Lartens

Minecraft XBLA profitable in first hour

As Mojang handed over the reigns of an XBLA port of Minecraft to developer 4J Studios last year, the game has been hotly anticipated by fans, and fan fare marketed by the big Microsoft, first at the 2011 E3 expo nearly a Year ago, and more recently in the NEXT Arcade promotion, kinda like the summer of arcade but in spring. It’s fair to say that Microsoft wanted this to happen badly, and there is some speculation of just how good a contract notch and team got with this bad boy, as apparently the update model for Minecraft is breaking the norm, a lot of developers are not so lucky with the promises regarding updates.

Anyway, ground work spiel aside, it has been publicly broadcast across the twittersphere that Mincraft was profitable in the first hour of release, thats over a years worth of development by a third party studio payed for, and whatever else goes into an XBLA release, covered in an hour, not just any hour, this is an hour where a large part of the world, is sleeping or working, or in some form of schooling. the hour when people look, its not there, they come back an hour later. but no, it did what it had to do in that first one.

Also causing a smidgin of controversy maybe is how notch knows that they’ve sold over 400,000 Minecraft XBLA titles, later claiming its form the leader board count after the developers of Fex said they were not privy to their stats even a month after release, and some stating that its only when they get the first check 3 months later that they can really see what happened. Apparently Microsoft like to keep stats close to their chest, even when marketing how great their sales are. As other NEXT Arcade line ups have been breaking records for fastest or largest sales in the first 24 hours or whatever, both Fez and the new Trials Evolution HD were publicized as fast movers and shakers.

Quake Live – Let’s Frag ‘em


Quake Live is quake in the browser with a plugin, and it looks wicked, and plays brilliantly, you may have recently seen a game with @notch, @jeb, and i think @kappische of Mojang play some young dude and a couple of guys to do with the minecraft for free website that notch asked to be taken down.

Well now, this week running 30th April to 6th May 2012, quake is allowing premium content free. This is the middle tear, there is the standard free to join and have some access, the premium which allows access to more content, and pro which has all content and allows you to create your own matches. Premuim is £1.59 per month billed anually, and pro is £3.18 per month also billed anually, very reasonable if you ask me.

Now at work we play Unreal Tournement but with the ease of setting up an account and downloading the plugin i’m voting we try this sucka out for a while, it looks fantastic, fluid playing and old school, love it.

Now what you waiting for, go over to quakelive.com, sign up and start fragging, there’s even a practice mode against some bots to ease you in. By the by, i used the Chrome browser, but apparently latest chrome firefox and 32 bit ie 8 and above are supported too. And is apparently running on Windows, mac and Linux. Boo ya.

Ludum Dare 23 is kicking off with Tiny World, oh

Ludum Dare Site Header
Here in the UK the time has just struck 02:00 and the gauntlet is down, Ludum Dare #23 a 10 year aniversary has started with the theme “Tiny World” and now i’m stumped, hmmm what to do?

For those un initiated with Ludum dare, it is a competition for fun where by the participants create a video game in 48 hours from scratch on their own or if they enter the Jam then in a team with a little extra time.

Generally those involved have an account with ludumdare.com and they post their progress to the main blog stream as they go, where there is a whole community of like minded game creator enthusiasts trying to beat the clock and keep their sanity.

At the end, with games submitted including source code, everybody gets to play other participants entries and vote and comment on them. then 30 days later a winner is announced and everybody can see how they did. Fun huh? hehe. I like it.

Fez gets April 13th XBLA release

Wait a cotton picking minute, the Grig has new posts barely a day apart, what gives? Fez release date thats what, 800 Microsoft points on the unusual release day of a friday, eh? Those crazy indie devs just don’t know how to fall in line, hehe.

Fez is a very 8 bit like retro graphicly game, with gameplay that is primarily a platform side scroller which can turn around the environment in 4 steps until you are back on the view you were at, giving the player a hint to the perspective to which the game character Gomez can jump the platforms which in a 3d space wouldnt be inline but from a side on view is, and that is what counts. if that makes sense. You know what,i pucture paints a thousand words, and if you string 25 of them along per second and give the illusion of movement, then that’s even better. here goes, embeding from vimeo

XBLA has a NEXT thing, and it has Minecraft in it

XBOX Arcade Next promotion screenSo Microsoft like to do these little XBLA release schedule promotion things for decent profile games, and call it a name like “Summer of Arcade” or in the case of this spring, “Arcade NEXT”. Starting April 18th with the Trials Evolution, certain XBLA titles will be released every wednesday and sporting the new 400 gamerscore point limit. The Arcade NEXT promotion runs through to May 9th when dun da da daaaa Minecraft XBOX 360 Edition is finally released giving us the perfect opertunity to mine that diamond without cheating on a server and then copying files into the single player loaded up with diamond pickaxe and armour. Locking down the experience is exactly what i wanted, and 400 XBOX Achievmos thrown in to the mix is a bargain, though the 1600 MS points is perhaps not, but we all know that won’t stop us.

