For a beautiful few years, you have near-complete control over what your child plays. You decide what’s allowed and when, what to play together, which gems from the past to share with an excited five-year-old. Then a little more time passes, and suddenly the situation is completely different.
There comes a point where kids are more bothered about playing with their friends than playing with you, which – though natural and healthy, and sometimes actually quite a relief if you’ve ever spent painful hours trying to beat annoying bosses for them- can also be a little bit heartbreaking. When my teen stepson was about six, I got so bored of watching him play the same few levels of various Spider-Man games over and over again that I introduced him to Minecraft, and we had a truly cherishable few months exploring the game together and building weird treehouses and underground vaults and pretending to be scared of the zombies.
Then his wee friends got in on the action, and before too long he wasn’t interested in playing with me any more. A little later, he started getting good enough at Spider-Man that Dad didn’t have to sit there beside him to help through the hard bits. He’d come home full of enthusiasm for ropey-ass YouTube-legend games like Five Nights at Freddy’s that had spread around school like wildfire. He was forming his own individual relationship with video games, totally independent from us. And now, years down the line, he has completely different tastes.
My partner and I both have jobs involving video games. The house is full of them, and we have a pretty eclectic gaming diet. We both get a kick out of digging out lesser-known games with some shining distinction: a surreal story, an interesting art style, an extremely clever mechanic. I love huge role-playing games you can sink into for 100 hours; he likes to jump between several games at once, sampling what each has to offer. Our predilections come together on things like Yakuza and the Souls series and diverge on Nintendo (he doesn’t get it) and survival horror (I am a huge wuss), and neither of us really bothers with online play. Despite all of this, we have somehow managed to bring up a Gamer Boy who almost exclusively plays multiplayer shooters and recently refused to try Assassin’s Creed because “it’s in third-person”. I mean, what do you say to that? It’s like refusing to watch a Ghibli film because “it’s animated”.
Your children are not carbon copies of you, of course, and expecting them to be anything like you is the source of a lot of needless familial stress. But it’s fascinating that despite sharing a passion for video games, the teen and I can find so little common ground these days. For a while we had Destiny, but where I was perfectly happy to play it at the weekend for a month or so every time a new expansion came out, he spent hours pretty much every day rolling the dice for the best guns and gear and becoming a juggernaut in the Crucible. His current dual obsessions are Counter-Strike and Fortnite, both of which make me feel about 3000 years old. (Am I out of touch? No… it’s the children who are wrong.)
It’s rewarding too, though, to see your kids forging their own path. I feel the same way when I watch my stepson dominate a round of Fortnite as I probably would if he were amazing at rugby: slightly baffled, but nonetheless proud.
SethBling showed how it works in a video uploaded over the weekend. In Minecraft, he opens a large chest whose 6×9 inventory space has been converted into a 2D area populated by item icons that can be broken down and crafted into stuff, just like in the main game.
He can move his avatar, represented by a tunic and head, left or right by clicking on a block in that direction. When he runs up against a block of rock or wood he can break it apart and acquire the materials. In an inventory screen within the chest screen, he can even combine those materials into new items, like a wooden pickaxe.
SethBling’s Minecraft within Minecraft even has a little house with a bed inside for when contemplating the nature of simulations within simulations proves too exhausting.
SethBling replicated the “real” Minecraft world within the chest using a special /loot command, which can be downloaded as an add-on to the game. This lets the player control the Armor Stand item from the chest screen and interact with the world outside the chest as if the Armor Stand were the player. Everything around the Armor Stand is rendered inside the inventory screen, and anything SethBling breaks apart or changes in the chest happens in whatever part of the world the Armor Stand currently is.
“It’s honestly a very limited system, but it’s enough to look really cool,” SethBling said in his video. “There’s no mobs or anything although that would be cool to add.” SethBling has also added fully-functioning portals and even an internet browser to the game, so sticking a few enemies in his latest Minecraft simulacrum seems like something he could handle.
Over two years ago, Minecraft’s 1.9 patch introduced what Mojang called the Combat Update – a broad set of changes intended to deepen the game’s fighting experience. Even that revamp has never been perfect, and both the Bedrock edition and the original Java version have their own flaws. Now, the developers are testing a major set of new changes that will unify the combat system in both.
“The combat mechanics in Java Edition have been a controversial topic ever since the 1.9 update,” chief creative officer Jens ‘Jeb’ Bergensten says (via Windows Central). We want the mechanics to be the same across all editions, but simply porting Java to Bedrock or vice versa is not taking us forward. We want to find a system that is flexible and works well across all input devices.”
In the test version of the combat revamp, attacks are faster across the board, and you can simply hold down the button to keep swinging. When you stop attacking, an attack timer starts charging up – at 200%, you perform a special attack (with examples like “crits, sweeping, and knockback”) which offers longer reach.
Weapons are now differentiated by different amounts of reach, and faster weapons will now leave shorter invulnerability timers on enemies. Additionally, shields will no longer have a warm-up delay, and can activate while crouching.
All these changes are available for player testing, and you can find instructions to get the beta going on Reddit.
The beta’s been out long enough for player feedback to roll in, and Bergenstein has responded to some of the most common points of concern. Auto-attack will likely be disabled by default for mouse and keyboard users, but the bigger concern is how to balance mobs against the needs of PvP combat – an issue the team hasn’t fully ironed out yet.
