Gamers rejoice! Christmas might be over, but there are some really great gaming deals out there in the post-Christmas run-up to the New Year. If you've been looking for an excuse to treat yourself, then the slashed prices might be just the excuse you need to justify it.
We've been keeping an eye out and have come across this cracking Xbox One S deal that will have you shouting “Jeepers Creepers!” – especially if you're a Minecraft nut.
What are you waiting for? Grab yourself a deal and get building! Don't forget with Argos you can order online and collect in-store today too, so you don't even need to wait to get gaming.
People can step back in time and experience what it would have been like to live in Roman Exeter thanks to virtual reality and the video game Minecraft.
The city’s rich history – and the treasures at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery – are now part of the hugely popular and addictive Minecraft game.
You will be able to experience Roman Exeter on Minecraft
A new map shows what Exeter’s Roman fortress could have looked like and is available to download for free while playing Minecraft. This joins another map, also inspired by RAMM’s collections , designed to represent 18th-century Exeter when the city walls still stood.
Minecraft is like a form of virtual Lego and has fans of all ages. Players build towns or cities together in virtual groups and complete buildings by selecting blocks with different textures and uses. They can also download existing buildings, or whole conurbations and change them and add to them.
This map is produced as part of the A Place in Time Project, a partnership between the universities of Exeter and Reading, Exeter City Council and Cotswold Archaeology. The Minecraft maps include recent discoveries and new interpretations of archaeological evidence found in the 1970s and 80s.
The Roman map shows the barracks and military buildings of the Roman settlement in what is now Exeter, and includes links to Roman objects excavated in Exeter. Players can use these to find out more about the objects in the game.
The Roman map shows the barracks and military buildings of the Roman settlement in what is now Exeter
RAMM worked with digital producer Adam Clarke AKA Wizard Keen and blockworks to produce the maps. The first is based on the Hedgeland model, which was constructed between 1817 and 1824 by Caleb Hedgeland and is one of the earliest surviving models of any town in Britain. The model is the only surviving record of many of the city’s buildings and streets. It is on permanent display in RAMM’s Making History gallery.
Sofia Romualdo, a researcher at the University of Exeter, who is working on the project, said: “The beauty of these new maps is they allow people to explore real places in different ways that are fun and educational.”
The year is basically done, bar the overeating and unison tweeting about Muppet Christmas Carol, so what better time to chase down some of Xbox’s top people and see what they thought? Not just of this year and their person highlights, but also what’s getting them hot for 2018. Coming up we’ve got some of the people behind Halo, Gears, Forza and Xbox One X itself, talking about what’s been, and what’s coming.
Rod Fergusson, Studio Head of The Coalition
What's been your 2017 Xbox highlight? My 2017 Xbox highlight was the Xbox One X launch and having Gears of War 4 be the very first Xbox One X Enhanced game available this year! It looks amazing at 4K with HDR and all the new rendering features, plus the ability to play in performance mode so for the first time you can play Campaign and Horde at up to 60 FPS.
What's one thing you won't forget about 2017? I’m assuming you’re just talking about gaming… For me it’s just what an amazing year it has been for games both in terms of quality and diversity from Cuphead to Assassin’s Creed Origins, I have a huge backlog of great games to get through during the holidays!
What are you looking forward to in 2018? For 2018 I’m looking forward to The Coalition studio renovation finally finishing, watching the eSports player talent in Season 2 of our Gears Pro Circuit, launching our new Gears comic book series and continuing to support the Gears community with some really cool content.
Matt Booty, Microsoft Studios & Minecraft CVP
What's been your 2017 Xbox highlight? Launching the Minecraft Marketplace, which created a place for players to browse, download and play cool community creations from within the game itself, and also created a place for creative and entrepreneurial community members to become a partner and market their work. Minecraft has always been about community and the marketplace feels like a natural extension to bring to Minecraft not just on PC but on mobile and console as well. The same is true for our partners who host servers in the marketplace. We're just getting started with the marketplace and will be announcing a lot of new content and more partners in 2018.
