Minecraft is turning into real life. Here is a cool Minecraft Block. Awesome!

Now that I’m working on projection mapping it was only a matter of time before this happened. Thanks to my brother for the inspiration, he mentioned that one of the other projection mapping examples looked a bit like a minecraft block. Once the idea popped into my head I had to give it a try.There’s a piezo element taped to the box and hooked up to an arduino. The arduino senses the physical impact with the piezo element and sends serial data to my PC. Processing picks up the serial signal and takes care of the projection and interaction (particles, etc).

Dragon Age 2 only came out yesterday, but some crafty people have already discovered an easy to perform glitch that gives the player an infinite amount of experience points and gold. Hmmm, those are surely some of the basic fundamentals of the game, no?

The glitch, or “cheat” if you’re the judgemental type, involves some quick button presses while turning in quest items from delivery missions. Check out GameFront’s video for the details:

Seeing as the first person genre seems to be both competitive and repetitive I was sure that we wouldn’t really see a new style of multi-player mass murder game until the world saw another war to base it on. The market is enjoying such good sales at the moment that it simply hasn’t had the need to waste money on coming up with anything new, if if ain’t broke don’t fix it. Right?

The video below is the best looking this i’ve seen for sometime. Barely do i ever see a trailer that makes we actually wanna wait for the game to come out. Set in what looks like some sort of slum in the future the first/third person shoot em’ up seems to be trying to bring something of a mech-warrior culture back. And they’re doing very nicely indeed. Named Hawken and rumoured to be released for all platforms, no real solid news has been released yet about its creators. It is however planned as a downloadable game, and has been built using Epic’s Unreal Engine.

Check out the cool mother-ship looking thing at 1:51……….

More Total War: Shogun 2 screen shot have emerged and they look as plush as the last few. With a sneaky hint at what looks like to be naval warfare says I. Some campaign map shots are knocking about and some sort of super-magic gold dude. It is war, but still, you have to look good don’t you.

Click the pictures for a better look.

The real, honest-to-goodness Nintendo DS is made in CHINA. And knock-off cheapo Nintendo DS handhelds are also made in……? China. Funny that.

Over 90 percent of counterfeit goods that entered Japan in 2010 were, according to Japanese customs, from China. The number is 11 percent higher than the previous year. The number two country for knock-off goods entering Japan was South Korea

The most popular knock-offs brought into Japan were Crocs sandals. Random and Lame. Number two was the Nintendo DS and DS-related items. Custom officials say that these phony goods do look real, noting that it is difficult to distinguish them from the genuine article.

Japanese custom officials are eager to work with China as well as South Korea to come up with effective measures to counter the counterfeits.

It is said on the grape-vine, that Ubisoft didn’t originally intend to release the Wii version of Michael Jackson: The Experience before the other consoles, but since it worked out that way, the publisher is taking advantage of the delay to tweak the experience based on feedback from last year’s best-selling Wii release.

Reviews were largely favorable when it came to the dancing mechanic and gameplay, but the dearth of bonus content and criticisms with the game’s Dance School mode were key points it wanted to correct. A small self life by the sounds of it, that kind of thing can result in thousands of gamers handing in their copies part exchange and the retailers are laden with a plethora of Michael Jackson game for sale second hand and any integrity the game has ever had disappears for ever.

On the latter point, Guillaume Cada (Ubisoft international product manager) said, “We decided to improve these so now that in the Dance School you see yourself dancing, just like in a mirror, so you can modify your moves.” With regard to new content, “We also had unlockables, now you have Trophies from the PS3. Every time you unlock a Trophy you unlock a visual or video in the Extras and in the Gallery part of the game.”

This year, Blizzard Entertainment – the developers behind series like Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo – turns 20. To celebrate, they’ve released this fascinating video retrospective.

Enjoy the half hour of power here.

Sony has been given permission to obtain details of people who downloaded files needed to hack the PlayStation 3.

A judge in San Francisco granted the electronics giant a subpoena that would allow it to see a list of IP addresses. The software, used to crack the PS3′s operating system, was posted on the website of George Hotz, who is also known as Geohot.

Court documents, obtained by Wired magazine, show that the company successfully petitioned to obtain IP addresses from the web-hosting company Bluehost.com

The details could be used to trace the real-world geographical locations of users who accessed George Hotz’s website, Geohot.com.

Mr Hotz denies that he set out to help software pirates, claiming instead that he was championing the ‘home brew’ community – users who write their own software for the PS3.

Sony has said it is now able to remotely identify users who are running hacked PlayStation 3 consoles and that it will ban persistent offenders from using its online services.

Blizzard have started to slowly poke out clues into what we can expect from Heart of the Swarm – the first expansion to Blizzard’s Starcraft II. The expansion will have as much of an e-sport focus as Wings of Liberty, and they’ve made a plea for gamers to embrace the new breed as a spectator sport.