Two of YouTube’s biggest stars Felix ‘PewDiePie’ Kjellberg and James Charles are linking up for KEEMSTAR’s new Monday Minecraft competition that pits some of the biggest content creators around against each other.
While James Charles had a rather unceremonious start to his Twitch career, no one can keep YouTube’s premier makeup guru down and is firing up his channel again to compete in the event.
Meanwhile PewDiePie is again streaming on his platform of choice Dlive as the two popular creators try to make their way through the brackets of KEEMSTAR’s latest event featuring Minecraft.
“I bet this is a friendship and stream that you didn’t see coming.”
To join up on the surprise collaboration, viewers can join either the sisters or the bros by visiting either other their live feeds.
Fans of PewDiePie will be familiar with his antics that can be caught exclusively on DLive, but those who want to tune into James Charles can find him on his Twitch channel: JCharlesBeauty.
The duo are up against 18 other teams vying for the chance to move onto the next round of the Minecraft Monday’s hotly contested bracket.
Minecraft Monday turns educational
Throughout the stream, the pair seemed to have plenty of chemistry as PewDiePie decided to teach James Charles a few things about playing Minecraft.
Whether it was James learning how to “helicopter” or them talking about why they named their duo “dick and balls,” there was plenty of hilarious antics from start to finish.
What are the rules in Monday Minecraft?
Keemstar laid out all that entrants need to know in order to assert their dominance in the Monday Minecraft set of rules.
For every Elimination a team gets +10 on their score, meanwhile a Victory Royale nets a squad +30 to their total. Moreover, the “top two teams” get +20 score while the “top three teams” get +10 score to their name.
Just surviving a game will get someone +2 score, but “whenever a team is eliminated all other remaining teams earn +2 score.”
KEEMSTAR TWITTERThe two YouTubers are doing their best to meme their way to the top of Monday Minecraft.
While teams are obviously working together, the scores for Placements, Surviving, and Victory Royales are evenly split between the members of the team unless someone dies. In that case, the scores will be “awarded to the surviving teammate” to “reflect individual contribution.”
There is NO cross-teaming, feeding, mods or resource packs that grant unfair advantages allowed in Monday Minecraft.
While trash talk is definitely allowed, players must “still conduct [themselves] respectfully.” And Keemstar added a note about Clout chase, saying players shouldn’t be a “sore loser” insted just HAVE FUN!
The hilarity is at an all time high as PewDiePie is screaming memes at the top of his lungs, while the new streamer Charles does the best he can while trying to navigate Minecraft and the technical difficulties of live streaming.
A subset of Pokemon fans are complaining because Game Freak has the audacity to re-use animations in Pokemon Sword & Shield. A portion of the Pokemon fanbase has been very vocal in their dislike that Pokemon Sword & Shield won’t be compatible with every Pokemon currently in the franchise. While past games have allowed players to transfer all of their older Pokemon into the game, Game Freak made the decision to limit the number of Pokemon species to an unspecified number due to the need to animate over 900 Pokemon models and close to a thousand different Pokemon moves in a higher fidelity than what was needed in Nintendo 3DS Pokemon games.
Since the announcement was made, a group of Pokemon fans have turned on the main series game developers Game Freak, claiming that their decision was made out of laziness and greed. To prove their point, fans have occasionally posted videos showing side-by-side comparisons of Pokemon Sword & Shield clips with clips from past games that appear to show Pokemon having the same idle animations and battle animations. Other “fans” have made the claim that Pokemon Coliseum, a game containing a fraction of the Pokemon and released over 15 years ago, actually looks better than Pokemon Sword & Shield.
While some of the disappointment is understandable, there’s a couple of erroneous narratives that are in need of correcting. Game Freak director Junichi Masuda stated that the decision was made to focus on higher fidelity animations for the Nintendo Switch, not that they were crafting all new Pokemon models and animations. While it’s clear that Game Freak is re-using some animations and models, increasing the fidelity isn’t an instant process, as explained in this threadby game designer Miodrag Kovachevic. And while there’s plenty of evidence that Pokemon Sword & Shield will use some new animations, Game Freak director Junichi Masuda noted in a previous interview that they attempted to bring over many of the older models and animations, but the higher fidelity rate led to some models needing to be completely re-made.
In addition, a narrative about Game Freak being “stingy” or “cheap” by not hiring enough developers to work on Pokemon Sword & Shield ignores the economic and business reality that it often takes months to properly on-board a new employee to the point that they can contribute to a high-profile project. Plus, finding skilled developers (like any skilled job) can be a long process, one that can’t be fixed in a matter of weeks or even months. There’s an argument to be made that Game Freak should have hired more developers if they wanted to include all 800 Pokemon, but that decision would had to occur years ago to make an impact on Pokemon Sword & Shield.1COMMENTS
At the end of the day, Game Freak and Nintendo have the right to design and release a Pokemon game with as many Pokemon as they want, and Pokemon fans have the right not to buy it if they feel it doesn’t live up to its standards. However, trying to craft a narrative using a few seconds of video seems disingenuous and doesn’t really help the discourse of the game or the toxicity of the fanbase at all.
Pokemon Sword & Shield will be released on November 19th.
