Minecraft Pocket Edition to get survival mode

Posted on January 8, 2012 4:34 pm by admin

Mojang, the company behind the hugely popular (and main reason we get any visitors) Minecraft, have announced that the pocket Edition of Minecraft that is currently available on Android an iOS is going through some changes, bassed on feedback form the fans who wanted more than just creative mode.

Apparently the Pocket edition has been design/coded in a way that makes this not quite as simple as you might believe, but it will make its way to us. A February date has been named for submission to the respective market place and app store, where we can expect some mobs, though not so much of the crafting yet, as the GUI would have to be changed.

There was no word on weather they would allow login to you normal minecraft servers eventually, which is really what i’d like, though in all honesty, i never get the time to play anymore, and i personally don’t think the mobile edition is worth the time, unless its to view creations while on the go.

The best part about minecraft is mining for resources, only that doesnt matter in multiplayer as you can give yourself anything, and in creative you already have a whole bunch of stuff. i’d like the limitations of 1 player mode, but in a multiplayer world, where you have to earn what you build. Yeah i could just not make myself an op, buuuut, i don’t have that kinda will power, just wish that was what was the official game. Oh well.

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its a block eat block world out there, figuratively speaking

Posted on January 7, 2012 12:17 am by lartens

I take a break from my evening grind of catching up on tech/game news to mention 2 interesting blocky games in development, both of which where tweeted by @notch, so if you follow him on twitter no doubt you’ve already seen the gameplay videos, but in case you haven’t there is the blocky rpg “Cube World” which you can follow the blog of development at http://wollay.blogspot.com/. Even though the title isn’t available for download, the developer has shown off some video of his cute blocky world and it looks pretty, with some clever questing and fighting thrown in. The indie dev has using c++ as the programming language and direct X, the latter means it will not be a simple port to other platforms but he has said a future version for mac is planned. Though quite when is another story as the developer is about to start at Mojang, the company founded by @notch the creator and publisher of Minecraft. If you like what he’s doing in Cube World don’t be too disappointed with his new employment though, he has said he will still be working on his indie title.

The second game is Castle Story, a game by 2 Developers from Canada, see http://www.sauropodstudio.com/. This little gem is a Real Time Strategy (RTS) style mine and build game set on floating islands in the sky. In the sampler video one of the developers walks us through sending men off to build a wall, and some others to mine for the materials, then he hsows us a castle he made earlier and then blows it up. So castles in the sky, reminds me of something hehe. It looks really good, and is one too look out for.

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XNA for xbox maybe more hidden, but Microsoft haven’t forgotten us

Posted on January 4, 2012 10:40 pm by lartens

In a surprise post on the msdn blogs, the might Microsoft have listened to feedback from the XNA creators club app hub community, and finally upped the maximum file size form a mear 150MB to 500MB, not only that but the 80MS prove point can now be on files up to 150MB, before anything over 50MB had to be 240 or 400.

This is great news along with another new maximum, the number of games a developer could publish on XBOX Live Indie Games used to be just 10, if and developers had anymore games they would have to setup another subscription for the development platform, but this threshold has been doubled to 20 titles, how’s that for high digs.

Of course the grigorigs own developers “Aminal Team”/”Team Aminal” only have 1 game published, that i don’t recommend getting until i update it, but there’s more in the pipe line, like a beach volleyball game with manga style girls, oh yes, call that one exclusive scoop for the grigorig team. There’s also the chu chu rocket rip off that i started at uni, let’s just sweap that one under the rug for now. Unfortunately this new found full time employment thing has crippled the game creating/playing/bloging/and everything else duties i was once almost on top of, but i’m sure eventually it will be done.

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iTunes match is in the UK Now

Posted on December 15, 2011 11:23 pm by lartens

Excellent news this pre Christmas, Apple has released iTunes Match outside of the US earlier than what was reported.

iTunes Match is where for a subscription of £21.99 a year, iTunes will scan your music, and find it in its database, where it will then allow you to download a drm free 256kps AAC file which is supported by Apple devices. Not only this, but if your music collection has something apple does not, it will allow you to upload these files so that you always have them across any device you wish to download to, that is linked to your apple account of course.

