but Exato is still working the kinks out, as gun crafting might lead to some seriously overpowered weapons if the studio isn’t careful.

Notable multiplayer modes

All three of these shooters have the usual selection of multiplayer matches we’ve seen and played countless times before (team deathmatch, capture the flag, and so on), so here’s a look at the modes that stand out for each game:

Ace of Spades

Despite how overused the undead are in FPS games, Ace of Spade’s Zombie Survival mode isn’t half bad. You only have a minute or two to find a place to hide or defend yourself before someone in the map is randomly picked as the first zombie. The zombies must kill all the survivors before the timer is up.

Once turned into a zombie, you have a few options. Zombies can tear through blocks almost as effectively as the Miner, and they can build their own prefabs. On your minimap, you can also see the heartbeats of the leftover human players, indicating the general area in which they’re hiding. The mode plays out like a frantic game of tagging as you try to build yourself an escape route or dig underground and hope the zombies don’t find you.

Brick-Force

Brick-Force’s Build ‘n Destroy mode boils down the genre into its essential ingredients. Teams go through two distinct phases during a match: the first to build, and the second to fight each other and destroy (the host can customize how long each phase lasts), with a semi-transparent wall separating both sides during the building time. After a match ends, the process repeats, but this time you can improve your existing fortifications from the last round. It’s just a shame that not too many people actually play this — you might find a room or two among a sea of team deathmatches when searching the servers.

Guncraft

If you want to take a break from shooting other block people in the face, the best way to spend that time is in Lava Survival. Players must race to the top of a map — or build a new way to get there — before a rising pool of lava consumes them (the speed it rises varies from map to map). But instead of killing other people with your guns, you can freeze them for a few seconds, which is a death sentence if the lava is nearby. The optional hookshot weapon (similar to a grappling hook) is your best friend here, as you can use it to quickly move away from the lava … or accidentally fall into it if you miss your next shot.

Cool weapons and tools

Ace of Spades

Two guns immediately stand out when you play Ace of Spades: the Drill Cannon and the Snowblower. The former is the exclusive property of the Miner, and he can use it to disintegrate massive rows of blocks in an instant as the drill plows through terrain with ease. It’s not much of an offensive weapon, but it’s fun for making underground tunnels or for weakening your opponent’s base.

The Snowblower, meanwhile, is a handy build tool as well as a deadly weapon. It rapidly fires blocks of ice, making it useful for plugging up holes in your base or building new walls. Any player that gets caught in its path will die within a few shots.

Brick-Force

Brick-Force’s in-game store has a lot of odd accessories and silly costumes for you to put on. Want to dress up like Batman with a cowl and a cape? You can do that. You can also buy or rent (using either in-game currency earned from playing or real world money) a jetpack, new materials to build (such as anti-gravity nodes), new guns (you start out with a submachine gun and a pistol), and new melee weapons (including pitchforks and frying pans). While the weapons all have different stats and functions, buying them is more or less an aesthetic choice.

Guncraft

The real stars of Guncraft’s combat are the vehicles. Taking a page from Electronic Arts’ Battlefield series, players can take control of helicopters, massive gunships, tanks, and even Star Wars-like hover bikes. Some maps already come with a few vehicles, but others become accessible only when you gain a certain amount of kills (borrowing Call of Duty’s killstreak bonuses). They don’t always work — helicopters and tanks can sometimes get stuck inside a building or in the ground– but it’s a minor trade-off for the chaos that ensues as blocks and gunfire fly across the screen.

Filed under: Games

Minecraft creator launches psychedelic typing game Drop

Jeffrey Grubb — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:28:24 +0000

Markus “Notch” Persson could spend the rest of his life watching cartoons and ordering out. The Minecraft creator made a fortune on his open-world block-building game before passing the development torch for that cult phenomenon on to a dedicated group of developers at his studio, Mojang. He’s not, however, kicking back on some tropical island. In fact, he just released a completely original game.

This new game is Drop, and it’s available to play for free in your browser right now.

Drop is an arcade-style typing game that draws inspiration from Fez, Super Hexagon, and a ceiling (see the tweet below). Built in Unity, a popular graphics platform, Drop has players typing in words as a world of vague shapes and shadows fall closer to the screen. If you miss enough letters, or don’t type fast enough, the world will drop on top of you for a “game over.”

The inspiration. Also, super hexagon. Also, the fez ending. twitter.com/notch/status/3…

— Markus Persson (@notch) April 28, 2013

It’s a simple but intense title that you probably can only play if you know how to touch-type. Hunt-and-peck folk might want to wait for Notch’s next major release, Ox10c, which is an open-world sci-fi title with space battles, hacking, mining, and trading.

Filed under: Games

GamesBeat weekly roundup: Supercell raises $130M, BioShock Infinite tops March sales, and more …

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 16:25:19 +0000

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Clash of Clans developer Supercell is now valued at $770 million and raised $130 million in February, Bethesda wraps up major Skyrim updates, and Disney fully embraces transmedia integration in Disney Infinity.

You’ll also find reviews for ShootMania, Cut the Rope: Time Travel, and a Threeview for BioShock Infinite, as well as our early impressions for Defiance.

News

Mobile news

Tech news

Benchmark reveals Ouya’s aging Tegra 3 can’t keep up with newest Android phones

NPDs and future plans

Exciting announcements

Interviews

Reviews

Previews

Disney Infinity takes shape as a huge investment in transmedia (hands-on preview)

Pieces of flair

Filed under: Games

Camp Minecraft: How educators use the block-building game to inspire kids to code

Jeffrey Grubb — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 16:55:47 +0000

Summer camp used to mean swimming, hiking, and bonfires. These days it could mean mines, exploding creepers, and JavaScript.

Educational group iD Tech Camps is using the block-building sandbox Minecraft and other games to teach children about science, technology, education, and math (STEM). The organization holds its camps over the summer at nearly 60 universities around the country.

“This is our 15th season,” iD Tech vice president of marketing and business development Karen Thurm Safran told GamesBeat. “We’ve been offering video game courses from the start. We look for products that are interesting — that’ll appeal to kids — because we want to show them how they can take a hobby like video gaming and turn it into a lucrative STEM career.”

STEM summer camps from other organizations

The company uses developer Mojang’s Minecraft to introduce many basic and advanced concepts to the students in four courses. The subjects cover ideas like basic game design for ages 9 to 12 as well as programming for ages 13 to 18.

Courses come in two flavors, one-week camps and two-week “academies,” but just because the camps are only a few days long doesn’t mean they won’t cover heavy subjects. One of the week-long courses, Minecraft – Game Modding & Java Coding, requires that its teen attendees already have a “solid understanding of programming languages such as Java, C++, or PHP.”

“Most kids play Minecraft, and so they’re very excited to go in and modify it,” said Safran. “So Minecraft has actually expanded the market. It takes kids who would never think about programming — and since we offer four different Minecraft courses — we can get them at different angles depending on if they have programming experience or depending on their age.”

While Minecraft’s appeal is helping id Tech grow, the company has always worked with games. It also offers courses that utilize popular titles like Portal 2, Trackmania, and Shootmania. Some advanced courses teach directly in Epic Games’ Unreal Development Kit.

A bait and switch

Video games are just the bait, according to one of the program’s graduates.

