A classic RTS game is to return with an upgraded look and enhanced features next month. Set to be sold on Steam by new owners Skybox Labs, the new Rise of Nations hopes to capture the elements that made it originally a well-received game while providing a smooth updated feel.

Originally developed by Big Huge Games, Rise of Nations combined two of the other best-selling strategy games – Civilization and Age of Empires – into a game that made use of some of the best parts of each back in 2003. Big Huge Games was eventually acquired by 38 Studios and along with other properties, Rise of Nations was snapped up at auction by Skybox after 38 Studios went into liquidation. Skybox have also touched up other classic property Age of Mythology, so they’re not new to the game of enhancing older games.

The new Rise of Nations Enhanced Edition will include both the base game and the Thrones & Patriots expansion, and comes with upgraded graphics, fixes to allow the game to run better with newer hardware as well as Steamworks and Twitch integration to allow for easy multiplayer connection and streaming respectively. It’s also available with a 20 percent discount if pre-ordered.

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.

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.

Hero Generations, the game dubbed “the five minute Civilization” has reached its funding goal on Kickstarter!

Dedicated listeners may remember that the creator of Hero Genreations, Scott Brodie, was a recent guest on the Indie Game Show. The game, which has you playing a hero who ages one year for every step he takes and must choose his path in life, be it fighter, builder or lover as he fosters a new generation to carry on has now reached full funding on Kickstarter. Hero Generations is now working towards meeting it’s stretch goals which include a Family Tree, Volcano Island and an advanced tier Tech Tree.

The Kickstarter for the game can be found here.

We at Sanitarium.fm wish Scott all the best, and will try to keep PredictedCyborg sedated until the game comes out, lest she damage herself or the studio bouncing off the walls in anticipation.

Fans of Sid Meier’s Civilization series, prepare to be blown away. Maybe literally if you happen to be standing too close to the rocket jets as they launch.

Today a trailer was made public for what appears to be the latest in the game series, that takes the well-established game mechanics of the series… and then sets them on strange alien worlds. That’s right, Civilization is going into space with Civilization: Beyond Earth.

The trailer itself is beautifully done and visually seems set in a not too distant future where mankind leaves the homeworld to seek new, uninhabited worlds to settle and develop further. Given that civilizations in this game start from the end point of the last game technologically (with rockets), the tech tree in this new game are taken from various sources of science fiction with such things as bio-genetics and cybernetics (yes!) being available in a ‘tech web’ system that guarantees no two civilizations will develop the same way. Ideologies also play a part in the game, affecting the development bonuses and appearances of units and buildings for the civilization that chooses them.

The game will release in the US, UK and Australia sometime during the third quarter of this year, so keep your eyes peeled for more news and information on the horizon. It’s sure to be one hell of a journey once we finally get into this game and launch our rockets to the wide reaches of outer space…