So if you have a bunch of 128kps mp3’s you ripped nearly a decade ago when the average hard drives were like 40-80GB in size, and the ipod mini had a meager 4GB space, then you can get a new shinny audio file that takes up more space but sounds better, all with minimal fuss. Huzzah, there’s one slight problem, we may not have 40GB drives anymore, but some of us have ssd’s in our macbooks which almost put us in the same position we were in back then, a 256GB SSD split between Windows and Mac, plus Lions restore feature, the multitude of development tools, and the World of Warcraft we never play, means we still do not have space. personally, after just installing xcode 4.3, i now have 2GB space remaining, *sigh. For me i shall be using a different account anyway as you need to have a credit card tied to the account, as it stands at the moment i use only pre paid cards. It’s to limit spending, and although it will ties me out of some of the benifits, i needded the tracks on my desktop anyway, this seems like the best solution without re ripping cd’s, and that s just for the one i do have.

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3DS update ahoy

Posted on December 9, 2011 12:07 am by lartens

The November update for the 3DS is upon us, this December 8th, hey it could of been worse, the big updates are the 3D video recording which is just as bad as the 3D camera so i’ll skip that one, but the most important feature is transferring 3DS data from one 3DS you own to another 3DS you own before you sell your old, you know because you bought the limited edition zelda 3DS, even though you already had both the console and the game. Sucka.

So being a sucka myself, i can confirm that it does go smoothly, but you are limited to once in 7 days, and have a limit of 5 times a device can be involved in transferring, hopefully there won’t be much need for this. Look on the bright side, at least old ds titles work on the 3ds, unlike paying for your old psp games to be on the vita, and thats only some of them, what a gyp. And yes, i will be getting a vita, and don’t ask me why, i’ve got over 2 months to justify it.

Oh, theres suppose to be some better dlc integration too, and updated mii pass goodness. I haven’t mii passed anybody since the Zelda concert, which i still don’t think i’ve reviewed, in case i don’t get round to that, it was phenomenal, and if the opportunity arrises again, its well worth 150 dabloons, and they were as cheap as £63, if that seems steep to you, it won’t after you’ve experienced video game music in an orchestra live. The CD with skyward sword didn’t do it justice. Speaking of which, be careful for a game stopping bug whe you complete some desert stuff first and then talk to a particular goron twice, Nintendo have news of it apparently, i haven’t checked, just be careful, or go visit nintendo to be sure.

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xbox, play, play PLAY!, PLAAAAAAY!!!!!!!

Posted on December 7, 2011 11:49 pm by lartens

XBOX Dashboard update, going metro like windows phone 7 and the upcoming windows 8. Once you get passed the agreements, you can almost use kinect for the interface, maybe you could do that before? i don’t know, i mean who uses a Kinect on xbox anyway?

In all seriousness though the voice control of kinect isn’t too bad considering, except when trying to play a video, “rewind” fine, “faster” fine, but “play”, “PLAY” is a freaking nightmare. At least that’s been my experience so far, think i’ll be keeping that controller handy for the more advanced controls.

Love Film was also included in the update (XBL GOLD members only), as a first time subscriber to the service i started off with some “Happy Feet” streaming, which was the perfect movie after watching BBC’s Frozen Planet over the last month. Unfortunately i lost xbox live connectivity twice during the movie which was frustrating, both times were whilst rewinding the video and yelling at the xbox, maybe i hurt its feeling hehe. I’m unsure if this is a LoveFilm service problem or XBL, as Ben has had similar trouble streaming from zune in the past. The good news is i was able to resume where i left off in the video, though i had to do a search for the movie to start playing it, there was no quick easy access of previous or recently viewed which is a bit of a let down. The video quality is SD sadly, but it was adequate enough, but i’ve also put Captain America and Thor on my blu-ray request list. There was a deal coming from the amazon site of a £15 amazon gift card and a month free trial of lovefilm for new customers which is great, had to sign up with a credit card though, but its ok to cancel before the months up so long as any rentals are returned.

Other new features of the update are inclusion of cloud storage for save games, something that will benefit those who visit their friends a lot and who don’t keep their saves on a usb drive.

The apps section is pretty slim, with LoveFilm and Zune as the only ones currently listed on the marketplace, though sky and last.fm are still available on xbox anyway.

The real kicka though is how far down indie games are now buried, you have to go to the main “Games” header, then game marketplace then another “Games” header, then select “Game Type” which will give you “arcade”, “games on demand”, “indie games” and XBOX originals.

So i’m not too disappointed with the new update, it has though caused me to either waste time watching stuff on LoveFilm and renting movies, or waste money on not having the time to do those things. I definitely wouldn’t of bothered with the service if it wasn’t on xbox. But as someone who generally fears change, i don’t mind this update at all.