“The iD Tech camps opened my eyes to possible careers in games,” former game developer Mark Grim told GamesBeat. “It was 2002 when I did the camp. I went for a multimedia game-creation week-long class. I was always interested in video games so I was curious what it was to make a video game, but I didn’t have any idea what it was like.”

Grimm knows he benefited from seeing behind the curtain at such a young age.

“It was really meaningful for me to see that [game development] wasn’t this big, nebulous industry,” said Grim. “It’s actually very approachable, technical, and interesting. From that point forward, I always had my eye on a career in video games or software development.”

Grimm was in between his junior and senior year of high school when he attended the class. He says that iD Tech helped him decide what to study when he eventually went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003. At MIT, he learned more about game development and eventually got a job working at Rock Band developer Harmonix Music Systems. He has since left that studio to pursue a business degree at Boston University.

When it comes to Minecraft, it’s all about how much it appeals to kids that might not even know they can make games.

“If there’s a kid out there playing Minecraft, he might check out the camps because there’s a Minecraft class,” he said. “I don’t think that kid would have come before id Tech integrated Minecraft into the curriculum.”

Meanwhile, in Stockholm

Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson is only 33 years old. He grew up playing games that inspired him.

I asked the developers at Mojang how it feels to know that young kids are finding the same inspiration in Minecraft that they found in the games of their childhood.

“It’s a humbling experience to be part of a game that is helping define a new generation of programmers and developers,” Mojang spokesperson Lydia Winters told GamesBeat. “At Minecon, [our annual convention], it’s incredible to see youth looking up to Minecraft programmers and wanting to learn coding themselves.”

Winters thinks that Minecraft makes such a useful tool for education simply because it is so open but simple.

“Teachers are able to use it to teach complex concepts through something students already enjoy,” she said. “As a former teacher, I wish I could have used Minecraft in my own classroom to engage my students in learning about a variety of subjects.”

More parents are looking for ways to teach their kids to understand technology. It’s a difficult thing to do because so few grownups understand coding. That’s why parents are delighted to send their kids to “play” with games for a week because the kids might come back with a passion for software development.

“Statistics show that in the next decade there will be over 800,000 unfilled STEM jobs,” said Safran. “Today’s kids are not training in college for those fields, so this is a real lucrative industry to get into. Plus, kids will be doing something that they love.”

I loved going to woodsy summer camps with canoeing and whittling when I was young, but I probably would have loved a gaming camp even more. Coming out of it with a taste for technology and programming would have been a major bonus.

Enrollment for summer 2013 camps is open now.

Filed under: Dev, Games

Phil Fish tweet rebuilt in Minecraft

Jeffrey Grubb — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:57:51 +0000

Blogging about games has its share of common tropes. We love top-10 lists and giving out year-end awards, but one in particular is so common that it’s driving developer Phil Fish a little nuts.

Last night, Fish (designer of mind-bending puzzle platformer Fez) tweeted his annoyance with gaming blogs that continue to post about pop-culture icons re-created in the block-building game Minecraft. For example, this post about a bunch of gamers that built the various realms of author George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire in the popular indie title.

hey bloggers, no more “blank rebuilt in minecraft” posts, please. we get it. you can make things in minecraft. thanks.

— PHIL FISH (@PHIL_FISH) April 12, 2013

Naturally, the Internet didn’t miss the opportunity for a clever (or obvious) joke about Fish’s feelings.

Minecrafter Nick Gilmartin responded barely an hour later with a near-perfect facsimile of Fish’s Tweet built in the game. Fish responded well to Gilmartin’s quick wit.

@nicknovelline @DrKarateChop HAHAHAHA. thank you for that.—
PHIL FISH (@PHIL_FISH) April 12, 2013

Gilmartin has made the schematic available for download for those who want their own Phil Fish tweet in their Minecraft world.

Yes, we’re fully aware of the irony of this post.

Filed under: Games

Microsoft hammers away at April 5 Minecraft update

Jeffrey Grubb — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 14:49:53 +0000

Prepare your pickaxe hand, because Microsoft and Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition developer 4J Studios have another update in the works for you.

The studio submitted the latest patch for the open-world block-building title to certification last week. Microsoft approved the update and scheduled it for an Friday release. Title Update 9 brings The End, a late-game realm with a boss fight, as well as sheep that regrow their wool.

I’m sure the sheep are ecstatic.

TU9 has passed Cert testing! The Microsoft LIVE team has scheduled the TU9 roll out for Friday 5th April. The End is nigh

— 4J Studios (@4JStudios) April 1, 2013

This is the ninth title update to the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft, which debuted on the console in May. Since then, Microsoft sold more than 6 million copies of the popular game. Mojang, the original developer of Minecraft, is also working with Microsoft to release the Xbox Live Arcade version on a physical disc later this month.

Filed under: Games

Modern games re-imagined as Atari 2600 cartridges (gallery)

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 21:43:19 +0000

In a freaky alternative dimension, Atari not only won the first console war with the Colecovision and the Intellivision, it also managed to keep up market dominance for over 30 years. Alright, that might be a little too BioShock Infinite-ish, but we can imagine divergent history with the help of these beautiful images of modern games imagined as Atari 2600 cartridges.

Artist StarRovias captures that dazzling but less-than-informative art style found on real Atari 2600 cartridges while invoking our memories of the final products, but I can’t help but wonder what Persona 4, Diablo III, and the Sims would look like as simplistic retro games.

Be sure to check StarRovias’ DeviantArt gallery for more images. Some of the pictures are decidedly not safe for work and aren’t included in the gallery.

Filed under: Games

Minecraft developer chipping away at April release for Scrolls beta

Jeffrey Grubb — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 18:16:24 +0000

Mojang doesn’t just pump out updates to its insanely popular block-building game Minecraft. The developer is finally about to release its second game.

Scrolls is a collectible card game for the PC that’s due out in beta late next month, according to Polygon. Scrolls mixes in elements of card games like Magic: The Gathering with board games.

“We are aiming for release at the end of April, and it’s looking pretty good,” Mojang cofounder Jakob Porser told Polygon. “We’ve been wanting to release it for a while because we want to have the same sort of development as Minecraft.”

For those that don’t recall, Minecraft went on sale to fans while it was still in its early alpha stages. Mojang then improved the Lego-like title to beta and raised the price. In 2011, it finally released a 1.0 version of Minecraft and raised the price again.

Scrolls could follow that same general release path, with the initial PC release (followed by Mac and possibly Linux) set to debut at a reduced price.

Mojang will include multiple modes in Scrolls. The beta should come packed with a standard multiplayer mode and a fleshed out campaign with a computer-controlled intelligence that is smart enough to play the game.

At the Penny Arcade Expo East gaming conference over the weekend, World of Warcraft developer Blizzard revealed it is working on its own collectible card game, HearthStone: Heroes of Warcraft. HearthStone is a free-to-play game that with deep monetization hooks. Players can purchase booster packs to help flesh out their decks.

Mojang is avoiding that type of business model.

“The core gameplay experience we want to keep as far away from monetization as possible,” said Porser.

Filed under: Games

Valve opens Early Games portal on Steam

Jeffrey Grubb — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 21:45:50 +0000

In 2011, Mojang sold access to Minecraft while it was still in development. Two years later, Steam is the first major platform to support that business model.

Since Minecraft, other indie developers have implemented this method, and now Valve is welcoming those games to Steam through a channel it’s calling Early Access.