What's one thing you won't forget about 2017? When German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited the Xbox booth at Gamescom and got a demo of our Minecraft: Education Edition and talked with the team. We're lucky to work on a franchise that spans countries, ages and genders and brings players together in so many amazing ways.
What are you looking forward to in 2018? Three things: The Update Aquatic, the Nintendo Switch Bedrock Release and the Super Duper Graphics Pack. The Update Aquatic will fill the Minecraft oceans with coral, kelp, fish, dolphins, shipwrecks and new water physics. The Nintendo Switch update will bring Switch players in to the Bedrock community and offer them cross-platform functionality and Marketplace content. Nintendo has been a great partner, and we’re excited to work even closer with them in the new year. The Super Duper Graphics Pack is getting a lot of our development attention right now, and it will include graphical enhancements like refined lighting, shadows, water effects, and character detail, plus customizable options and sliders.
Bill Giese, Creative Director of Forza Motorsport, Turn 10 Studios,
What's been your 2017 Xbox highlight? My 2017 highlight would be launching Forza Motorsport 7 on Xbox One and PC in October, and then shipping the game again on Xbox One X in November. This game is a labor of love for the team and seeing the feedback from the community has been incredible.
What's one thing you won't forget about 2017? I’ll never forget when we announced the 2018 Porsche 911 GT2 RS on stage at E3 in June. For the first time in history, a car was revealed alongside a game announce. Working with Porsche has been a dream come true, and they were integral to helping us deliver a once-in-a-lifetime moment.
What are you looking forward to in 2018? I cannot wait for fans to see what we have in store – 2018 is going to be a huge year for the Forza community. We have some spectacular announcements and new experiences coming up. I’m excited for those announcements and Red Dead Redemption 2; everyone should be looking forward to that game.
Kevin Gammill, Xbox One partner group program manager
What's been your 2017 Xbox highlight? The release of Xbox One X – the world’s most powerful console – was a significant milestone for the Xbox team and we couldn’t be more thrilled about the excitement and demand we’re seeing from our development partners and fans. Having over 90 Xbox One X enhanced titles available and 75 more already announced and adding support as we move in to 2018 required strong collaboration between our engineering teams and our partners. It was also an incredible achievement for the team that we were able to deliver the Fall Update for Xbox just prior to the release of Xbox One X, which not only brought a new streamlined dashboard and UI design to the Xbox One family of devices based on user feedback, but also enabled gamers looking to upgrade their console to easily transfer their existing games and settings to Xbox One X, so they could immediately jump in and play as soon as the console released.
What's one thing you won't forget about 2017? Playing a number of Original Xbox games such as Fusion Frenzy and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic with my twins boys on our Xbox One X. Our engineering team really took advantage of the power of Xbox One X by improving the pixel count as much as 16X, and the games look and play great. It was only after hours of gameplay together that I told them these are games that are over sixteen years old.
What are you looking forward to in 2018? I’m looking forward to improving my PlayerUnknown’s Battleground skills and hopefully winning a few chicken dinners along the way, continuing to expand the Xbox One games portfolio with unique services like Xbox Game Pass that deliver great value to Xbox gamers, and listening to valuable feedback from both our development partners and Xbox community to improving the Xbox One platform. It is going to be another great year to be a gamer.
Greg Stone, Senior Producer at 343 Industries
What's been your 2017 Xbox highlight? My highlight has to be the launch of Xbox One X and how it delivered on the promise of true 4K resolution and HDR gaming in the living room. It’s just mind-blowing to me how much better the enhanced games look on the console. It truly is as powerful as advertised and virtually my entire game collection looks and plays better on Xbox One X, especially Halo Wars 2 and Halo 5: Guardians.
What's one thing you won't forget about 2017? There are so many great memories from 2017. We released Halo Wars 2 in February, put out new DLC on a monthly basis for 6 months straight and shipped our incredible expansion, Awakening the Nightmare, in September. We are extremely proud of the success that Halo Wars 2 has seen and energized by the positive response from our amazing fan base. A tremendous amount of effort and care went into making Halo Wars 2 and it was a pleasure working with our development partners at Creative Assembly to bring the latest installment of the Halo Wars franchise to life. Launching a new game is always a milestone and it’s something I will cherish when I look back on 2017.