During a talk entitled The Game Design of Starcraft II: Designing an E-Sport at GDC, Justin Browder one of the designers on the project  admitted that the team did encounter some surprises when the game was finally released: “We’re going to maintain the e-sport values. We’re still working on it. These values are real. We’re not going to chicken out on e-sports in Heart of the Swarm.”

According to Browder, every aspect of Starcraft II’s development centred around the idea of making the game balanced and enjoyable to spectate: “Multiplayer was hugely impacted by e-sports. We took a ton of damage in trying to make this game’s multiplayer. A huge amount of effort. We were completely screwed around for five or six years. The art team got hit hard by the decision to make this an e-sport. Even the vision and the story were affected by the fact that this was going to be an e-sport. We did anything we could to make this a more watchable viewing experience.

Tonnes of gamers are staying in touch with the spectator aspect that the game is responsable for, PC Gamer proudly admit to it, and so does Inappropriatebunny.com, but what about you guys? The Bunny enjoys these places, Where we watched the Moon Vs. Squirtle Semi on friday, and HERE for all the latest on the Koreans.

Where and what gaming tournemants are you enjoying? Share some links. Search for my gamer tag on SC2, help me put together a good Bunny 4v4 team. InappBunny, come on gamers Team Bunny top of Grand Masters by the end of the year.

Saints Row has always seemed to play second fiddle to Grand Theft Auto in the world of crime games.

But with Saints Row’s over-the-top naughtiness, a bit more like Getaway, which included pumping pedestrians with pooh in the last game, you can’t really call it a clone. Expect the series to continue pursuing its own brand of potty humour and action in Saints Row: The Third, which was just announced for all platforms.

The slick art you see here comes from Game Informer, which will feature Saints Row: The Third on the cover of the magazine’s April issue.

Warner Bros. has announced that it intends to fight the Mortal Kombat ban that was imposed in Australia last month.

While the game is obviously gruesome, the publisher says that the gore in Mortal Kombat is on a par “with numerous other titles available for sale in the Australian market”.

The official Statement read:

“After careful consideration Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment Australia have decided to appeal to the Australian Classification Review Board against the RC (Refused Classification) decision given to Mortal Kombat. After reviewing both the game play and the Board’s original decision WBIE Australia believe the violence in the game is on par with numerous other titles readily available for sale in the Australian market. As such the company wants to exhaust all options to make the game available to Mortal Kombat fans in this country. An identical version of the game will be submitted for appeal.”

Currently, Mortal Kombat is rated mature which was deemed necessary to create the unimaginable brutality that the franchise is best known for, according to NetheRealm Studios anyway.

Penny Arcade and Minecraft are teaming up to make a new game that seeks to reinvent the classic collectable card game genre.

Scrolls will be developed by indie game studio Mojang and feature writing by Penny Arcade’s Jerry Holkins.

Holkins brings his flair for writing and deft use of adjectives to the game’s back story. Holkins says he and the rest of the folks at Penny Arcade are big fans of Minecraft.

Still in beta, computer game Minecraft already has more than 4.5 million registered users and has sold more than 1.4 million copies. The game was developed by Markus Persson. Persson has since formed Mojang, a studio of nine based in Stockholm, Sweden.

Scrolls, Mojang’s first game as a team, will combine elements from classic collectible card games with tabletop and board games, according to a Mojang press release.

The PC Gaming Alliance have released some figures ahead of their GDC report, showing that the PC gaming market grew by 20% in the year 2009, taking $16.2 billion in revenue. The report also predicts that the PC games market will continue to grow and could hit profits of $23 billion in a few years time. Almost doubling

Digital distribution is the main reason given for the explosion in growth. Selling digitally bypasses the cut taken by high street retailers,simply cutting out the middle man and allowing developers and publishers to take more direct profits. The report says that the PC gaming market will continue to grow, driven by digital distribution, and could regularly be worth $23 billion by 2014. the report also predicts that Steam will face tough competition from other contenders in the near future.

Blizzard are releasing another main patch for StarCraft II, and are allowing players to try it out before the official release date. The 1.3 patch is now current available to download via StarCraft’s public test server.

Patch 1.3 adds a new Grandmaster League to the 1v1 ladder matches, an extra league above Master. This league is available to the top 200 players in each of StarCraft II’s global regions. Additionally, the usual fixes of balance changes and general bug fixes are all present and correct, along with some improvements to the Join Custom Game feature and the game’s editing tools.

Activision as it confirms plans to release more download content for the series thanks to huge continued support from fans. With a bit of DJ Hero too it would seem.

After axing both the DJ Hero and Guitar Hero series in a shock announcement earlier this month, the publisher then confirmed that February’s planned Guitar Hero Downloadable Content releases would be the last, and that it “will not be able to release new DLC packs” in future. This month would official see the end of the GH and DJH series.