“A lot of games are already operating as ongoing services that grow and evolve with the involvement of customers and the community,” Kinetic Void developer Sean Pollman said in a statment. ”Steam Early Access will let us continue the development of our game while gathering crucial feedback, input, and support from the steam community.”

The following games are available now through the Early Games portal:

1… 2… 3… KICK IT! (Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby)
Arma 3
Drunken Robot Pornography
Gear Up
Gnomoria
Kenshi
Kerbal Space Program
Kinetic Void
Patterns
Prison Architect
StarForge
Under the Ocean

Filed under: Games

GamesBeat weekly roundup: Whales of social gaming, Starcraft II guide, Saints Row IV, and family Minecraft servers

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 17:14:08 +0000

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, EA admits it handled SimCity problems poorly and offers players a free game, Angry Birds gets its own arcade machine, and Mojang ventures into family-oriented Minecraft world rentals.

You’ll also find reviews for Lego City: Undercover, MLB 13: The Show, and SimCity as well as previews for Guacamelee and Payday 2.

News

Mobile News

Reviews

Previews

Interviews

Pieces of Flair

Filed under: Business, Games, Mobile, Social

Minecraft Realms: Mojang ventures into services with world rental aimed at families

Jeffrey Grubb — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:15:25 +0000

Minecraft fans can play online with friends, but it’s not exactly a simple process.

Developer Mojang plans to introduce Minecraft Realms, which should simplify multiplayer for families and young players, according to Games Industry International. Realms is a subscription service that players can use to rent a safe and secure Minecraft world. Mojang designed it in response to parents who wanted a simple way to get their children playing online.

Currently, Minecraft’s multiplayer mode requires a dedicated server. Players can run their own or they can rent one from a third-party, but both of those options primarily serve the hardcore.

“Our [Realms] customers are parents who are tired of trying to act as server administrators on behalf of their kids,” Mojang chief executive officer Carl Manneh told Swedish news site IT24. “Minecraft Realms will be a simpler kind of service, aimed at families and kids. In the future we aim to offer certain profiles with mods that are certified to work without crashing, but this will still be a safe and easy way for kids and families to play Minecraft online.”

Realms subscribers each get their own Minecraft world. They can then invite anyone who owns Minecraft to play with them whether those players have a Realms subscription or not. Mojang hasn’t set a final price, but the talk is that it will end up somewhere between $10 and $15.

“All we know is that there has been a great demand for this service,” said Manneh. “We have never tried to sell anything to our gamers except the game itself and a little merchandise, so it’ll be very interesting to see if the community will be prepared to pay for a service like this.”

Minecraft is a phenomenon. It reached 20 million in sales across all platforms earlier this year. With an audience that vast, Mojang believe Realms has major revenue potential.

“If we look ahead, I do think [Realms will] be the biggest source of income in the future, and [it will] bring in more money in total than the game itself,” said Manneh.

Mojang is currently running the service in private tests. It plans to release Minecraft Realms in beta by May. The company expects it will need far more than 100,000 active servers once Realms is up and running.

Filed under: Games

Mojang releases Minecraft: Pi Edition for the Raspberry Pi Linux computer

Jeffrey Grubb — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 16:35:21 +0000

Before our sun collapses and goes supernova, Minecraft developer Mojang will probably release its brick-building games on all available platforms — and then some that aren’t available, like toasters and cats.

Today, the company officially released Minecraft: Pi Edition for the popular credit-card-sized Raspberry Pi Linux-based PC, according to Mojang’s blog. The download is free and available now at pi.minecraft.net.

Mojang based this new version of the game on the work it did for the Pocket Edition releases on iOS and Android.

Of course, Raspberry Pi’s creators designed it to help teach people about computing and programming. With that in mind, Mojang made Pi Edition fully crackable so rookies could open up and experiment with the code.

“The possibilities are massive,” Mojang chief word officer Owen Hill wrote in a blog. “You could organize the cheapest LAN party of all time or use the Pi to learn the fundamentals of programming on a minuscule budget. It’s like hacking your way into Minecraft and modifying the game world with code, a bit like being [Minecraft developers] Notch, Jeb, or Nathan, but arguably more fun and less stressful.”

Raspberry Pi is available online starting at around $35.

Via TheNextWeb

Filed under: Games

Exclusive: Minecraft’s Notch no longer funding Psychonauts 2

Rus McLaughlin — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 02:52:07 +0000

Sometimes, it’s tough to hold back the tears. Speaking on Reddit over the weekend, Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson indicated that he’s no longer involved in financing Psychonauts 2, a proposed sequel to Double Fine’s critically lauded but financially underwhelming 2005 action-platformer.

Double Fine founder and chief executive Tim Schafer confirmed Persson’s departure from the project. “Yeah, I think I gave Markus a heart attack when I told him how much Psychonauts 2 would cost,” said Schafer.

Persson and Schafer raised fans’ hopes almost exactly a year ago when Persson, whose wealth is estimated in the low $100 million range thanks to the runaway success of Minecraft, sent out a simple tweet to Schafer: “Let’s make Psychonauts 2 happen.” Ever since, both men have worked to keep expectations at a reasonable level. Persson took to his blog in Feburary 2011 to explain his position:

“All I know is that if the numbers work out and if they still want to do it and if they don’t decide to self-fund a sequel by doing more crowdfunding (which is honestly what I would’ve done if I were them), I would be most interested in doing this type of investment.”

Last Friday night on Reddit, the story changed considerably.

“I somewhat naively thought ‘a couple of million’ was two million. I had no doubt in my mind that a Psychonauts 2 would earn that money back easily. Turns out they wanted 18 million dollars, haha. I don’t have the time at the moment to even try to get educated enough to make an 18 million dollar deal. Perhaps in some distant future when I’m no longer trying to make games, I could get into angel investing. I’ve made one private investment into a game so far, at $100K, and it’s frankly a lot more work than I thought.”

Schafer previously mentioned a $13 million budget in a 2012 interview with Kotaku, comparable to the first Psychonauts. That game followed the adventures of Razputin “Raz” Aquato, a young paranormal learning his craft at a bizarre psychic summer camp. Critics praised it for its wonderfully inventive and surreal level design, depth of gameplay, and hilarious writing. Despite near-universal praise and plenty of groundwork laid down for an encore, Psychonauts never found a huge audience.

Persson’s blog post did mention other interested investors, but so far none of them have come forward, and it seems unlikely that any have his deep pockets.

But if the full burden for financing an $18 million project landed in Persson’s corner, it might be difficult to blame him for withdrawing from Psychonauts 2. That price tag would’ve eaten up nearly a fifth of his estimated pre-tax 2012 earnings in return for a sequel to a game that many regard as a flop even if an artistically brilliant one.

In a statement, Double Fine says it is “excited about the prospect of making a sequel to Psychonauts, but we’re currently focused on making our Kickstarter game and haven’t been able to budget it out. Once we get around to it, we’ll likely explore alternative funding methods that will require multiple sources to make it a reality.”

Schafer has said he’d long accepted that Psychonauts 2 would never happen, but this close brush seems to have changed his outlook. “We’re still going to do it someday, I hope,” he said.

The full Reddit thread can be found here, with Persson’s specific comments split out here. Mojang, Persson’s company, has not yet responded to requests for comment.

