This is one iPhone 6 you won’t be able to bend as hard as you might want, because it’s made out of Minecraft blocks by one expert Minecraft creator.
The recent launch of Apple’s newest flagship smartphone, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, have been the big talk of the Internet over the past few weeks. Even the pixelated, sandbox spaces of Minecraft seem to be a buzz with iPhone-mania, and in particular, one Minecraft enthusiast building a working iPhone 6 within the game.
German YouTube’er and Minecraft user, Tom Shuffle (or SHUFFLE as his hacker alias is known), posted this 13-minute video of his fine Minecraft creation, and while it might not have all the neat bells and whistles of your real-world iPhone 6, it does feature a sliding lock, working home button, and functioning apps.
Well… “functioning” might be a stretch to say, but they have the look down if nothing else. And some apps do work, like the music app and painter app, the later a cute addition by Tom that lets you paint directly from the Minecraft iPhone to your blocky-heart’s content.
Check out the video below to see the Tom’s Minecraft’ed iPhone 6. It’s in German, but creative awesomeness is a universal language anyone can understand!
VIDEO TO ADD [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiG8PynmFZg]
It would be a curse to not check out this spectacular-looking Castelvania SNES.
If you needed something to kickstart your Halloween excitement, then video game console-modder Vadu Amka has just the thing for you: a Super Nintendo designed after one of the most Halloween-celebrating video game series, Konami’s Castlevania.
To be precise, the action game franchise that rose to popularity at the height of the NES, was more of a love letter to the classic monster movies of the 1930s and 1940s from American movie maker, Universal Studios. But seeing how Halloween owes so much of its modern iconagraphy to those films, the two just can’t be separated.
As for Vadu’s spooky creation, the Castlevania SNES – also know as the Dracula’s Curse edition, named after the second game in the series – is a great spittin’ representation of all that makes Castlevania… uh, Castlevania-y?!
First, it looks like a breakable block from the game, the kind you can break and find a whole roasted chicken in (gross, but it’s better than dying), with skeleton skull and coffin in tow. And notably, it features the two most prominent fixtures in all of Castlevania, Dracula’s castle and the famed, evil-banishing whip belonging to the Belmont Family.
Lest I forget to mention that SNES controller, which looks darn close to weathered wood, and has some nice bronze decorating that alines with the overall theme of the console. I can only guess Vadu made a pact with Dracula himself to create something so amazing. That, or maybe Vadu is really good at what he does, especially considering past console creations.
The living room might become the living playroom thanks to a Microsoft prototype.
Recently, Microsoft Research has been tinkering with the idea of the living room as a natural extension of the video game experience. At CES 2013 the company debuted Illumiroom, a unique display technology that fills up the living room with images and lights beyond the borders of what’s displayed on the television screen.
Starting today with the project’s rebranding as RoomAlive, Microsoft intends to push the immersive experience of their concept to not just incorporate the background behind the TV, but the living room itself. RoomAlive uses a configuration of multiple Kinect sensors and projectors – as opposed to the single Kinect and projector pairing with Illumiroom 1.0 – to display content across several kind of surfaces, and better yet, can be interacted with.
Microsoft says that RoomAlive can auto-calibrate and find out the 3D geometry of any room in a matter or minutes; Transforming it into a large playroom, where users can touch, shoot at, or even kick objects, such as tiny little creatures or evil robots that where shown in the video demonstration below, that appear walls and floors.
It is pretty darn sweet, even if it’s not near Star Trek “Holodeck” levels of amazing-ness where you can pretend to be Sherlock Holmes, but baby steps, of course. Baby steps.
The tech behind RoomAlive is far away from the consumer stage, and might be that way for a long time. Using the number of projectors that Microsoft does for its demo room is way above what most can afford, but for now it’s an impressive preview of what the future of what the living room can be.
Eat away the dark in your home with this Pac-Man light box.
When it comes to fine-looking ornaments of the geeky persuasion, let Christina’s Etsy store BurntPixel fill that dark corner of your heart with one of her handcrafted light boxes. One of her newest lamps available is based on Japanese video game publisher Namco’s legendary arcade ghost eater, Pac-Man, and looks absolutely smashing.
Crafted from of laser-cut MDF, the Pac-Man light box is a 6 inch gloss black cube, featuring Pac-Man himself and his rainbow-colored specter pals. In a creative twist, the colors shining from the light box don’t emit from the light source – in this case is just a simple AAA battery-powered LED – but from the cut-outs themselves.