What are you looking forward to in 2018? I am really looking forward to the release of Sea of Thieves in 2018! The team at Rare was gracious enough to invite us to play Sea of Thieves during their Mixer live stream from Gamescom. We had a blast scavenging dark caves on a haunted island for buried treasure and sending opposing pirate ships to a watery grave. I’m going to be participating in my share of looting and plundering when it launches next year.
Matt Salsamendi, Co-Founder of Mixer
What's been your 2017 Xbox highlight? 2017 has been a huge year for the platform. When we rebranded from Beam to Mixer, we started on a journey to connect gamers all across the globe in the most interactive way possible. Along with the rebrand, the introduction of co-streaming was huge for me and the community on Mixer. The ability to watch a PUBG stream, and not only see the action, but see everyone’s unique perspective in squad views totally changed the game for me.
What's one thing you won't forget about 2017? E3, hands down. This was my first E3 as part of Xbox, and over 1 million people watched the briefing on Mixer. It was a huge, team wide effort. I remember the nights leading up, with the entire team focused on not only delivering the experience at scale, but also giving viewers a unique experience. We broadcasted the briefing in 4K, with less than one second of latency, all over the world, for more than a million people. On top of that, with Mixpot we were able to give away free games and loot to those that watched. It was a crazy cool experience.
What are you looking forward to in 2018? There’s a few areas I’m really excited about. With channels like HypeZone launching, we’re increasing our focus on discovery for new broadcasters. I think that’s a huge opportunity, introducing an audience to those that are just getting started in streaming and giving streamers the tools to help create an entertaining experience for viewers. Also, the new mobile apps we’re launching are awesome and they’re some of the first steps we’re taking to bring the Mixer experience to more devices. I’m really excited about the ability for viewers to watch from anywhere, and have a differentiated experience that takes advantage of each platform.
Chris Charla, Director of ID@Xbox
What's been your 2017 Xbox highlight? The sheer volume of amazing games that shipped from ID@Xbox developers is definitely my #1 highlight, but as for specific moments I will say that E3 is always a massive highlight for me – just getting to see so many amazing games at our press briefing in such a short amount of time! It was really neat this year because for Bluehole (PUBG) and Pearl Abyss (Black Desert) it was their first time being part of an E3 media briefing so that was really fun to see. Also, being able to attend the launch party of Cuphead at Meltdown Comics in Hollywood and hang out with Chad and Jarrod and Maja outside the venue, next to a giant two-story painting of Cuphead, and just seeing all their incredibly hard work pay off with a bombshell critical and commercial success – it was just kind of an awesome moment! Then we went and got chili dogs at Carneys. It was like a perfect LA night!
What's one thing you won't forget about 2017? Maybe this is a little inside baseball, but as a video game fan, getting the opportunity to talk to folks like Kareem Choudhry and Kevin Gammill about the tech inside the Xbox One X at various press events and other things where we were together was really awesome. We have some amazingly brilliant people working at Xbox and getting to hang out with those guys is pretty special!
What are you looking forward to in 2018? Below. (And a lot more amazing games!)
With new, innovative apps and programs dropping everyday, it pays to have a powerful computer. But forking out the cash for a pre-made rig can get expensive — especially when it's perfectly feasible to build your own at a much lower price point. Of course, not all of us have the IT acumen of a Windows technician, but you can give yourself the necessary know-how with the How to Build a Computer Bundle — now on sale for $19.
Featuring five beginner-friendly courses, this collection will guide you through the steps and concepts crucial to creating a computer from scratch, or upgrading your current machine. You'll start with the essentials, learning all about the functional roles of the various components and hardware that make up a computing system. Then, you'll move on to more advanced concepts, like making hardware modifications, network cabling, overclocking your CPU, and more.
Plus, this collection also includes training on upgrading laptop hardware, thereby improving the versatility of your newly acquired skill set.