Filed under: Games

Resident Evil’s iconic mansion re-created in Minecraft

Mike Minotti — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:00:57 +0000

We all love ogling at inventive Minecraft creations, but it’s especially cool to see something from another game brought into the popular world of blocks and building. That’s why we’re so impressed with this re-creation of the Spencer mansion from the original Resident Evil, the famous survival-horror pioneer for the original PlayStation.

Moltenpanther, who originally shared his creation on Reddit, went to ridiculous lengths to build the interiors and exteriors of the mansion, courtyard, and residence building. Check out just how frighteningly detailed his creation is in the gallery below. We also included some comparison shots from the actual game.

Filed under: Games

8 alternative Grand Theft Auto V trailers to ease 8 months of waiting

Dan Crawley — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 16:00:35 +0000

Reckon you can wait 8 months for Grand Theft Auto V? Developer Rockstar thinks so. We’re not so sure.

It’s pretty clear that no one’s playing GTA V before September, though, following news that the open-world game isn’t hitting its anticipated spring launch window.

But don’t just sit and watch the GTA V trailers endlessly while you wait for that pesky summer sun to come and go. Watch these eight fan-made alternatives instead, created using Minecraft, Lego bricks, Battlefield 3, old GTA games, and the real-life streets of Rio De Janeiro. Heck, one even showcases Super Mario’s bad-ass side.

And remind yourself that it’s only 200-odd days until GTA V’s Sept. 17 launch. Just long enough to listen to that gravelly voice-over another 264,000 times (or thereabouts).

Grand Theft Minecart

Minecraft players keep amazing gamers with their creations. The ridiculously popular open-world crafting game hosts this impressive take on GTA V’s first trailer.

GTA V vs Battlefield 3: Trailer 1

It’s wonderfully endearing to watch highly trained military personnel shuffling around masquerading as female passersby. This homage to Grand Theft Auto V’s first trailer must have been a blast to make.

GTA V vs Battlefield 3: Trailer 2

Trailer one was a tough act to follow. This one beats it hands down, with the masterful use of an EOD [bomb disposal] bot as a rottweiler just over a minute in. The tank train is a stroke of genius, too.

Lego Grand Theft Auto V

I hate to think how long it took to re-create the GTA V trailer in stop-motion, using only Lego bricks, in this entry for YouTube channel Machinima’s Interactive Film Festival. Probably not far off eight months.

Grand Theft Mario V

Nintendo’s iconic hero Mario reveals his darker side in this parody trailer by humor website Jest. It’s tough being a family man, Mario. Just ask Bowser.

GTA V Real-Life Edition: Rio de Janeiro

Much darker than the other videos featured here, this fan-made film really captures the dichotomous nature of life in Brazil’s capital city. Those are some mean streets.

GTA V vs GTA: San Andreas

Re-creating a 2012 trailer with a game engine from 2004 is a tough task. This trailer makes it look easy, though, with San Andreas-era Los Santos ably standing in for its modern-day likeness.

GTA V vs GTA IV

This piece of work really showcases the progress that Rockstar has made, in terms of visuals, in the time between Grand Theft Auto IV and Grand Theft Auto V. It sure makes for an interesting comparison.

[Top image via Vareide/YouTube. Featured image via Ketegano15/YouTube.]

Filed under: Games

Minecraft’s Notch on earning $101M in 2012: ‘It’s weird as f—’

Jeffrey Grubb — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 22:50:57 +0000

In 2012, Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson made $101 million.

That money came from sales of the building-block game on PC, mobile phones, and Xbox 360. Minecraft developer Mojang brought in a total of nearly $240 million.

“It’s weird as fuck,” Persson wrote in a post on content-aggregation website Reddit. “I grew up in a relatively poor family, but once I got a decent job, I never really had to worry about money. My hobbies were playing games and programming, so there wasn’t any real drain. I could eat out when I wanted to, and go to the movies without having to save up for it. I still had to save up for trips and to be able to buy computers or consoles, but that just felt normal.”

Naturally, that all changed when his simple indie game became a breakout hit over the last few years.

Minecraft is a phenomenon. The game surpassed 1 million purchases in 2011 and continues to gain momentum. Most million-selling games do the majority of their sales in the first few weeks of release. It’s a testament to the appeal of Minecraft that the game sold a bulk of its 20 million total in 2012.

“Now, all of the sudden, as a result of how modern society works, I managed to somehow earn a shit-ton of money,” said Persson. “I still like playing games and programming, and once I had the latest computer and consoles, there really isn’t much more to spend the money on than traveling. I might eventually get a driver’s license so I can buy a car.”

Persson lives in Stockholm, Sweden. That’s where he grew up, and it is the location of Mojang’s headquarters.

He hasn’t worked on the day-to-day programming and designing of Minecraft since December 2011. Persson is currently working on a new game obtusely titled 0X10c.

Not much is known about 0x10c. It is a sandbox space game where players make their own fun. Although, the developer did reveal how to pronounce the game: Ten-to-the-see.

If you say so, Notch.

Now that Notch has more money than he knows what to do with, he’s also trying to figure out what to do with it.

“I think the right way to use money like this is to set a decent portion aside to make sure my family is comfortable, spend some on living out your dreams, and then try to put the rest toward making society a better place,” he wrote. “For me, this includes charities that help children, and charities that help promote freedoms I think are vital in the coming dozens of years, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation.”

And since he has all the games he could want, what is he trying to play right now?

“Actually, I’m trying to play Ni No Kuni,” he wrote.

Filed under: Business, Games

Splinter Cell’s creative director has the best Minecraft story ever

Rus McLaughlin — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:00:29 +0000

When the creative director of the Splinter Cell franchise goes off on a wild tangent during an interview, you better believe I let him. And Maxime Beland, said creative director, had a quite story to tell. It’s an important tale about friendship, woe, self-realization, things on fire, massive spoilers, and the one common thread that could possibly tie all those elements together: Minecraft.

“What I realized in recent years,” he begins, “is that I’m a very casual player of massively multiplayer online games. Like, I’m not a hardcore guy when I play them. So I’ve got a friend — he’s an engineer on our team. He’s the smartest guy I know. Like, three times smarter than the next guy, probably, and he’s my co-op buddy for a lot of those games.”

“And I love it, because it’s not about playing the game as much as it is just being with him and being kind of his sidekick, in a way. He’s the one who does all the research. ‘Oh, we need to go there, we need to kill this guy, and then we’re gonna go. …’”

Beland flicks his hands around. His friend’s plans run deep.

“I’ve been playing Minecraft with him recently, right?” he continues, “But it’s so not the classic Minecraft experience. Like, we’re on the server, and I’m like, ‘I’m tired, I’m going to bed.’ I come back the next day, he’s like, ‘Max! Max! Grab some stone of this, and grab that,’ and OK, how do I have a lighter now?”

Maxime’s friend also isn’t big on explanations when they have work to be done. Maxime just goes with it. “He’s like, ‘C’mere, c’mere, put some blocks there!’ and I’m like, ‘What’s happening? What’s happening?’ and suddenly, there’s a fuckin’ portal to go into Hell! Holy shit!“

“So, it’s like I’m very casual about it,” says Beland in a very noncasual manner, “but at the same time, I’m having a blast.”