The overall effect is a simple, echoing illumination that feels almost similar to the classic 1980 game in motion. Thankfully, you won’t be needing an endless amount of quarters to enjoy it.
Right now you can purchase the Pac-Man light box from BurntPixels, a wonderful addition to a gaming den or bedroom, for the starting unassembled price of $50.00 USD; Add five more dollars to that price if you wish for full assembly and added shipping costs.
Nintendo’s latest firmware update for the Wii U brings folders to the console’s OS.
On Monday, Nintendo dropped the news of a new firmware update for the Nintendo Wii U (available to download now). The shining star for the update, version 5.2.0, is the inclusion of folders, which now allows Wii U owners to organize their home menus and arrange software icons.
The Nintendo 3DS has had the same “create folders” option since April 2012, which is notably later than it should have been implemented in the first place. But thankfully, especially for Wii U enthusiasts who have a mess of gaming content on their front page, the feature is finally here, and works exactly as it does on the 3DS.
Moving on to other 5.2.0 changes, the update also adds a Download Management icon to the Wii U menu; the Quick Start Menu now displays when the Wii U is turned on from the GamePad TV Remote; an Options icon has been added to Power Settings, which lets users to rearrange software from the Quick Start Menu, and the design and layout for the Home menu has been tweaked to be easier on the eyes.
Finally, of course, further improvements to overall system stability also come with this firmware update, so thanks, Nindy! For a more detailed list of what Wii U firmware update 5.2.0 entails, head on over to Nintendo’s support website and take a gander for yourselves.
Lets review the most important news from the Japanese video game trade show.
Its reach might not be as large as year’s past – especially, when attendance drops to 18,000 less visitors from 2013 – but when the Tokyo Game Show comes around (September 18th to the 21st), somehow the Japanese gaming expo still evokes a fevered passion that matches other major industry-wide events, like E3 or Gamescom.
Albeit, it does generally help when there’s something to show – and “to show” there was. With a year of a new console generation under its collective belt, the Japanese side of the gaming industry seemed to be swelling with tons of awesome items being featured at the show; new announcements, hot footage of highly anticipated games, and other fascinating story lines that one list probably couldn’t contain.
I’m going to do it anyway, though! So here now are the five biggest highlights from Tokyo Game Show 2014.
1. Final Fantasy XV Is Alive & Well
The biggest surprise at TGS this year had to be – hands down – the latest trailer for Final Fantasy XV. Long mired in development hell since 2006, when it originally went by the name Final Fantasy Versus XIII, the Square Enix role-playing game has been surrounded by a dark cloud of doubt regarding its development status.
This past week’s incredible unveiling though, after a year of silence from E3 2013, when the game was reincarnated from a spin-off title to a full-fledged Final Fantasy release coming to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, have seem to inspire a bit of new found hope that the troubled project will see a release in the near future.
Perhaps by late 2015 in Japan (with a subsequent release in other territories in early 2016), if all goes well. Square Enix management appear to be fully committed to getting the game out the door, replacing the game’s original show-runner, Kingdom Hearts director Tetsuya Nomura, with Hajime Tabata. Tabata is a director that has a solid pedigree of shipping projects in a timely manner, so it will be up to him to insure the same for FFXV.
According to Tabata in an interview at TGS, Final Fantasy XV is “55% complete” at this time, with a demo planned around the first half of 2015 sitting at 80% completion. No sound, or loose release date has been confirmed for either, but for now we’re left with a promising taste for what audiences should expect when the RPG launches.
2. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain – Quiet on the Set
Hideo Kojima brought all the Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain info he could to this year’s Tokyo Game Show. With the game nearing completion, the famed Konami director brought a great amount of new gameplay footage to his stage presentation, showing off a new local and more insight into the character of Quiet.
The scantly-dressed female sniper happens to play an important role in one of Phantom Pain’s key gameplay features, the buddy system. This allows players to team up with A.I. controlled partners out on the battlefield, who then have their own unique set of abilities.
Depending on certain conditions met within the game, your choice of A.I. partner will vary. Chances are you might even buddy up with other mission partners, such as a wolf-dog that Big Boss can raise and accompany him in later missions, if the player manages to rescue as a puppy.
Players necessarily don’t have to go out of their way to form these relationships, they’re totally optional and can be ignored if you just want to focus on the central campaign. But as a total package, it’s nice to see the kind of depth we might expect when Metal Gear Solid V ships sometime next year.