Contrary to popular belief, mastering the fundamentals of robotics doesn't have to be a mind-numbing slog through programming and electronics courses. SunFounder's Nano DIY 4-DOF Robot Kit offers an intuitive and beginner-friendly way to break into the field by walking you through building your own programmable robot, and you can get it in the Boing Boing Store for $50.
Going by the name of Sloth, this DIY kit is compatible with the included SunFounder Nano board or an Arduino Nano board. It's equipped with two legs that you can program to walk, kick, or even dance, and, thanks to its HC-SR04 ultrasonic ranging module, it can even detect and avoid obstacles intelligently. What's more, this simple kit comes with a visual programming language, allowing any DIY-er to start from scratch regardless of their coding background.
The SunFounder Nano DIY 4-DOF Robot Kit can be yours for $50 when you order it from the Boing Boing Store.
Alice Maz was part of a small group of players who came to have near-total mastery over the internal economy of a popular Minecraft; Maz describes how her early fascination with the mechanics of complex multiplayer games carried over into an interest in economics and games, and that let her become a virtuoso player, and brilliant thinker, about games and economics.
Maz's long, fascinating essay about her business ventures in Minecraft are a potted lesson in economics, one that shows where financial engineering actually does something useful (providing liquidity, matching supply and demand) and the places where it becomes nothing more than a predatory drag on the “real economy” of people making amazing things in Minecraft.
Back when I was working on For the Win, my YA novel about gold farming, I read pretty much every book and academic paper on the subject of games and economics, and Maz's essay is among the best pieces of writing on the subject I've encountered. It's especially interesting because all the economic activities are aimed at dominating a server, but Maz never talks about whether, how, or if any of the in-game wealth can be converted to cash money, giving the whole thing a kind of abstract clarity that is sometimes obfuscated in the literature on in-game economics.
Diamonds being not the most valuable but certainly the most valued item in the game, both for their utility and their price stability, the server was littered with buy chests for them. These were mostly of the fling and a prayer sort, offering prices low enough that anyone selling to them was a noob or a fool. But not so low that I couldn't sell them Charlotte's. I bought from her all I could afford, bankrupted every single person who had a buy chest at any price, then went back for more. Buy chests in the market shops, scattered on the roadsides, nestled in secluded towns no one remembered the names of, I hit them all. If you were buying diamonds at the bottom of the ocean, I would find you and take all of your money.
At the same time, I dropped my sell price in the market to 16M and did pretty good business for a few weeks. I had the advantage of one of the two best plots there were, the other belonging to Emma. (This I'd gotten via inside knowledge that Zel's to-be partner was shuttering his store and gifting the plot to a friend. I offered to swap my plot as the gift, help with the deconstruction process, and advise on pricing in the Emporium in exchange, thus getting the prized location without it ever going up for sale.) QuickShop provided a console command to show the closest shop selling an item, and these two plots, though behind hedge walls and not immediately visible, were the closest as the crow flies to the market's warp-in point. So anyone using the command–and this was most people, traipsing through the market looking for deals being a rare activity mostly limited to speculators–got directed to me or Emma for anything either of us sold.
This all made me a lot of money. I drove a portion of profits into bolstering my diamond and beacon reserves, bought basically any building material I thought I'd ever need in bulk, and still watched my marble balance grow. Up til the diamond bonanza, I'd been making money on a dozen different side hustles. A bit here, a bit there, doing better than most, but regardless the day-in day-out of working the market took up the majority of my time on the game. That made me rich; this is what made me wealthy.
But soon 16M became 14M, and 14M became 12M. A few people started to notice Charlotte's store, and she restocked faster than I, or anyone, could recoup enough to buy out. Mostly though, it was clear to everyone the price of diamond was falling, even if they had no idea why. I diversified into selling enchanted diamond equipment of all types, priced just so that I could break even on the enchant and move the component diamonds at the same price I sold them for raw. A few of the buy chest people I'd tanked tried recovering some of their money by putting up at a loss the diamonds I'd sold them, but they still couldn't move product faster than a trickle. Eventually even Charlotte had to cut her prices to keep selling. It was bad.