Of course, it’s not all gold ingots and Ender pearls. Issues and spats occur, just like you’d expect with any roommates living together in a virtual Legoland.

“One night, we started playing at 1 a.m., and he sent me an email at 6:30.” Beland drops into a flat monotone, imitating his friend. “He’s like ‘Yeah, I read the entire Minecraft wiki.’ What? Don’t you want surprises? He says, ‘No. I want to understand it all.’ Well, alright, but don’t spoil it for me.”

“So then I log in, and we’ve got lava in our house. We’ve got lava! Quick, do something! He’s like, ‘No, it’s under control. Half a block’s blocking it.’ Oh, shit — well, OK, I guess.”

At this point, Beland’s PR handler is doubled over in silent, hand-over-mouth hysterics. I briefly consider getting Beland to spill every last secret he’s held back on Splinter Cell: Blacklist while she’s distracted, but I decide this Minercraft story is better.

“He made a room in our house,” says Beland, sounding a little offended. “I was like, ‘You have a room? I want a room!’ So he made me one, but it was a bit smaller. Like one block smaller.” He nods to himself. “OK. All right. You wanna play?

“So he was off going somewhere, and I started digging up his room, and I went super-deep, you know? Like, fuck you! deep, right? I dig, I dig, I dig, and then he comes back. …” Beland dips into the monotone: “‘Ah, you suck.’”

“The next night, I log in,” says Beland. “My room has become our room. And it was decorated. There’s the two twin beds next to each other, with a little chest in the middle. And I’m like, ‘I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this! I’m going to take a screenshot, just in case.’”

“The next night, the beds were together. I was crying,” he laughs.

Filed under: Games

Game of Thrones’ King’s Landing meticulously re-created in Minecraft

Sebastian Haley — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 04:09:33 +0000

GamesBeat has reported on some of our favorite Minecraft creations to date, but none of them took over 100 builders to make. That’s what the team at Westeroscraft is claiming was required for their painstaking re-creation of King’s Landing from A Song of Ice and Fire (or Game of Thrones for the literary-challenged).

Sharing some recent images on Reddit, user pizzainacup says that the custom Minecraft map currently adds up to 35 GB of data, with around 3,000 unique buildings all hand-made and with “fully decorated” interiors:

But King’s Landing is just a taste of things to come as pizzainacup states that a Minecraft iteration of the entire Westeros content is about 70 percent complete, with the continent of Essos planned “one day.” You can view the map live here (when Reddit isn’t crashing the server) to see the ongoing progress.

Filed under: Games

Release day daze: How post-launch content sours new games

Community Writer — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 15:27:05 +0000

Two fiscal strategies have become popular over the last couple of years for PC games: Either you give out the game for free and monetize through updates and micro-transactions, or you sell the game before it’s out and allow people access to increasingly more polished and complete beta builds. Everyone’s favorite little indie game turned viral hit Minecraft brought the latter strategy into the limelight, but this model has since been adopted by several other projects (such as Klei Entertainment’s Don’t Starve).

The privilege of buying in early and often at a reduced cost is the same way by which many Kickstarter projects find their funding. While Minecraft did not raise money through Kickstarter, the primary developer at the time, Markus Persson(Notch) opted to use a similar strategy that many who operate through Kickstarter now use. For a reduced cost, he allowed customers access to the latest (and sometimes unstable) builds of the project. As the builds got larger and the game itself moved from an alpha to a beta, the buy-in price increased, and the momentum of popularity continued to reach critical levels until the game finally had its day-one launch.

Klei Entertainment’s: Don’t Starve is an unreleased game receiving large content updates every two weeks building towards its final release.

Since its release day, Minecraft updates have not slowed down — the Mojang team releases several monthly “snapshots,” each offering small parts of a larger update that drops later on. While Minecraft is still fondly spoken of, sells well, and becomes an exponentially deeper game with each new version, there is something less exciting about these updates; perhaps it is the idea that the game was “finished” on its original launch date. This may be an unfair assertion, but to consider the game unfinished because it is still rolling out content is to challenge the idea of what a finished product is; yet almost all modern games are in some sense released iteratively, and as such, are “unfinished” upon release. If this is so, then when is a game truly complete? And furthermore, why are the post-release additions to Minecraft so underwhelming for me personally compared to their alpha and beta counterparts?

Consider this: A game is released. After launch, there is no downloadable content, no patches. The game is released one time in its complete form; it’s that simple. The game is finished.

Consider now that a game is released, and post-game content launches that offers either a more definitive end (think Asura’s Wrath or Mass Effect 3) or in the case of a multiplayer title, a rebalance or addition to the game which brings forth new strategies or gameplay (think Team Fortress 2’s weapon releases). In both of these instances, the final product, the released “finished” game, is edited and changed. This is a big deal, and the bigger the game is, the more impactful this change can be. When an epic trilogy like Mass Effect is able to change its ending post-release, it makes one wonder if Tolkien or Lucas could have gotten away with manipulating the final moments of their trilogies after hearing the response of their audience. It seems unreal, almost uncomfortable, to consider that the “canon” of this world could be manipulated after it has already been published, shot, or developed.

Only through purchasing this additional content is the player able to witness the final ending of Asura’s Wrath

If iterative releases are capable of manipulating storylines, how can we trust the final release to be canon? How can we trust the end is truly ultimate?

Now, this isn’t to say that all post-launch content is guilty of opening this can of worms. A more popular variant of downloadable content is one that adds additional content without manipulating the main story or the mechanics of the game itself. This includes side missions or map packs for a multiplayer game. From a canonical perspective these are more likely to enrich the world as opposed to manipulating it.

So how does Minecraft fit into all of this? Well, pre-release there is the notion that some features may be changed or removed before the game’s final release. While there is no real story or canon to Minecraft, one may consider that the features that make it into the release on day one are the definitive (or vanilla) features of the game — or in other words, these features are the canon of this particular game or universe.

Buying into a game before its release and following it as it is shaped from its gooey primordial alpha state into a solid definitive release is exciting because you’re able to see features form before it is even certain they will be in the final product. For example, when Minecraft was in beta and Notch was doing new releases every Friday, you could dive back into your undeveloped worlds to suddenly find new ores such as redstone. As time passed, you would hear of people doing stranger things with it, until eventually you’d come across something like this 16-bit computer built inside Minecraft. When the game finally released, this would be within the capabilities of all the users: no mods, or additional content required; but, as an early adopter you get to see it in all its rougher states, you’d get to see it when it was “subject to change,” when it was uncertain that it’d make it into the final package.

Some Ideas from the Minecraft beta (such as finite torches) never came to fruition in the final release

The irony here is that these between pre-release content updates and post release, there is no real difference aside from the declaration of ”finished and released” by the developer of a supposedly complete product. That is to say, if we can buy into a beta and play any content at all, it is in a sense “released,” and this may be (or with a more pessimistic view, simply is) a clever marketing strategy to drum up hype while allowing early backers immediate access with the promise for more. Yet, this is exactly what draws me to the beta buy-in: the promise for more. I realize that a developer is completely capable of cutting a project short, and the day it happens to me, (where I have bought in early and failed to see the project come to fruition) may be the day I feel less passionately about participating in these betas. Additionally, the early buy-in (in the case of Minecraft and more recently Don’t Starve) often comes with additional bonuses such as a reduced price or extra copies. The reduced price is especially captivating because it feels more like an investment — the day you buy-in, the game may be small but the promise for additional updates gives increasing value to the initial purchase.

