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Disney Interactive loves Disney Infinity, and apparently the Avengers. During an even in Los Angeles, Disney Interactive President Jimmy Pitaro announced that characters from Marvel’s vast stable of heroes and villains will be joining the Disney Infinity universe this fall as Disney releases the 2.0 Edition of the game.
Characters revealed so far include Hawkeye, Black Widow, Captain America, Iron Man, Thor and the Hulk. For those keeping score, thats pretty much all of the Avengers. MODOK and Loki were also shown as well as Groot and Rocket Raccoon from the upcoming film Guardians of the Galaxy. The Marvel characters also come with a new environment, Marvel Manhattan for players to explore. Each character will have their own unique abilities to give them that signature feel folks have come to expect from the famed Marvel characters. Iron Man can hover, Hulk can climb walls and Black Widow can….punch things. The figurines and in game characters will feature a stylized look that has been “homogenized” across the Marvel spectrum. That isn’t to say the designs have been dumbed down. They just fit into the Disney Infinity universe while remaining instantly recognizable.
For those worried that 2.0 will force you to start over, fear not! All content from the original version will carry over, including toys, play sets, power discs and Toy Box levels. marvel Manhattan is promised to be four times larger than the size of the Incredibles play set in the current game. Players will be able to engage in airborne combat, scale buildings and perform super jumps. In addition, Disney is adding in a degree of customization as they raise the level cap from 10 to 20 for characters and add a skill tree interface.
Disney Infinity 2.0 Edition will launch with a new starter pack that will include and Avengers-themed play set, two power discs and three characters: Black Widow, Thor and Iron Man later this fall. The game will be available for iOS, PC, PlayStation 3, WiiU, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
Space combat is all well and good. I like blasting an enemy to bits just as much as the next person. BUT, I also love in-game economies where I can buy and sell to my greedy heart’s content. It seems Elite:Dnagerous developer Frontier does as well. In a recent newsletter, Frontier has dropped a whole lot of information about the economy in the upcoming open world space game.
“The rules are, of course, simple and universal – buy goods cheaply, where they are made and there is plentiful supply, and then sell them where prices are high, in a location that has a high demand for your cargo. Of course that may be easier said than done because of people who have honed their combat skills and are not averse to a little piracy as they spot you travelling from A to B – but let’s not worry about that for now…!”
As in the real world, the economy of Elite:Dangerous runs on commodity markets. To make things more interesting, each solar system has it’s own market, niche and government. Some may be service based, some prefer to deal in high-tech goods and others may be heavily industrialized. Add on top of that the extra complication of governments, “ ranging from anarchies where ‘anything goes’, to theocracies who have their own idiosyncratic strict proscriptions.” , and theres a lot of complexity when picking that sweet spot for what to buy and where.
The economy uses a server-based background trading simulation, with supply and demand levels being influenced by trading between local systems. This actually connects the economy across the vastness of the game world, meaning that each individual system is not a self contained market. Increases in the supply of a commodity in one system will have a corresponding impact on the price of that commodity in other local systems. And its not just players that affect this. AI traders exist in the world and their effects can also be felt. This system also encourages players to work together. “All your individual trades are added to the whole, and even mid-sized economies can be influenced by concerted efforts between groups of like-minded individuals. So you may find your ‘milk run’ dries up for a time, forcing you to look elsewhere for the deal. Or you could engineer a fat profit for yourself by cooperating with your friends…”
Frontier plans to start rolling out trading in ALpha 4, and I couldn’t be more excited. Of course, I’ll be the one blowing your ship away and taking your cargo for myself, but I just consider that cutting out the middle man….
A 1:1 scale map of Denmark has been created inside of the game Minecraft, for the sake of educational purposes.
The Danish Geodata Agency has undertaken the massive-scale project using their data to recreate the landscape of the country, the map taking up over a terabyte of data due to its size and detail. The two men responsible for the build, Simon Kokkendorf and Thorbjørn Nielsen, hope that the map can be used within schools to teach kids about environmental effects and urban planning among other things.
The Indie Game Show with DJs Digmbot and PredictedCyborg Sunday night, 6pm til 9pm GMT, 1pm til 4pm EST.
On the Indie Game Show this Sunday…
XMPT Games!
This team are participants of the EGX Rezzed Indie Game Jam, which they won with their game Personal Space Invaders inspired by the Game Jam’s theme of ‘touch’. The game is now available on their website for people to play.
We are being joined by Ed and Luke to talk about Personal Space Invaders, other projects they are working on, indie gaming in general and of course we will be taking your questions from the IRC for the guys to answer!
Hints about a major new addition to the game of Minecraft have been floating about recently, and yesterday Mojang have finally revealed the nature of the addition in a video demonstrating its use. Simply, you’ll be able to generate your own custom worlds with much greater control than ever before.
Coming in update 1.8, the new function allows a player to alter the settings of a newly generated world via 16 sliders, as well as controlling the spawning of villages, dungeons etc. by strictly defining how many spawn or even if they will spawn at all. You can also set a new sea level for the world. Included with this update are a set of premades that Mojang have made to allow players to get certain types of world without having to experiment with the sliders first (this includes a world made of mountains as well as another made mainly of islands and ocean).
All of this means that as soon as the game updates to include this new feature, players will have an even greater control over the worlds they spawn, being somewhere in between the usual world-spawn Minecraft uses and the use of a tool like Voxel Sniper or MCEdit to make a custom world that fits with whatever the player has in mind for that world. And as someone who often wants a certain thing from her Minecraft worlds, yet also enjoys seeing the random way the game creates its landscape, I see this as being a very exciting thing indeed.