Here’s footage of the Tokyo Game Show stage demo in action:
3. New Nintendo 3DS Makes Its Debut At The Show
In typical fashion, Nintendo themselves were absent from the festivities of TGS, but not when it came for their upcoming latest handheld, the New Nintendo 3DS. At Capcom’s booth, demo units for the handheld – in either its standard or XL forms – were being used to try out the Japanese publisher’s next big 3DS release, Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate.
Releasing October 11 in Japan, the New 3DS improves on its past revision with a host of new features: better 3D screen, a small boost in hardware performance, and the ever apparent new C-Stick, which gives users an optional control method for in-game cameras. How do the new changes fair with a game like Monster Hunter 4? Here’s a video from an Engadget reporter, who got to try out the handheld from the TGS showroom floor.
4. D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die Stealth Release On Xbox One
Rarely does the spotlight fall on the Xbox brand during TGS (you can look up how badly every Microsoft made console has performed in Japan to see why), but it did just that with the immediate announcement and launch of D4, a Xbox One exclusive developed by Access Games and directed by Hidetaka “Swery65″ Suehiro.
Swery’s directorial efforts certainly have their own mad-ball flare, and that almost alone makes them worthy to try. Deadly Premonition, his previous effort, is game that is full of oddities, both comedically and in it’s surreal presentation. D4, or rather Dark Dreams Don’t Die, certainly extends into the auteur realm of which Swery affectionally belongs to.
In D4, players take the roll of private investigator David Young, who must solve the murder of his wife by going back in time to relive the fateful moments before her death. Using Kinect (although, the game can also be played without it), hand gestures and voice recognition can be used to find clues to further get to the bottom of this mystery.
Some major gaming outlets have already giving D4 some high recommendations, and better yet, the game is available to digitally purchase right now for $15.99 off Xbox Live. D4 is an episodic mystery adventure (you get the prologue and the first two episodes with your purchase), with more chapters to come in the following weeks and months.
If you happen to be a fan of the weird, especially of the Japanese variety (which is of a special variety), then you should certainly check out D4 if you have a Xbox One.
5. Bloodborne Gets Dated For Worldwide PS4 Release
Sony managed to fit in one more last surprise before the Japanese gaming exhibition came to a close: namely, a worldwide release for the dark action-role-playing game from the makers of the Dark Souls series, From Software’s Bloodborne, arriving exclusively for the PlayStation 4 on February 6, a day after the gothic-inspired title launches in Japan.
Bloodborne will be available in both a standalone edition and a prestigious collectors edition that costs $79.99 USD and comes with a Steelbook collector’s case, an art book featuring concept art from the game, and a digital copy of the game’s complete soundtrack. Below you’ll find the latest gameplay trailer for the game, possibly the last bit of new footage before the game’s release in early 2015.
Sony’s set-top box that provides instant access to a variety of PlayStation content is headed to North America next month.
October 14 is the North American release of the PlayStation TV. For $99 USD, the Sony gadget is a set-top box where you can play games from the PlayStation Vita, PlayStation Classics, the PlayStation 3 (through PS Now), and the PlayStation 4 via Remote Play.
Sony promises “nearly 700 games” will be available to download and play in the United States and Canada when the device launches. Although, some PS Vita titles won’t be able to make the “PS TV compatible” jump due to their use of hardware-specific gameplay, say using the Vita’s back-touch in Tearaway for example.
The list is still ample though, and will feature popular PS Vita titles: God of War Collection, Persona 4 Golden, Killzone Mercenary, and many more. And if you’re looking for a cheap way to dig through the PlayStation’s back catalogue, which consists of both PlayStation One and PlayStation Portable outings, the PS TV should do just nicely.
With PlayStation Now, Sony’s video game streaming service, the PlayStation TV will also be able to play select PlayStation 3 titles, provided, of course, if you have a sturdy and speedy broadband internet connection.
Lastly, if you own a PlayStation 4 (over 10 million worldwide sold say, yes, you probably do), then the PlayStation TV will allow for Remote Play. But instead of staring at a small screen, as with Remote Play on Vita, users can stream and play PS4 games from their main display to another, and control them with a synced DualShock4.
The PlayStation TV, aside from it’s $99 standalone version, will also come available in a system bundle that includes the box itself, a DualShock3 controller, an 8GB memory card, and The LEGO Movie Videogame. Another bundle, exclusive to Walmart retailers, reportedly has Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time instead; both available for $139.99 USD.
Apple’s set-top box gets a new software update, a subtle new look, and a bunch of new iOS 8 features, like Family Share and more.
iOS 8 wasn’t the only major software push coming from Apple this week. Apple TV also received a stealth update on Wednesday, which among other changes, included a new interface that shares its icon and font trappings from the latest iOS.