I’d like to hold on to the notion that when a game is released it is complete on day one. I’d like to believe that I do not have to download a patch, buy additional content, or sign up for a service to access the final ending. Unfortunately, this becomes further from reality with each year, and as such, it becomes more difficult to determine what the final “true” release of a game will bring.

Whereas pre-release content additions via buying into betas and the like is exciting because it feels as though it is building towards a proper definitive end, post-game content that chooses to address issues or manipulate canon feels cheap by comparison, especially if it is paid DLC. When the next generation of gamers grow up, they likely they will do so in a world where games are rarely complete when they first become playable. Most games if not all will in some sense be iterative, and even those that are not will probably exist in some trilogy, most likely one where even the final chapter is not the end.

Filed under: Games

This 22-day-old open-source Minecraft-cloning game builder runs in Javascript in your browser

John Koetsier — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 15:03:11 +0000

It’s not every day that a reporter’s interview is derailed by an 85-year-old drunk woman who hits a power pole in Oakland, cuts power to a developer’s home office, and forces him to Mi-Fi on a Skype call while his laptop’s battery slowly dies.

But it’s also not often that someone invents an open-source game development platform that can make Minecraft-style games that will, with a little luck, soon be running on web browsers everywhere: laptops, Android phones, and iPhones.

Twenty-two days ago, Max Ogden was a bored developer whose latest startup, Gather, was not, shall we say, making a lot of hay. So he was looking for something new to occupy his time.

“I came back from Europe in the winter working on a bunch of little indoor projects — it’s been freezing here in the Bay area,” Ogden told me today. “Then I saw the Minecraft documentary right after Christmas.”

He had given the wildly popular sandbox builder to his 10- and 11-year-old nephews for Christmas, and they loved it, so he started to think about building something for it — a mod perhaps, or an extension of Minecraft. And was startled to find that Minecraft was totally closed source, with no API (though one is coming soon). Instead, he discovered that developers who want to mod Minecraft hack it, decompile the code, build their mods, and then release them … to be broken with every new version of the game.

A forest in Voxel.

So he came up with the idea of building not just Minecraft, but the toolset to build any Minecraft-like game, all inside the browser, using common old Javascript and OpenGL, an industry-standard toolkit for building interactive 2-D and 3-D applications.

“OpenGL has been around for a long time, but Chrome became the first browser just last month that lets you take over someone’s mouse pointer, which is totally needed for games,” Ogden said.

Having found his project, Ogden did nothing else for the past three weeks, staying up late, “going crazy,” and cranking out code. He found numerous little snippets of code that others had worked on that helped, speeding the process, and brought in a friend, James Halliday, to help solve some particularly tough problems.

“In about two days of working with James, it all came together,” Ogden said. “We had something that looked like a game, and we looked at each other and said: ‘Holy cow, that was quick.’”

The result that looked like a game was Voxel.js. It’s not precisely a game itself, but a game-building toolkit for modern browsers. You can try early examples of game environments built with it already, right in your (Chrome) browser, including one with a virtual drone simulator.

A Minecraft skin

“Kyle Robinson, who runs hackathons for AR quadricopter drones, built a virtual drone simulator for it,” Odgen told me, marveling. “It has a command line, you can tell it to take off, spin, and it has a little camera to ‘see’ the terrain that shows up like an iPad in the game.”

Which is all very meta: watching a landscape of a virtual world via a virtual drone that you control in a game running inside a browser on your computer. It sounds impressive, until you hear that another acquaintance of Odgen is planning to run Voxel.js on a Raspberry Pi running Firefox OS (coming soon) on a real AR quadricopter videoing the actual landscape while also running the game and viewing a virtual landscape.

Just try to wrap your head around that.

All the code is open source, and Odgen is welcoming any and all hackers to make contributions, adding modules like water, better physics, or creatures. Seven already have. All of which could soon have the game-building environment running on iPhones as well as Android smartphones. While Android should be relatively easy as soon as Google updates mobile Chrome to support OpenGL more fully, iOS is another story. It turns out that Apple supports OpenGL in mobile Safari, but for iAds only.

“So you can run WebGL on iPhone … if you make your own browser,” he said.

Fortunately, a project named Impact is working on a solution, rendering Javascript to iOS’s native Objective-C language.

All of which means that a Minecraft-like game built with Voxel.js could conceivably run in a browser on an iPhone. And on an Android smartphone. And in your web browser on your laptop. And, if you really, really, really must, on a tiny little $35 Raspberry Pi, flying high on a quadricopter above the drunken old ladies of Oakland.

Which, frankly, would be awesome.

Filed under: Business, Dev, Entrepreneur, Games, OffBeat

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Disney Infinity: Made possible because Disney owns all of this

Alejandro Quan-Madrid — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 19:00:56 +0000

No other company besides Disney could make Disney Infinity. Aside from the obvious, the amount of resources it can pull together for this upcoming platform is staggering.

Disney Infinity is essentially an open-ended Grand Theft Auto sandbox with a Minecraft/LittleBigPlanet creative component that you can use to make their own content. You can unlock new characters, items, worlds, and more by placing stylish collectible figures and chips onto a special base. And everything is wrapped in the family-friendly ethos of the Disney films and theme parks.

Infinity launches this June for PC, all major home consoles, and mobile platforms. Leading up to the summer, the House of Mouse is making a big push to establish this new brand (read: money machine). It officially unveiled Infinity this week at the classy, Disney-owned El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, Calif. John Lasseter, the chief creative officer at Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, was on hand to talk about Infinity’s emphasis on play and creativity.

I had a chance to preview the game and learn about all its different elements. I came away with one main conclusion: Regardless of how you feel about conspicuous consumption or one company owning so many different things, you must admit that something as ambitious as Disney Infinity is only possible because one conglomerate owns all this:

Walt Disney studios: It’s no coincidence that Infinity and the upcoming Monsters University film are both coming out in June — and that the game features characters and stages based on the movie. Expect this to become the norm whenever a new high-profile Disney flick comes out. Instead of having to spend two or three years making a standalone movie-game tie-in, developer Avalanche Software can just make a new set of levels and characters to expand Infinity.

Executive producer John Vignocchi explained to me that Disney hooks Avalanche up with unprecedented access to filmmakers like Jerry Bruckheimer (Pirates of the Caribbean), Tim Burton (The Nightmare Before Christmas), and their teams.

Talk about going to the source for authenticity.

The type of audiences that Disney commands from its motion pictures is tremendous, and now each of those viewers is a new potential customer to try an inspired interactive experience with Infinity. How many people are fans first of Spyro the Dragon and other characters from the rival Skylanders series and then get into the games second? Compared to all those for the beloved Disney franchises, not many.

Since Avalanche is able to draw from all the Disney-owned properties, what else might we see in the game? One of the add-on vehicles available at the event was the Electric Mayhem bus from The Muppets. Does this mean we might see some Marvel Avengers or Star Wars content when Disney releases those blockbusters in the following years?

“The possibilities are infinite,” Vignocchi said.

Parks and resorts: Picture the iconic Sleeping Beauty castle from Disneyland with a Finding Nemo underwater twist. Now, swap out the coral decorations for some neon-laced Tron trim. Add a constantly growing interactive world around it and you start to get the idea. These are the kind of images Disney showed us to promote some of the creative potential for players using the Minecraft-inspired level-editor Toy Box.

