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Minecraft records up for grabs as gamer SeaPeeKay introduces brand new challenges

by Stone Marshall | Sep 17, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized | 0 comments

Minecraft fans can put their skills to the test with an exciting series of record attempts in Guinness World Records: Gamer’s Edition 2019.

The new book contains four reader challenges inviting people to attempt records for:

Fastest time to build a castle in Minecraft creative mode
Fastest time to build a rocket in Minecraft survival mode
Fastest time to build an igloo in Minecraft survival mode
Fastest time to saddle and stable 10 horses in Minecraft survival mode
Minecraft Reader Challenges 3

YouTuber Callum Knight, better known as SeaPeeKay, introduces the challenges in the book and has even set a benchmark time of 4 minutes 20 seconds for the castle record.

To help would-be record breakers, tutorial videos have been created for all four tasks along with explanations about how to register attempts.

You can find the tutorial for the Fastest time to build a castle in Minecraft creative mode while all others are on our dedicated Minecraft challenge page.

But that’s not all that’s featured in Gamer’s Edition 2019, which is packed with accomplishments games such as FIFA 18, Super Mario 2, Overwatch, Fortnite, Splatoon 2, The Legend of Zelda, Roblox, Dragon Ball FighterZ and many more.

Feel inspired after reading exclusive material featuring the likes of Ray “Stallion83” Cox, record holder for the Highest Xbox Gamerscore, or popular VR-dedicated YouTuber Nathaniel “Nathie” de Jong, and Joseph Garrett, aka Stampy Cat, who has written this year's introduction.

Minecraft Reader Challenges

Find out which Monster Hunter: World beast is the largest, who the Most subscribed gaming YouTuber is, just how many players have been healed by one Overwatch gamer alone or how the Nintendo Gameboy originated, through colourful and insightful spreads.

“Gamer’s Edition 2019 is bursting with the latest, greatest records from the games you love to play,” said editor Mike Plant.

“From Stampy Cat’s cake-making Minecraft adventures to Ninja’s Twitch-streaming exploits in Fortnite, there’s always something new for gamers to discover. I hope you have as much fun reading Gamer’s Edition 2019 as I had editing it!”

Gaming platform Roblox may be the next Minecraft

For startup Roblox, it pays to play with digital toys.

After closing a $150 million round of series F funding, Roblox is now valued at $2.5 billion, the company said Wednesday.

This isn't the first big valuation for an open world game platform geared for kids. In 2015, Microsoft bought Mojang, maker of popular kids' game Minecraft, for $2.5 billion.

“We think of this in terms less of a big number and more in terms of an emerging category for human interaction and co-experience,” said David Baszucki, Roblox's founder and CEO.

Roblox, which was founded in 2004, is a platform where you can create your own games or join ones others have made. Roblox's avatars look a little like Lego minifigs. There are more than 70 million monthly users, and users log about 900 million hours of engagement each month, according to Roblox's website.

The funding round was led by Greylock Partners and Tiger Global with Altos, Meritech and Index Ventures also participating. Baszucki said plans for the future are, as you might imagine, growth.

“Ultimately we have the vision of expanding to a world wide platform that allows kids from the US to go on field trips to China and adults around the world to make friends from different walks of life and people who have different life experiences,” he said, and “to really help create a future digital civil society.”

Combining ‘Fortnite’ and ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Is Easier Than You Think

by Stone Marshall | Sep 16, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized | 0 comments

Players looking to bring an innovative encounter to their next session of Dungeons & Dragons should look no further than one of the most popular video games out today.

At first glance, Dungeons & Dragons and Fortnite couldn't be any further apart. One is a venerable tabletop RPG enjoying a renaissance due to the appeal of shared storytelling and streamlined rules. The other is a manic video game that combines crazy free-for-all action and combat with an addicting comic irreverence. However, I recently crafted an encounter in our home game that benefited from adding some Fortnite-esque rules into the mix.

A popular staple in Dungeons & Dragons is gladiatorial combat – either against rival teams of adventurers or against monsters. Gladiator matches are a good way for bruisers to test their might and also win some gold or fame along the way.

So – how does one turn a gladiator match into a Fortnite-esque battle royale? Well, the chances are that your D&D group already has the irreverent “destroy everything and laugh along the way” mindset needed to succeed in Fortnite, so you just need to bring in the shrinking battlefield into the encounter.

For my D&D/Fortnite mashup, I used a pretty typical coliseum type setup with only a handful of rules. There was only one winner (thus forcing all alliances to be temporary) and players couldn't use divine magic, thus keeping clerics and druids from preventing bloody violence up with their healing spells or ability to transform into fire elementals.

The combat area itself was split into three rings, each of which had a handful of terrain options to provide cover and add a little bit of strategy to the mix. Participants could use the entire stadium at the start of the fight, but once about half of the participants were eliminated, the remaining warriors had a few seconds to enter the inner two rings or get hit with some nasty lightning damage – courtesy of some arcane runes around the edge of the coliseum. Eventually, players are forced into a small area of combat, forcing them to duke it out (or to try to push their opponents into the deadly lightning circling the ring.)

You can also spice up the encounter by introducing rivals or setting up future encounters. My home game's battle royale had been teased via town criers and idle gossip for months, and the players recognized many of the other participants, including some old friends and the monk's friendly rival…who was created just to incentivize the players into entering.