For a while the media set-top box lazy kept with the glossy icons of past Apple operating systems, but thankfully things are looking a lot more presentable; app icons such as Music, Computers and TV all have new colors that match their iOS 8 counterparts.
Several new additions from iOS 8 and the upcoming Mac operating system, OS X Yosemite, will also make their way onto AppleTV with this update, such as support for Apple’s new ecosystem-wide initiative, Family Sharing, and iCould Photo.
Family Sharing lets families (of up to six people) with iTunes accounts share content like apps, iBooks, music, movies, and more, across all of their devices using iCloud, provided that they at least share the same credit card.
Lastly, the new software update introduces Beats Music, an app that’s readily available on other iOS devices, yet finally makes it home here. The channel will allow Beats Music subscribers log on to their accounts and stream music from their Apple TVs.
To download the free software update, which is only limited to third-generation Apple TV boxes, users must go into the Settings channel, select General, and then select Software Update. From there the update should being its install process.
These stunning sneaks are by a UK designer are PS4 fanboy approved.
If you’re looking for a fashion statement that proudly describes your gaming allegiances, then look no further than these pair of custom Air Jordans styled after the PlayStation 4.
They’re called the “JRDN X PS4”, and are the brain child of United Kingdom artist Jonny Barry from FreakerSNEAKS, a website devoted to coming up with unique sneaker designs not found in your everyday Foot Locker. Indeed, these shoes are truly something else.
Using a pair of jet black Air Jordan 4 – a fine vintage sneaker selection I might add – Barry has stitched PS4 and PlayStation logos at almost every turn, specifically on the back end, loudly and proudly. And for the tongue, an image of the ardroable trouble-making robots from the PS4 augmented-reality game, The Playroom.
The PlayStation fanboy pièce de résistance though (pictured way above): A HDMI port built into the sole of the shoe. Ridiculous? Yes. Amazing? Yes. Working? Nope. It’s for pure show, along with the Jordan-branded HDMI cables that come with the shoes, and make for a neat carrying cord when plugged in.
Barry plans on making a limited run of ten JRDN X PS4’s at a price of around $950 each, more than twice the price of a single PS4. Pretty outrageous, but then so are these custom sneaks. Interested parties should send a direct email to info@freakersneaks.com or contact Barry on Instagram at freakersneaks, if they’re seeking to purchase a pair.
The Windows OS maker just made their $2.5 billion dollar buy out of one of the gaming industries biggest franchises legit.
It is official; after days of speculation from highly creditable sources, Microsoft officially announced on Monday that the software giant had agreed on principle to acquire the Minecraft license for the incredible sum of $2.5 billion.
The purchase of the sandbox construction game, which has been an unstoppable force in the industry in mass appeal, profit, and influence, comes with the keys to the independent Swedish studio behind it, Mojang, as well as the merchandising rights to all things Minecraft. Namely, apparel, LEGO sets, and what not, which in total helped Mojang post a revenue of $326 million in 2013, with $128 million banked as pure profit.
Not apart of the deal though, is the creator of Minecraft, one Markus “Notch” Persson, who along with his co-founding partners – Carl Manneh and Jakob Porser – will be leaving the company they created in 2009 after receiving quite the buy out. Reportedly, it was Persson who approached Microsoft to buy the Minecraft license, seeking to step away from the immense status he’d gained by creating the game.
As for Minecraft going forward, and how it relates to the number of platforms it currently appears on (including rival Sony’s PlayStation 4, PS3, & PS Vita), Microsoft have said that they are fully committed to support every version of the game. This means continued support on PC – where a passionate fan base pushed the game towards its success and still thrives – Mac, iOS, Android, and even consoles such as the PlayStation.
Ultimately, the grander play for Microsoft’s acquisition of the Minecraft IP is to gain a major entertainment platform rather than an exclusive to help sell Xbox Ones. That much is stated not from on-the-ball industry analysts, but from top executives within the company, like head of Microsoft’s Xbox division, Phil Spencer.
“We respect the brand and independent spirit that has made Minecraft great,” Spencer wrote in a statement about the purchase, “and we’ll carry on the tradition of innovation to move the franchise forward. Our investments in cloud, Xbox Live and mobile technology will enable players to benefit from richer and faster worlds, more powerful development tools, and more opportunities to connect with the Minecraft community.”
Time will tell if such intentions come true, but in the meantime, the deal still needs to be finalized through legal approval, which according to Microsoft won’t happen until “late 2014.”