The theme park connection is also visible in the Play Sets. These are what Disney calls the different in-game worlds (each with mission-oriented gameplay) that players can unlock with Play Set figures. The Pirates of the Caribbean level we saw had a couple of visual references to the classic ride. As Captain Jack Sparrow rowed a boat under archways and between vessels exchanging cannon fire, I instantly thought of the Disneyland attraction. No one had to tell me. The park experience is that ingrained in me, and that can be a powerful way to connect with customers

Consumer products: “We’re all game developers,” Vignocchi said. “So while we hoped and dreamed, since the inception of Infinity back in 2010, that we’d have this line of collectible figures that went with it, none of us know how to make toys.” That’s where Disney’s massive Consumer Products division comes in. This is the group that manages the mountains of official Disney licensed stuff in stores.

They help us “identify factories that we we’re going to work with for manufacturing, make sure that we’re delivering the correct file formats to the various factories, quality assurance, working with the FCC. …” said Vignocchi.

Disney’s Imagineering and other research teams also served as consultants to the special figurine technology that Avalanche conceived of. Those teams are also helping to develop what future versions of the base reader (what you use to connect the toys up to the game) can do.

Club Penguin: With user-generated content, fans inevitably will try to make levels featuring swastikas, marijuana leafs, penises, four-letter words — you name it. Hell, some rogue Disney animators even inserted a picture of a topless woman into The Rescuers. That’s apparently the kind of thing some people will always do given creative freedom.

To keep the game environment family-friendly, Disney is bringing in some pros to vet the levels that players submit. The customer support staff from the popular online children’s game Club Penguin (which reportedly has over 30 million registered user accounts) will sort through submissions and weed out the inappropriate ones before players can download any of it for Toy Box mode.

Club Penguin is aimed at kids ages 6-14 and has been around since 2005. I cannot imagine a group of people who have more experience cleaning up online f-bombs and hate speech than the folk who work there.

Avalanche Software: A quick glance at this developer’s portfolio shows that the people there definitely know how to make solid licensed games. They’ve been crafting them since Disney acquired the studio in 2005. More intriguing is the Octane development engine that they’ve been adding to for the past 11 years.

“Right now, I know that we have well over 60 different mechanics in the game,” said Vignocchi. “Whether that’s melee combat to sword fighting to projectiles, driving … it is on par with some of the biggest games out there, like Grand Theft Auto, and it is a ‘family game.’”

This foundation is essential for Avalanche to make each Play Set feel different. The Incredibles level involves a lot of superhero fighting and robot smashing, while Monsters University is more focused on stealth to scare students from rival Fear Tech. The Pirates of the Caribbean world featured galleon customization and naval gun battles. These certainly aren’t cookie-cutter platformers. Considering how many developers treat the stable cash-in of licensed properties, it’s refreshing to see Avalanche go the distance. “As game developers,” Vignocchi said, “our mantra is, we kind of take a page out of Pixar’s book, we create games for ourselves but that are accessible to kids.”

That focus will ultimately benefit fans since the freedom in Toy Box mode turns them into game makers. In a demo video, we saw how quality assurance staff could change the camera angle to 2D for a working Donkey Kong arcade game level. Another person re-created the Bowser’s Castle race track from Mario Kart 64 that players can actually drive on. When you add in the programming logic items that enable aspiring level designers to add and chain together triggers, doors, moving platforms, and more, the potential is pretty promising. Disney plans to foster user creativity by holding themed contests.

It’s that emphasis on play and imagination that appears to ground Disney Infinity. So much of this corporate synergy is a bit mind-boggling. The business model is classic Disney (movie tie-ins, collectible trinkets and toys, and so on), but it’s the gameplay that will determine whether Infinity is just a massive cash-in or the title that could finally establish Disney Interactive as a formidable, traditional game maker.

Filed under: Gadgets, Games

BioShock vs. Hunger Games: Minecraft Edition (video)

Sebastian Haley — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 22:07:27 +0000

The following video starts out as an impressive mashup between the opening of the original BioShock and the same scene re-created in Minecraft. Depending on your allegiance to Katniss, it then takes a turn for (your opinion here) as the creators of the map discuss that this Rapture remake is actually a HungerCraft map. Hunger Games-inspired maps have become a popular subculture within the Minecraft community, leading to many livestreamed survival showdowns.

If you want to pretend that somewhere out there exists a remarkable single-player remake of BioShock in the Minecraft engine, you can stop watching around the 2:20 mark.

Top image via Minecraft.me

Filed under: Games

Best of GamesBeat 2012 roundup

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 18:30:47 +0000

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, GamesBeat celebrates the biggest games and news of 2012 with several retrospective features. Even though the year is almost over, that doesn’t mean we’re completely out of news yet, however. You’ll also find stories on Nintendo patenting a specific use for the Wii U’s dual-screen functionality, Microsoft releasing an iPhone and iPad game with Xbox Live Achievements, and where to buy the documentary Minecraft: The Story of Mojang without digital rights management.

Best of 2012:

The DeanBeat: Game industry predictions for 2013
Here’s the scorecard on our 2012 predictions for the game industry
The biggest gaming trends of 2012
The news that shook the game world in 2012
Kickstarter game projects raised $79M in 2012
GamesBeat’s 2012 Game of the Year: The Walking Dead
The best games of 2012 (GamesBeat staff picks)
The worst gaming trends of 2012
The best MMOs of 2012
12 of the best games for your new mobile device
The best video game trailers of 2012
The biggest gaming disappointments of 2012
The best video game soundtracks of 2012
The biggest gaming surprises of 2012
Top 15 mobile games of 2012
2012′s most innovative game ideas
Top gaming technologies of 2012
5 of the best original games of 2012
The best indie games of 2012
The video game industry’s 2012 holiday cards

News:
Blizzard: ‘We are going back to the drawing board’ for team deathmatch in Diablo III
International Game Developers Association appoints new executive director
This week in The Nintendo Download: Wii U discounts, Lost Levels, and Mega Man
Nintendo uploads tip videos for New Super Mario Bros. U to YouTube
Nintendo secures the patent for a specific use of the Wii U’s dual-screen functionality
How to gain early access to the Dead Space 3 demo
Microsoft launches first game for iPhone, iPad with Xbox Achievements
Where to buy Minecraft: The Story of Mojang documentary without DRM

Previews:
The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is an ambitious shooter that’s faithful to the show (preview)

Pieces of flair:
How Canada has become America’s mobile app guinea pig
A tale of two zombie games: The Walking Dead vs. The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct
5 worse BioShock Infinite covers
How major MMOs are celebrating Christmas in-game (gallery)
The many major missteps of Far Cry 3
Outlandish factoids from Street Fighter’s expanded universe (gallery)

Filed under: Business, Games

Where to buy Minecraft: The Story of Mojang documentary without DRM

Jeffrey Grubb — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 01:19:26 +0000

You can get on Xbox Live now and watch a documentary about Minecraft … but only if you have a Gold subscription to Microsoft’s online service.

What if you don’t have an Xbox Live Gold account and don’t want to purchase one to watch Minecraft: The Story of Mojang from 2 Player Productions? You don’t have to, and you don’t have to wait long to get the film completely free of digital rights management.