The rest of the line up is Bloodforge April 25 for 1200 MS points, Fable Heroes May 2nd for 800 MS points, and the Trials Evolution that kicks it all of is 1200 MS points.

Are video games art?

We pose the question because this week saw both the BAFTA video game awards, and the opening of the The Art of Video Games exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Lets start off with a hearty congratulations to our favourite Sweed, Markus @notch Persson who picked up the Game Special Award at the Baftas. We aslo congratulate British Developers at Rocksteady Studios for the latest Batman instillment, Arkham City, which Won 2 awards, one in the Action category and one in Performer for Mark Hamill’s role as The Joker, which is well deserved for the Star Wars 2nd favourite hero, assuming we agree Hans Solo is the cool hero of course.

Portal 2 was the big winner, unsurprisingly as it was an enormously satisfying sequel with fun logic puzzles, humour and great story telling. Funnily enough it picked up Bafta’s for Best Game, Best Design and Best Story.

Rayman Origins also picked up a cheecky best Artistic Achievement Award. So well done to all, for the full list see http://www.bafta.org/games/awards/nominees-winners-2012,2892,BA.html.

Now on to the Smithsonian, apparently there are 3 parts to the Art of Video Games exhibition, the first is where you listen to the designers, the second where you can play from a selection of 5 games which is essentially showcasing the building blocks of game mechanics, story telling and other aspects that games have since built upon. The exhibit is on from March 16th – September 30th. Some of the classic title on display are pacman, zelda, super mario, pitfall, and many more.

The debate as to wether video games are art depends on who you are, some find that 8 bit graphics are art, take Minecraft for instance, and recreated megaman in blocks is like pixel art, and the fact its built in a 3d world is pretty funky. Then there’s the upcoming retro city rampage, which envoles a feeling of nostalgia for old nes, games, i could consider that art too. Moving into hi res games, some of the graphics are breathtaking, sometimes almost real, and sometimes just a beautiful creation. Games like limbo have that noir look to it and is definitely an artistic view. But of course with games, there is more to the art than just the imagery, theres the story, and the gameplay mechanics all of which can be an artform. Portals puzzles are well thought out and constructed, again an artform.

So if games aren’t art, what are they?

Just over 2 months until Fez

Fez XBLA artWoah woah woah woah, what? Long time in the making indie title Fez, is finally coming to XBLA 2nd of May according to xbox.com.

Fez sees a little 2d creature named Gomez, embark on a journey in a 2d world seen by 4 perspectives, kinda making it seem 3d. Now 3d can mean many things in the gaming world, the most recent being 3d with glasses, but traditionally its 3 dimensional objects in a 3 dimensional space in the game world that is then calculated with distances etc to find the color of the closest pixel to the camera origin that is not obscured by another onto a 2d frustum or viewing area, as apoosed to 2 dimensional flat sprites like the classic 8 bit NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) days. Fez is a 2d classic game, but the 3d world that it referes to is 4 perspectives in 2d, for instance, if Gomez is jumping along platforms on a very cuboid tower, then when he reaches the edge of a side, the view pans round to the next side and he continues scrolling along, in the world he is now moving into the distance, but to the player he is still in the 2 realm moving left and right. This is hard to explain, but it looks beautiful and will have plenty of puzzles to challenge the player. So come May 2nd, check it out.

Original release date: 5/2/2012
Developer: Polytron Corporation
Publisher: Xbox LIVE Arcade
Genre: Action & Adventure, Platformer, Puzzle & Trivia

Kinect for windows coming February, BUT all is not peachy

Microsoft have announced over at their blog that Kinect for Windows is coming this February 1st in 12 countries including the UK, Japan, Australia, Germany, Spain, USA, canada, France, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, and New Zealand. Though i can see no listing for the hardware on amazon at this time, the price is said to be around $250, which will probably end up around £231 here (based purely on typical UK pricing, nothing official).

The reasons for the increased price are based on the lack of ecosystem and subsidising, after all Kinect for Xbox brings sales of Kinect games, and also helps sell Xbox 360′s. A lot of money went into the research and development of the kinect, and £100 price point of the original is still the cheapest by far for the technology, hence why it was so popular with hobbyists and hackers of robotics.

Along with the release of the hardware, comes new software, the SDK (Software Development Kit) which is free, but the big tough Micro-soft are stating that non-commercial deployment is for the new hardware, and not the xbox 360 Kinect. the Beta SDK can still be used for non-commercial deployment, and the licence is supported until june 16th 2016. The commercial deployment is also for the new hardware. So, whos going to offer the competition for new drivers for the new Kinect, for non windows SDK use? i’ve got a limbo code i can gift on steam. just saying.
#####UPDATE######
A new blog post from MSDN suggests that the new SDK will still work with the Xbox 360 kinect, which makes the previous comment confusing to say the least, I’ll confirm when it’s out I guess.

So, i’m going to need to spend more money on a new Kinect, that any development is going to lock out the 18 million other xbox 360 Kinect users. though to be fair, i doubt many of them are using it on their windows machine anyway.

Lets see how it goes

Minecraft Pocket Edition to get survival mode

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.

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

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.