I kept my Fortnite encounter rather simple and wrapped it up in a single night, but adventurous DMs can turn it into an extended storyline. Maybe players are stripped of their magic items and dropped onto a remote island, where they have to rely on their scavenging and tracking skills to survive. Or maybe players can form small teams, thus preventing a PvP battle (and hurt feelings) at the end of the battle royale. There's plenty of ways to port Fortnite into Dungeons & Dragons, and chances are you'll get a few laughs when players realize what's happening.

How have you used video games to enhance your D&D game? Let us know in the comment section or shoot me a tweet at @CHofferCBus on Twitter!

‘Marvel’s Spider-Man’ Trailer Reveals Black Cat

A new Marvel's Spider-Man trailer just dropped, giving us our first look at Black Cat (Felicia Hardy). Black Cat will serve as the main focus of part one of The City That Never Sleeps DLC. This chapter is called “The Heist,” and for those of you who know Black Cat, you know exactly why. Check out the teaser above!

Spider-Man and Black Cat have a long and complicated history, and presently we're not sure exactly where they stand in this new canon that Insomniac has created. She is apparently still the anti-hero that we all know and love, but what does Spider-Man think of her? Do they still have any kind of romantic tension between them? Could that serve as a point of conflict between Peter and Mary Jane?
And just what is Black Cat after? The title of this DLC chapter is “The Heist,” so we know that Black Cat will be stealing something, we just don't know what. There are plenty of major powers at play in this game world. Fisk is a hyper-powerful jailbird with a chip on his shoulder, and plenty of power at his disposal. Osborn is a power-hungry politician willing to do whatever it takes to secure a third term. Martin Li is a dangerous man leading an impossible double-life. They all have their motives, and they all have things that are precious to them. What, or who, is Black Cat after?

These are all questions that will be answered before long. Marvel's Spider-Man swings onto PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 Pro on September 7, which will give you guys a little over a month to power through the main story and prepare for all of this delicious extra content. The Heist is set to drop on October 23, and two more DLC chapters will be launching in November and December to complete The City That Never Sleeps.

In the meantime, you guys have our review to look forward to. We've played and beaten Marvel's Spider-Man, and we'll be telling you everything you need to know about it tomorrow as part of our review. Make sure you bookmark ComicBook.com/gaming, and check back tomorrow to read our full review. We have so much to say about this game, and you're going to want to read it all before you jump in at the end of the week. Stay tuned!

This Realistic City Made In Minecraft Has Us Astonished

by Stone Marshall | Sep 15, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized | 0 comments

Minecraft, despite having been out for almost a decade now, continues to prove that the creatively driven title has a lot of life left it. The community is strong and never ceases to amaze with their amazing creations in-game. From epic crossovers, to just incredible innovation – the sky is the limit for these block creators and this recent Reddit post proves just that.

The building mechanics in this game are really limitless. For those that bypass the Survival mode and go right into the Creative one, it is a nice outlet for letting that inner artist shine. With the easy to use building mechanics and the incredibly soothing soundtrack, it's really no wonder that so many still tank an impressive amount of hours into this game.

Posts like this always make me incredibly happy because you can just imagine the level of pride the creators are feeling with it. I can't even seem to build a one-level house with four solid walls, so seeing entire realities coming to life is absolutely astounding to me.

Now that the “Build It Together” update is live, it's even easier to create entire worlds. Excited to squad up with friends and family? Here's what you can experience together with this expansive update:

“Explore randomly generated worlds and build amazing things from the simplest of homes to the grandest of castles. Play in creative mode with unlimited resources or mine deep into the world in survival mode, crafting weapons and armor to fend off the dangerous mobs.”

Minecraft Marketplace
For the first time, skins, textures, and worlds designed by the community are available in the store. Buy once and enjoy across Xbox, Windows 10 and mobile devices!* (and soon, the Switch)
Endless exploration
Create and explore your very own world where the only limit is what you can imagine.
Build almost anything
Crafting has never been faster, easier or more fun!
Co-op play
Play with up to four players in split screen for free, or invite hundreds of friends to a massive gameplay server or your own private Realm!

‘Minecraft’ add-on gives gamers taste of climate change side effects

A “Minecraft” add-on, or game mod, added climate-change weather effects to show gamers negative impacts similar to the real world.

The aptly named “GlobalWarming” game mod, made by developer Nick Porillo, attempts to simulate the real-world effects of climate change into “Minecraft” as a way to educate gamers about caring for the environment, reports Motherboard.

The game mod added several concepts into “Minecraft” such as the idea of rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the game’s atmosphere. Things like smoke from burning, cooking or smelting ores would increase CO2 levels and trigger various weather phenomena. Some of these weather changes can also be observed in the real world.

Porillo got inspiration from a course on climate-change science, technology and policy last spring at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

“[The course] really educated me on the topics at hand. Last week I was just playing the new Minecraft 1.13 update after a multi-year hiatus from Minecraft. I was shocked at how much things have changed, and the ocean biomes updates really introduced the ability to make this idea happen,” said Porillo.

He added, “The (Minecraft) community believes there is potential educational benefit, so I’ve been working on developing cool ideas to make the gameplay fun and informational.”

Not all is doom and gloom for the game add-on. Players who install the “GlobalWarming” may also practice saving the environment by planting trees and other activities to offset in-game emissions. This in turn will help stop environmental damage on a large scale.

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