Tonight at midnight, 2 Player Productions will put the film live up on Redux.com. It is DRM-free, meaning you can move the video file to any of your devices.

Minecraft: The Story of Mojang follows the developer after gamers made the block-building open-world title a cultural phenomenon.

Filed under: Games

GamesBeat weekly roundup: THQ bankrupt, Machinima downsizes, and Shaq is back

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 19:30:12 +0000

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, THQ files for bankruptcy, gaming video giant Machinima lays off 10 percent of its staff, and we crown The Walking Dead as our 2012 Game of the Year.

You’ll also find reviews for Black Knight Sword, Mass Effect 3: Omega, and Middle Manager of Justice.

News:
The DeanBeat: The Newtown shooting will turn up the heat on video game violence — but will it make us think?
DayZ lead designer considered leaving the project
This week in the Nintendo Download: Mario, Wario, and Alex Trebek
Turn your friends into Pokémon in the next Mystery Dungeon game on 3DS
Writer McComb isn’t worried about the lack of the Planescape license for the new Torment game
Valve gives Plantronics the rights to officially brand headsets with Aperture Laboratories and Mann Co. logos
Visualizing a tough year for the retail core game industry
Rabbit pulls reimagined video chat out of its hat
THQ’s bankruptcy filing reveals new games
THQ files for bankruptcy, assets sold to investor Clearlake for $60M
Valve pulls The War Z from Steam over fan backlash, offers refunds
Nintendo’s TVii available tomorrow, but it won’t be fully functional
MeritShare finds a way to gamify employee recognition (exclusive)
Green Throttle Games launches developer program as part of play to take over living room gaming
Assassin’s Creed III glitches and issues addressed in massive patch (full details)
Dartmouth professor names Zynga’s Mark Pincus one of the worst CEOs of 2012
Get ready for great games on a thin laptop as AMD preps new mobile graphics chips
Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion coming to Star Wars: The Old Republic
Nvidia’s next Tegra 4 processor may come with 72 graphics cores
Minecraft documentary free for Xbox Live Gold subscribers this weekend
Online gaming firm Aeria Games merges with Japan’s Gamepot
The spirit of BattleBots lives on in a new robot-building game
Arktos Entertainment acquires majority stake in game studio Hammerpoint Interactive (exclusive)
Why Google predicts Microsoft’s next game console will beat Sony’s
Developer id Software releases Rage add-on next week
Game videos giant Machinima lays off 10 percent of staff
NRA blames video games for mass murders

Mobile News:
Kabam scores big with highest-grossing game on App Store for 2012
Apple freezes the App Store in advance of the holiday app-downloading bonanza
Jordan Mechner’s Karateka remake returns to Apple (iOS) devices today
Mochi Media says 86 percent of Flash game developers are expanding into mobile (exclusive)
MindSnacks’ new iPad games help you learn languages, pass the SAT
After 6M paid downloads, mobile hit Pocket God wraps up with its final, apocalyptic update
Kamcord is helping users record 7 mobile-game videos every second
With more than 20M downloads, Battle Bears mobile game hits San Francisco’s billboards
Plain Vanilla releases its multiplayer video game quiz for iOS
MediaBrix’s responsive design ensures in-game ads will always look right (exclusive)
SGN launches its MasterKey tool for making cross-platform social and mobile games
Gamevil surpasses 200M game downloads on smartphones
Exclusive: Go Ninja developer brings Shaquille O’Neal back to video games

Best of 2012:
GamesBeat’s 2012 Game of the Year: The Walking Dead
The best indie games of 2012
The best games of 2012 (GamesBeat staff picks)
The game industry’s 2012 holiday cards

Interviews:
Heroes of Newerth 3.0 adds bots, hopes to teach new players (interview)
Crytek’s chief: Nothing will beat Crysis 3′s graphics for at least two years (interview)

Previews:
Hawken’s open beta shows a thoughtfully designed mech combat game (preview)
Insomaniac’s Fuse lets you lead a team of four badass agents (preview)
Toki Tori 2′s simple mechanics reward your curiosity (hands-on preview)
Zen Pinball 2 on Nintendo’s eShop gives you a choice of dozens of pinball tables (preview)
The 3DS library gets a little weirder with these quirky eShop games (preview)

Reviews:
Marvel Heroes needs more humanity, more warmth, and more MMO
Black Knight Sword’s punishing difficulty requires more luck than skill to overcome (review)
Middle Manager of Justice is all business, no gameplay (review)
Mass Effect 3: Omega is explosive, nostalgic, and somewhat pointless (review)

Pieces of Flair:
What sales managers can learn from the four types of online gamers
Solving a Wii mystery: The fate of the awesome toy WeeWaa
Exploring why some players are unable to initiate Halo 4′s single-player campaign
A history of bodies: Video game violence and the player
Love your free players to unlock the full potential of free-to-play games
What are your holiday gaming traditions?
Justin Bieber, Minecraft’s Creeper, and other cameos in modern games (gallery)

Filed under: Games

Minecraft documentary free for Xbox Live Gold subscribers this weekend

Jeffrey Grubb — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 00:08:55 +0000

I hope you remembered to get your annual present for Microsoft — a payment of $59.99 for Xbox Live Gold — because then the company will remember to give you your holiday gift: a free Minecraft documentary.

Minecraft: The Story of Mojang will begin airing on Xbox Live on Saturday, December 22. It is free to anyone with an Xbox Live Gold account.

The show from 2 Player Productions (Penny Arcade: The Series, Double Fine Adventure’s upcoming documentary) will cover the rise of everyone’s favorite block-building game and its Swedish developer, Mojang. Naturally, Mojang founder Markus “Notch” Persson is a central figure in the movie, and a big part of the movie’s arc focuses on his efforts to build a video game company.

To check out details about the premier including a trailer, navigate to the Minecraft tile on the Xbox Live homepage.

The film originally secured full funding as a Kickstarter project. It raised $210,297, which surpassed the stated $150,000 goal.

Filed under: Games

Ho, ho, how about some holiday skins for Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition

Jeffrey Grubb — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 23:13:17 +0000

If you’re a Minecraft player on the Xbox 360 who is also in the holiday spirit, we’ve got some cheery news for you.

The developer handling Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition, 4J Studios, will release the Festive Pack of skins Monday for 80 Microsoft Points. This add-on will feature 24 Santa, reindeer, and other holiday-themed skins for the Minecraft characters and world.

Sneak Peek At The Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition Festive Skin Pack! bit.ly/VEHB6e

— Microsoft Studios (@PlayXBLA) December 13, 2012

PlayXBLA, the official blog for Microsoft’s digital-distribution platform, revealed the details of the DLC pack.

Normally, 4J Studios’ skin packs for Minecraft include 48 skins and go for 160 Microsoft Points, but they obviously wanted to get something out in time for the Christmas holiday.

Minecraft is one of gaming’s biggest success stories. Its original developer is Mojang, which still handles the PC version and has sold more than 17 million copies across all platform. The 360 version has sold more around 4.5 million copies on its own, which makes it one of the biggest hits on Xbox Live Arcade.

It continues to rank as one of the most-played games on XBLA, according to Microsoft’s Xbox evangelist Major Nelson. That suggests that skin packs like this one are big money makers for all involved.

Filed under: Games