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Nintendo 3DS update delayed but soon

Posted on November 30, 2011 11:03 pm by lartens

The nintendo 3DS update that was due very late november is in the internal testing phase at Nintendo and should be rolled out by December 8th.

The update includes 3D video recording for upto 10 minutes, as well as some stop motion goodness, but more importantly for the insane mugs that bought the 3DS at launch, and then again for the limited edition zelda version, the update will allow 3DS to 3DS account transfer, so all those ambassador games we got for free can be taken over to the zelda 3ds in time to resell the original 3DS before Christmas.

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Street fighting Gold Action

Posted on November 29, 2011 10:23 pm by lartens

Those of you who subscribe to Xbox Live Arcade Gold can get half price deal this week on Super Street Fighter 2Turbo HD Remix 600 MS, Streetfighter 2 Hyper Fighting 200MS, and Final Fight Double Impact 400MS.

Of course if you’re a die hard capcom fan into your classic, you probably already own these, unless you were to cheap to pay 1200 for a weird looking SF2 like me, in which case you gotta ask yourself one question. Is half price worth it?

Take the week the remaining week to think about it until the weekend, i am.

Posted in Arcade, consoles, Fighting, Games, General, lartens, News, XBox 360 | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ooops, we forgot to mention, Minecraft is officially launched, but you knew that already

Posted on November 23, 2011 12:05 am by lartens

So last weekened was the big MineCon in vegas, where 5000 met to celelbrate the release with @notch and the rest of Mojang. As we here at grig can’t afford a plane ticket, 3 nights in a hotel, and the cost of the convention itself, then we didn’t go, but you may have seen that we didi share with you how IGN were streaming the event, which was nice, the Yogcast panel was a waste of time with that annoying guy yelling in the microphone every now and then in a high pitched voice, i wouldn’t bother with their interview with notch either, nothing of importance there.

So Minecraft 1.0 is out of beta. It now has an end, theres a whole level up thing happening, and there’s more things to craft and build and mine, awesome. Just one problem, there’s no time anymore, this is november, it’s gotta be the single most popular month of big release games EVER, hot on the heals of an already full on release from october, if you didn’t beat Batman already, then you’ve been compounded with Sonic Generations, Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3, Skyrim with its 300 hours of play lol, Zelda Skyward Sword, Goldeneye Reloaded, Halo anniversary, rayman origins, Saints row the third, did i miss any, OK, we’ve not got all them games, but i’ve atleast got 4 of this months big titles, though goldeneye is done, MW3 is not as interesting as skyrim or zelda, which by the way, my 2 hours with zelda has been magical, definitely pick this sucka up., If you don’t have a wii, but have a decent computer, why not try out the Dolphin emulator, it can give you pretty good graphics, but will take some processing. i’m struggling to get good frame rates and limit the glitches at the mo on the MBP, if i get that sucka worked out i’ll post the settings.

Anyway, what am i blathering on about, congratulations notch and mojang, on releasing minecraft 1.0, can’t wait to meet that dragon. Oh, and Minecraft on IOS is not that great, it looks nice, but doesn’t suit the form factor. it would be better as a viewer to you previous online worlds rather than a simplified builder.

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Need to buy a new Kinect, don’t use the one you got?

Posted on November 22, 2011 11:31 pm by lartens

Well folkes, here’s the skinny, over at the Microsoft Research Kinect for Windows blog, there’s news that next year will see a new kinect that will have “optimized certain hardware components and made firmware adjustments which better enable PC-centric scenarios”. So if you purchased a Kinect for use with the Kinect for Windows SDK, but don’t have time to do anything with it between your job, your blog, your skyrim/zelda/batman/driver/amnesia/my Japanese coach, then by the time you do get some time, a new Kinect will be out that hopefully has better support for actually detecting you closer up or behind a desk, they haven’t said anything about the desk thing, but they have mentioned with new firmware the depth camera can see objects as close as 50cm, and that “Near mode” will allow “close up” applications, and then it goes into “beyond the living room scenarios for Kinect for Xbox 360” in the same sentence as the close up stuff. Now i failed english many a time, even just then i spelt english wrong, twice!, but my point is that the blog post wasn’t fully clear or detailed, except the part about a shorter cable and something about a dongle, but it didn’t say if it would be able to do away with the power supply.

All this was kinda tied into mentioning when the commercial SDK comes out early next year, so weather we can see the new kinect this early remains to be seen, again, things were implied by sentence structure and not specifically said, though it would make sense that the commercial SDK that will benefit from the new Kinect, will have the new hardware to available at the same time.

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