Hearthstone’s been around long enough now that there are strategies that are well known to regular players. Love them or loathe them, strategy is strategy. Most annoying is when a strategy cannot be countered though, and once again Blizzard have stepped in with some changes to stop some of the more notorious.

Leeroy Jenkins for those unaware is a 4-cost Charge creature that has an attack power of 6 and a health of 2, who also summons two 1/1 Whelps for your opponent. The idea is that you get to smack your opponent with a powerful Charge hit, but also hand your opponent the means to remove said card in their next turn if they should choose to. Things never go as planned though, and the card is often the centre of strategies that combine him with cards such as Shadowstep and Power Overwhelming that aim to smack your opponent for ridiculous amounts of damage getting as bad as 20+ health at the more extreme ends.

The nerf seems minor, upping the mana cost to 5, but as you only ever get up to 10 mana per turn at best (unless you’re a Druid with the right cards) it puts a limit on how ridiculous a ‘Leeroy Bounce’ can get in a turn.

Another minion has seen some changes as well. Starving Buzzard is a Hunter card that cost 2 mana, had 2 attack and 1 health and let you draw a card with every Beast summoned. It’s a useful Beast, I have one in my own Hunter deck. Seems that Blizzard considered the card draw too high though because they’ve now seriously upped its mana cost to 5 and gives it new stats of 3 attack and 2 health.

It’s up to you whether you consider either of these changes as a good thing or a bad thing. Either way, you’re going to have to get used to playing a familiar deck with a slight balance change towards the higher mana cost cards.

Last night’s news about a possible Microsoft buyout of the indie developer responsible for Minecraft, Mojang sparked quite a reaction last night. A lot of people do not seem to relish the thought.

Now Bloomsberg have reported that far from Microsoft approaching Mojang as was assumed, founder Notch approached Microsoft first. The report states that Notch “reached out to Microsoft a few months ago, based on a positive working relationship on Minecraft for Xbox,” and that details have been being hammered out ever since that time. If the deal did go through it would also see Notch leaving Mojang entirely after assisting with the transition.

The news comes as a bit of a shock given that Notch has a reputation for being big on indies but not as much on bigger companies, having once famously pulled out of a Minecraft/Oculus deal after the VR company was acquired by Facebook. Personally I am still a tiny bit sceptical, but then $2 billion is a lot of money and you can never really tell.

All we can do now is wait and see whether there’s any truth to the news flying about.

In the midst of the Bukkit episode, it didn’t seem possible for another shockwave to hit the Minecraft community. But it has, and from a completely unexpected direction in some ways.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that according to “a person with knowledge of the matter” Microsoft have been in some serious discussion with the makers of the sandbox game, Mojang with the intent to acquire them for themselves.

The deal, said to be worth around $2 billion could be signed as early as this week. It comes as a bit of a surprise given what else has been happening recently though.

Minecraft is undoubtedly a very popular game and it’s easy to see why Microsoft would be interested. However, Mojang founder Notch has always been fairly wary of venture capital and big business and even once criticised Microsoft’s Windows 8 as being very bad for indie gaming.

All I can say is that the idea of a Microsoft-owned Minecraft makes me feel very… uneasy.

The Lego games are usually quite good for a laugh. There’s just something about seeing a tongue-in-cheek representation of well known licenses in (virtual) plastic that just… works.

The third Lego Batman should hopefully not break that streak, but the news that it’s getting DLC from release day, and that fairly substantial parts of the game are contained within these packs… well, it suddenly makes you wonder a bit. Then there’s the ‘season pass’ which is being offered as well.

The DLC packs will number 6 for this game and each will allow the unlock of other characters and missions to be played. For example, the Batman 75th Pack will allow play as Joker and Harley as they get up to mischief and will contain costume from all periods of Batman’s run. And then there’s the Dark Knight Pack which will allow for the playing of a mission based off a car chase sequence from the second Nolanverse Batman film.

It’s not all bad news though; the prices are at least not extortionate. Each individual DLC pack will cost £2.55/$2.99, while the season pass will be priced at £12.79/$14.99.

As far as fighting games go, Mortal Kombat has a long and somewhat infamous history of being not too shy about showing off the blood and the gory fatalities that probably played a role in keeping the series popular for so long.

Trailers for the latest announced game, Mortal Kombat X, were made public a few months ago. Now a release date has been announced for the game. April 10th is the day you can expect to get your new fix of the famous fatalities.

Unfortunately to unlock one of the characters, four-armed Goro, you need to actually pre-order the game which sucks for fans of the series who enjoy the character. There’s a chance he could later be available in DLC but paying extra for a character that had always been included before might rub some the wrong way.