Post by Morreion on Oct 1, 2013 9:43:38 GMT -5
PayPal Freezes MineCraft Dev’s 600k Euros (Rock Paper Shotgun)
In PayPal’s defense, a PC indie developer racking up 600 thousand euros is pretty suspicious, albeit only in a “What brand of racehorse steroids did Notch import that made him this amazing” kind of way.
Minecraft is a bit meh isn't it...oh wait.... (Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle)
So much for the wondrous discoveries we dreamed of making. We had been playing for over an hour and we had nothing to show for it except for a few basic tools and a bag full of useless rock and wood. I was ready to chuck it in myself but before I logged off I thought I would see if I could make some kind of crude dwelling with all that stone and wood.
Two hours later I was still playing and the penny finally dropped. Minecraft is not just a game about discovery. It is a game about creation. It is a magnificent lego set that allows you walk around and interact with your own creations. When my daughter saw what I was doing she wanted back in and we spent several further hours playing.
Minecraft embodies the attributes that started it all (Keen & Graev)
Minecraft captures that perfect feeling. It has basic graphics, slightly better than ‘just enough to get by’, but shines above the rest with its gameplay. When playing it I can’t help but allow my imagination to take over and suddenly the graphics do not matter at all. This is how it felt back when playing games like EverQuest and UO. Neither of those had great graphics but both did something amazing with gameplay that essentially propelled gaming forward and created the foundation for what we have today. It’s so, so rare to see a game come around that is pure and captures that old feeling that got me hooked on gaming.
Minecraft guild creates massive world to help educate children (Massively)
Massively Minecraft (no relation) is a community of Minecraft players dedicated to the education of children on a massive scale through the popular indie sandbox. Created by virtual world vet Jokaydia, Massively Minecraft is "a Guild based learning community for kids aged 4-16 who are interested in developing digital media skills, exploring their creativity and developing online social skills." Of course, in an environment like that, there's an application process to get onto the multiplayer server's whitelist, so safety is a priority.
The world of World of Warcraft recreated in Minecraft (Massively)
Minecraft players are well-known for their insane, over-the-top LEGO building projects, but one may have all the rest beat. A player named Rumsey is in the process of recreating the entire world of Azeroth from World of Warcraft inside the game, and while it's not completed quite yet, it's already incredibly impressive.
Rumsey says that he had to cheat a little: Instead of placing every single block by hand, he wrote a piece of software that helps to automate the process of making full-scale version of the world. He's recently completed one continent -- Kalimdor -- and has plans to do the others as well as all of WoW's dungeons. He says that the only problem he's run into is Minecraft's height limit of 128 blocks, so he's had to employ mods to get around that.
Why Minecraft is more than just another video game (BBC)
Minecraft's creators revealed this week that the blocky freeform building game has 33 million users. It can easily become an obsession.
Britain rebuilds itself with 22 billion 'Minecraft' blocks (The Verge)
The Ordnance Survey is Britain's national mapping agency, but having already mapped most of the country on paper in its 200-year-plus history, it's turned to Minecraft to recreate the largest of the British Isles.
The world they've created is 22 billion blocks big, correlating to 224,000 square kilometers (86,000 square miles) of British terrain. It's only missing Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands, and the Isle of Man: parts that make up the United Kingdom as a whole, and areas not covered by the mapping agency..
The Creator (New Yorker)
Since the game’s release, in 2009, Minecraft has sold in excess of twenty million copies, earned armfuls of prestigious awards, and secured merchandising deals with LEGO and other toymakers. Last year, Persson earned over a hundred million dollars from the game and its merchandise. Persson—better known to his global army of teen-age followers by his Internet handle, Notch—has a raggedy, un-marketed charm. He is, by his own admission, only a workmanlike coder, not a ruthless businessman. “I’ve never run a company before and I don’t want to feel like a boss,” he said. “I just want to turn up and do my work.”
How Minecraft became one of the biggest video games in history (Los Angeles Times)
In a time when gaming companies are striving for ever more realistic graphics, Minecraft uses large, blocky graphics -- there’s not a curved line in sight. Close your eyes and propel yourself back to the early 1980s, when you probably last slipped a quarter into a slot to play a game such as Frogger. Minecraft’s graphics look like they come from that era of gaming.
