A little less painstaking than plugging Lego blocks together, the Pixio are much more natural to use, allowing you to build in the real world the way you would on Minecraft. Individual pixels snap to one another, creating low-resolution artworks, while giving you the freedom to build whatever it is you want. Coming in a set of 800 individual blocks divided across 16 colors (50 blocks per color), the Pixio presents itself as an absolutely delicious looking cuboid of hues and shades, just waiting to be pulled apart and put together in a variety of ways. With colors and freedom (to use them how you see fit) you would expect from play dough, and a simple snap to fix system that refines the Lego experience, the Pixio is a deserving winner of the A’ Design Award (for the year 2018)!
Final Fantasy XV hasn't shied away from crossovers, with elements of Assassin's Creed, The Sims, and Half-Life all appearing in the game in some way. Now you can add Minecraft to that crossover list, but going the other way.
Mojang today launched the Final Fantasy XV Skin Pack on the Minecraft Marketplace. Of course, the pack includes the four main protagonists from the game: Noctis, Ignis, Prompto, and Gladiolus. But in addition, there are skins for villains like Ardyn and Astrals like Ifrit and Shiva.
In all, there are 43 skins to choose from, all of which are drawn from creatures, villains, heroes, and others from around the world of Eos. Personally, I'm going Moogle and Cactuar skins.
Avengers: Infinity War made history by earning an estimated $630m (£457m) worldwide on its opening weekend.
That's way ahead of the previous first weekend record of $542m set by The Fate of the Furious last year.
And the new Avengers movie, in which Marvel superheroes unite to battle Thanos, hasn't opened in China yet.
It is also likely to take the all-time North American opening weekend record after making an estimated $250m. Star Wars: The Force Awakens took $248m.
Industry tracker Exhibitor Relations made the estimates and official figures will come out later on Monday, but they rarely vary significantly from the estimates.
Infinity War, directed by brothers Joe and Anthony Russo, cost between $300m and $400m to make.
Actors including Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Chadwick Boseman and Chris Pratt, star in the sequel, the first of two parts. The conclusion is set to be released in May 2019.
The films with the all-time top five opening weekends are all sequels and spin-offs.
Top five global opening weekends
Film
Takings
Release
Avengers: Infinity War
$630m
2018
The Fate of the Furious
$542m
2017
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
$529m
2015
Jurassic World
$526m
2015
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
$483m
2011
Deadpool actor Ryan Reynolds congratulated the Avengers on their success by posting a letter supposedly written by Tony Stark (AKA Iron Man) to Deadpool, rejecting his request to join the Avengers.
Reynolds wrote: “From a guy who never knows when to quit, I'm glad you guys never did. Congrats #Avengers.”
From a guy who never knows when to quit, I’m glad you guys never did. Congrats #Avengers.
Avengers: Infinity War comes 10 years after the release of Iron Man, which kicked off a series of high-profile superhero films.
The first Avengers came out in 2012. It held the previous record opening for a Marvel film, making $207.4m domestically. Age of Ultron, the second Avengers feature, debuted with $191m.
Thanks to Spider-Man: Homecoming, there's been a lot of confusion about the Marvel Cinematic Universe's timeline but it turns out that Avengers: Infinity War may have finally cleared things up for us…
Spider-Man: Homecoming kicks off with a flashback to the events of The Avengers and that's followed by a title card reading “8 Years Later.” That immediately confused fans as it would mean Ant-Man, Captain America: Civil War, and Black Panther all took place in 2020, something which doesn't make a lot of sense when The Avengers was supposed to take place in 2012 and the MCU moves in real-time.
However, things are cleared up in Avengers: Infinity War when Iron Man's conversation with Doctor Strange reveals that Loki and the Chitauri's invasion of New York took place six years ago. That places this movie in 2018 as there's no way Spider-Man: Homecoming was set two years after this one.
This means Spider-Man: Homecoming‘s title card should have read “4 Years Later” instead of “8 Years Later.” How that oversight came to pass isn't clear but it could be more Sony's doing than Marvel Studios. Either way, it's nice to have things clarified because this is something which has been bothering fans since last year! What did you think of Avengers: Infinity War? Sound off down below.
It looks like Final Fantasy 15’s road-tripping boys have gotten a wee bit lost on their way to a wedding or a fight or a chocobo race. They’re so lost, in fact, that they’ve managed to drive right out of Eos and enter the considerably more blocky world of Minecraft. They’ve dragged some pals along, too, including those of the more monstrous persuasion.
Premium skin packs aren’t the most tempting of offers for a game that’s so customisable and already contains more player-made skins than you could hope to use, but you do admittedly get a fair amount of bang for your buck here. If you’ve got the Windows 10 version of Minecraft, you’ll be able to add Noctis and pals—all 43 skins—for a measly $2.99.
Honestly, the image of Prompto riding a pig has already sold me on this, and I don’t even play Minecraft these days. But if you’d rather use characters from other Final Fantasy games, there are plenty of free alternatives. There are some skins from 15 in there, too.
China’s gaming giant is working on challengers to two enormous Western games: Minecraft and Hearthstone
Tencent is looking to knock Minecraft off the throne with a sandbox game of its own: Handcraft Planet.
For weeks, the company had a dedicated countdown web page in the lead-up to Monday’s unveiling of the new game in Beijing.
Tencent bills this new world-building game, in which players can build virtually anything with Lego-like blocks, as a “next-gen” sandbox game.
From what can be gathered from the teaser, the game resembles Minecraft in both gameplay and aesthetics. But how exactly this new game is a step-up from Minecraft remains unclear, though we should discover more once testing begins in the third quarter.
In China, Minecraft is published by China’s second largest gaming company NetEase, which says it has some 60 million registered users in the country.
Unlike the original Minecraft which was priced at US$6.99, Minecraft’s Chinese edition is available for free in Apple’s App Store.
One reason could be that in China, Minecraft is far from the cultural phenomenon that it is in the US. While it ranks among the top paid iPhone apps in the US, in China it ranks only 346th among free apps, according to App Annie.
Handcraft Planet is one of three sandbox games that will be published by Tencent this year, but two of them are being developed by studios in the West: Robocraft is from the UK’s Freejam Games, while Ylands is by Czech developer Bohemia Interactive.
Handcraft Planet is Tencent's new sandbox game. (Picture: Tencent)
In addition to taking on NetEase in the sandbox genre, Tencent is also looking to tackle NetEase in card games.
This year Tencent is publishing the video game version of the classic card game Magic: The Gathering. Currently the most played online card game is Hearthstone by World of Warcraft maker Blizzard Entertainment, which is published in China by NetEase.
China’s gaming market is increasingly looking like a duopoly between Tencent and NetEase. The two giants together published about 80 percent of the country’s top 50 mobile games during the first quarter of 2018, according to the China Gaming Industry Report.