But it seems Activision has had a change of heart (sensed a money-making opportunity says I). A statement on the GH Facebook page reads: “Thank you for being a part of this community and all 3 MILLION of you rock! In thanks for your continued support, we’ve decided to celebrate by releasing some more downloadable content. Details coming soon…” As well as the DJ Hero fan-page on twitter states, ”Thanks for being a member of our community. In recognition of your continued support, we’ve decided to release more DLC! Details soon!” If it was a REAL gift and a GENUINE thank you, the content would be free wouldn’t it.

The planet seemed to be moving towards tablets before it actually arrived there, it somehow seemed inevitable. The iPod evolved into an iPhone,  that happened organically, the touch screen was there already, you had your music in it and Guitar Hero was still cool so it seemed and easy slide into touch screen portable games. Sony’s attempt at a game phone seems 5 years too late somehow, and regardless of arriving late, its already out of date. Why start from scratch in a ultra-competitive saturated market when they could have followed the iPod-Phone movement and just made PSP-Phone, that would would have made more sense to me, they would already had a game library anyway.

Its specs boost “touch sensitive controls”, but we’ve had those since the N64 haven’t we? Where’s the touch screen controls? Rookie mistake. The specs on this look better, if not then the same at the very least. (you have to laugh at the now over 4,000 colours though don’t you).

I WANT TO SEE SONY INNOVATE SOMETHING ORIGINAL FOR ONCE! Shoulder button, L2 and R2 and all that, snes did it first. Playstation move, Wii came first. Four control ports, GameCube. Silly bollocks crash team racing game, Mariokart. But now at least they’ve done a gaming phone eh. Nintendo don’t have one of those yet do they. No, but nokia have have done it already Ericson. Over five years ago, keep up guys.

According to an article on Swedish game site Press2Play, we should “forget dreams of Mirror’s Edge 2.” The report, which was originally published in December, claims that a prototype for Mirror’s Edge 2 was declined by EA, and that the project has been “stopped.”

According to the report, Patrick Soderlund, EA’s man in charge of driving and shooting games, “seems to have Mirror’s Edge near his heart” but also admits that “Mirror’s Edge didn’t match up to their expectations regarding sales.”

Given this Press2Play story, Gibeau’s comments, and that we haven’t heard much in support of Mirror’s Edge 2 except from Soderlund, we’ve just about completely lost faith in the possibility of a sequel (Ha!). DICE is surely focusing the bulk of its resources on Battlefield 3, anyway.

After almost nothing but good reviews of the first one, this was actually a decision that gamers didn’t see coming me thinks….

Wolverine. Ryu. Scorpion. Terry Bogard. Never before have these giants of the fighting game genre met in the one title before, but in Pixel Force: Head 2 Head, come together they shall. To kick ass.

Head 2 Head is the latest project from Eric Ruth, the guy behind the 8-bit renditions of Halo and Left 4 Dead. Billed at his first attempt at something other than a “demake”, the idea is to throw 30 characters from 10 classic fighting game series together in a single game, featuring the tag team mechanics made famous by games like Marvel vs Capcom.

As with his other works, it’ll be a free download for the PC when completed!

In first-person shooter Killzone 3, the Helghast are the gas-mask wearing baddies. Cloaked in black and with glowing eyes, you wouldn’t want to meet one on the street. And in Munich, Germany, you won’t.

To help promote Killzone 3 in the German city, a Helghast cosplayer roamed the streets, complete with mask, helmet and phony gun. Cops tend to notice crap like a guy draped in black, carrying what looks like a firearm.

So the Munich police approach the Helghast cosplayer, trying to figure out what the heck was going on. Ultimately, the officers asked the cosplayer to remove his mask and lay down his plastic weapon — which he obliged.

Normally, carrying around phony guns outside is in violation of Germany’s Weapons Act and carries the equivalent of a US$13,500 fine. But this time, the Helghast were asked a few questions, and nothing came of it. Shame the in-game Helghast can’t be defeated with a good talking to.

How are videos like this not just their own TV station yet? I’m not joking. My mates and i enjoy a good splash on Starcraft every now and again as much as the next casual gamer, we’re somewhere around 20th in Bronze 3Vs3 league. But we’d never go as far as to record ourselve, let alone let it get on the Interwebs if i did.

But I would DEFINITELY watch a TV station that was just this all the time. It’s hilarious! Always! “And now, back to Leroy Jenkins.” Ugh, the worst part is that someone probably will eventually make this into a TV network and it will be hugely successful and I won’t see A DIME. That’s the way of the world. The same thing happened when I invented Lunchables. “Why don’t we invent Lunchables and call them Lunchables.” How I rue ever saying that in that room full of lunch executives that definitely existed. Anyway: make it happen, Ari Gold, and send me a check for one million dollars.

Civilization 4 has become the fist game ever to receive a Grammy. The prestigious prize was awarded to one track from the game’s soundtrack called Baba Yetu. You’ll find the music video for the piece above.

Baba Yetu was composed by Christopher Tin for his album Calling All Dawns, but was originally used in Firaxis’ brilliant 2005 strategy game Civilization IV. The song scooped the prize for the Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalists category at yesterday’s Grammy awards.