In the news of amazing things people continue to do with Minecraft comes this one: one player is taking on the challenge to recreate Pokemon Red in vanilla Minecraft. That is, the game of it. Quite a task.

Reddit user Magib1 has been working on their project for a while already and they estimate the rest will take “a few months” to finish. The system works through swapping custom textures into view with each click to simulate the moves made by the player.

“There’s a physical representation of the map in spawn chunks in which each block corresponds with a texture,” says its creator. “When the player clicks, a reader armor stand moves and clones the row of new textures behind the display. Display armor stands then detect the block type and stick the corresponding texture on their head before moving. The player model is just swapping between a static walking and standing texture.”

This isn’t the first time this user has done something like this in Minecraft before either, they’ve already constructed a working Pacman in Minecraft previously with ghost AIs and everything.

Assassin’s Creed is one of the many gaming franchises slated to have a movie made in the next few years. While some of those movie ideas will inevitably fall through, the Assassin’s Creed one is at least having some actors now attached to it.

Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard were already involved and now a Deadline exclusive seems to confirm that both Brendan Gleeson and Jeremy Irons are also involved. They’ll be playing the fathers of Fassbender and Cotillard respectively. Both actors are fairly big names too, so if it’s truthful then it’s a major point in the film’s favour. Also attached to the project is director Justin Kurzel.

The video game series itself has sold over 91 million copies and Ubisoft seem to bring out a new one every year. Let’s hope that some of the bale leaping makes its way into the film, although in a more realistic fashion. It’s easy to suspend disbelief in a video game after all, and some of the leaps in game would break your neck in real-life no matter how good you are.

The Assassin’s Creed movie is speculated to be due on December 21, 2016.

I love Cities Skylines. It’s a wonderful little city builder game which requires you to keep on top of your building and assigning of areas, as well as leading to eventually being able to plan ahead your cities as you build. Of course, it’s also very well supported by its community in mods on the Steam Workshop as well which is a big plus for most people (I only have one mod installed myself – a Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria skin for the low-density retail buildings). Now Paradox have released the first DLC for the game entitled After Dark.

The big thing to note is that despite its title you don’t actually need to get the After Dark DLC if you want a day/night cycle in your cities. That bit came in a free update and my god does it look pretty.

The DLC itself adds a number of things into the game, mainly based around three areas: specialisations; transport and crime.

The new specialisations are in both the commercial areas of the game. It’s now possible to specialise your commercial areas in either leisure or beach-focused tourism. The leisure specialisation will act like normal commercial areas during the daytime but during the nighttime will see a massive increase in activity, while the beach-focused commercial areas can be assigned to commercial areas built along the shoreline of an ocean.

Transport wise there’s been the addition of a new type of transport: taxis as well as bus and bike lanes. Taxis originate from a Taxi Depot and can rest at nearby Taxi Stands if they’re closer, picking up passengers where they’re called to and also from stands. The bike lanes are a new form of path that can be found included with the paved path and gravel path when you unlock the parks, and bus lanes can now be included in roads that are built. There’s also the addition of a new big Bus Terminal where many buses can converge to pick up passengers.

Crime has seen a big overhaul, with a new stat being added to show the amount of criminals being detained at a time. While the former police buildings do have some jail capacity, the new Jail building is necessary for the detainment and reform of caught criminals during their sentences.

Playing it through, the new additions to the game are nicely implemented without taking away anything from the core game that I loved. The most noticeable bit was the day/night cycle admittedly but being able to set up new ways for my citizens to move around the city is always a good thing because inevitably there will always be a point where the traffic jams are mounting up and you need to get people off the roads or into using public transport. Buses have always been a big issue for my games, so it’s nice to be able to at least streamline some of that part with the new Terminal although it doesn’t fully sort that problem out. Mind you, the challenge is to figure that out yourself so that doesn’t put me off at all.

The fun of Cities was always to build a city that works. After Dark brings some new solutions to the equation as well as a few new issues to solve. It adds to the game rather than replacing or taking away something and that is basically what a DLC should do. And for £10.99 / $14.99 it’s not too steeply priced either. Right now the base game is 50% off until tomorrow, so it’s never been a better time to get into the game if your interest has been piqued.

8/10

AMD has just released the Catalyst 15.9.1 beta driver update after the 15.9 update on Tuesday resulted in reports from users of memory leaks that resulted when certain windows were altered.

The update came with optimisations for the Star Wars Battlefront beta and Fable Legends’ DirectX 12 benchmark, but when some users resized windows or snapped certain windows, it caused a memory leak that would cause all the video memory of the graphic card to be used. Upon becoming aware of the issue AMD issued a statement that urged everyone affected to roll back their driver versions.

The 15.9.1 beta driver update has fixed the issue, so if you’ve got 15.9 update as soon as possible to stop the memory leak problems. The beta driver update comes with the same optimisations for tar Wars Battlefront beta and Fable Legends, as well as a DirectX Diagnostics bug fix. Other bug fixes included crashes and signal loss on some BenQ FreeSync monitors, and an issue with Catalyst Control Center that made it impossible to download any updates from within the software.

Recently the developer of World in Conflict, Massive decided that the time had come for the online functions of the RTS game to come to an end. The game had been released in 2007 and with low numbers playing it, it didn’t seem a good continuing investment of Ubisoft’s money anymore.

However, when they announced this on a post on their forums saying that “This includes Massgate [the website], the game servers and the forums, which means it will only be possible to play campaign and LAN games after that.” the small but active community wasn’t having it.

A Change.org petition began circulating through the community to try and save the online capabilities, and although it only gained 439 signatures, it’s made Ubisoft stop and take notice. They’ve since posted that they’re going to postpone the October 6th shutdown date to weigh other options first. “We are still investigating some potential community based solutions,” the update says. “No promises, but we are looking into it. We want to make sure all options are exhausted before we shut it down.”

Although it wouldn’t be true to say that WiC is out of trouble just yet, it is kind of nice to see that sometimes the companies will take notice of what their gamers want. Even Ubisoft.