Minecraft Update!

Minecraft 1.5 Beta was recently released and a few interesting things were added to the game:

* Weather (rain, snow, thunder)
* Statistics
* Achievements
* Detector rail
* Booster rail
* Performance improvements

Chris's Sky City

So yesterday I showed you the ground level of Chris's castle and this preview of the sky portion; today I'll take a full look at the sky city.

Here is the staircase leading up to it.

Once you are up there he has some nice fountains and a tree growing in the center.

Each of the four corners has a building with some bookcases and chairs.

There is quite a nice view from up here as well. You can see far off in all directions.

Chris got mad because right on the edge of his territory some guy put up a tower overlooking the castle. Chris said he was destroying it but the guy told a mod and now the tower is protected, heh.

I spotted this huge stadium like thing off in the distance and it intrigued me; I'll take a look at it and feature it in a future blog post. I saw a guy working on it so it is still in construction.

Chris Has Been Busy...

It's been a while since I played on the Sincraft server so I'm a bit behind on events there. My friend Chris still plays there and asked me to come check out his new area and holy crap he has been really busy. In this post I'll show off the ground level of his huge castle. Above is the main entrance to the ground area.

Here's a small living area inside the middle building.

The bank is on the right and the greenhouse is on the left, he modeled this castle after the one I built on the Sincraft server.

Down at the bottom of his bank is his protected nether portal which I seemed to be able to hear from anyplace in the castle which is pretty creepy, the noise disturbs me.

In my next post I'll show off his above ground developing sky-city. For now I'll treat you with this little preview of a part of it.

Nice Minecraft House

This house was constructed on my small Minecraft server over the course of a few days and it turned out pretty nice, nice enough to share on the blog. Most of the credit goes to Krazy_Kow for his design
work.

I'm Back! Here's Some WoW News

To start off I'd like to say sorry for the lack of posts over the past days; my internet connection was borked and my ISP took their time getting out here. They put in a new line and everything is fine now so the daily posts will continue!

While I was gone a bunch of cool WoW news has popped up on my favorite source mmo-champion so let's dive into it. Blizzard is still adding more and more to the 4.1 content patch which should hit live servers by the end of the month (hopefully).

Nice piece of fan art that could serve as a wallpaper.

Minecraft Pyramid

I don't have much time today so I'll just show off this pyramid I made out of lightstone in Minecraft. I'm a big fan of Egyptian style architecture so my first project was this pyramid which took me about four or five hours total to construct. The wooden walkway that goes to the top is just part of our tram system.

There is a closer up picture of the pyramid. I was going to make it a bit taller but it just would have taken too much time and I was ready to move onto somthing else.

 It has a pretty nice view from the very top. Sometime I wish to create a tunnel system inside the pyramid full of crypts and traps. I think that would be pretty cool.

Situation Report: Patch 1.3 (Starcraft)

David Kim, Starcraft game balance designer.

The new 1.3 patch for Starcraft implemented a good deal of balance changes to the game and, as always, caused some heated discussion among players. In a recent post by David Kim they relayed their reasoning behind the changes to the community. I'll pick out the parts I found most interesting to discuss. The entire post can be found here.

Firstly Blizzard killed the archon toilet, which I explained how to do in an earlier blog post, calling it a bug fix rather than a balance change; vortex was meant to be a lockdown and not a wipe out their entire force move. Units leaving the vortex are now immune to all damage and untargetable for 1.5 seconds.

Next, the Khaydarin Amulet upgrade for High Templar was removed; this means that Templar can no longer cast psi-storm immediately after being warped in. The biggest reason they did this was because they felt that Protoss AoE was a bit overpowered. Instead of nerfing collosi they decided to adjust Templar.

Blizzard apparently also thinks that Terran rush capabilities were overpowered. Bunker build time was increased to make offensive bunkering (bunker rushes) more difficult. Also, stim pack research time was increased by 30 seconds to give opponents more time to scout and prepare for early stim pushes.

Ghost EMP was also nerfed to only drain 100 energy instead of all energy which is a very good change for protoss. EMP was just too strong against sentries, infestors, and high templar which I agree with.

Perhaps my favorite change (at least the most fun change) is that Battlecruisers got a movement speed buff! Blizzard thought cruisers were underused so they buffed their weakest point. I love Battlecruisers so I may start trying to incorporate them into builds more.

Battlecruisers are now coming for you! At a slightly faster pace...

Even More Blizzard Store Items Incoming

A couple weeks ago in a post I talked about the up and coming Winged Lion mount that will be available for purchase with real money from the Blizzard store in 4.1. With the incredible amount of cash they made from the Celestial Steed I definitely saw this coming. However, now it seems that Blizzard is ramping up production of premium content, which to me is disturbing; it indicates the slippery slope effect. Here are the next two "mounts" that will be available from the store along with the lion:

You can individually purchase the wings for $19.99 or buy both of them for $29.99. To me this illustrates a disturbing trend. First Blizzard had a few in game pets that could be purchased, then one mount. Now it's a whole set of mounts along with the continued production of pets. I do not feel that in a subscription based game that development time should be spent on premium content, especially this amount of premium content. In the end Blizzard is a business and this kind of thing makes them money so they will continue with it and I don't blame them, expect to see a lot more of premium content in the future.

As an extra mmo-champion has a video up of the lion mount so here it is, no videos yet of the wings.

Starcraft....On Kinect!

In a revolutionary post today Blizzard announced their intent to return to the world of consoles! The once PC only developer will now be taking the step to consoles with an Xbox 360 version of Starcraft played with Kinect! Here is an excerpt from Blizzard's article.

"Combining advanced body tracking hardware of modern consoles with the exciting strategy gameplay of StarCraft II, StarCraft: Motion Overdrive will allow you to experience StarCraft like never before. Use gesture-based controls to direct your forces and out-move your enemies. Challenge your friends in intense multi-actor matches either locally via split screen or online. Wave your arms in the air like you do, in fact, care."

 

They also created an epic trailer depicting the intense action' it also relays the fact that, as always, Koreans will dominate every game they play!

Disclaimer: Before having either a nerdgasm or an intense fit of nerd rage please observe today's date and Blizzard's history of announcements on said date.