Nachimir

There's now a glass skyscraper with hovering gardens North West of the giant man and woman statues. I've done better in one session on this server than in multiple ones in single player. First I found 4 diamond blocks within a few hours, then 75 blocks of Obsidian in one place, in a deep cave with multiple streams running over lava. I tried to reproduce it, but could only make two more. Edit: Totally plotting to mass manufacture obsidian now. May have found a way...

There's fantastically harsh wording throughout, including frequent use of "fraud"

Oh, Jesus. There's a metric shit-ton of tunnels right under my home I'll need to fix up with lanterns. Perhaps I'll just spend this month scouring them for everything valuable, then seal them up.

Thanks. I was sad getting a location was such a thrash, but enough people turned up to make it feel like a party, and the discussion between developers and press was excellent. Also, this was fun: That's Alec Meer from RPS doing their best of the IGA award, which went to Nidhogg by Mark Essen. Security ran up red faced and ready to take the megaphone off him, saying they're banned in Earl's Court. Never mind that people couldn't hear him ten paces away and the Defjam stand was a million times louder... Still. I basically got to be naughty for a weekend with a load of indie developers and journalists. Superb

Minecart ballet? Many tracks weaving through each other, all synchronised by red dust.

Should be around. Running the Show & Yell again on Saturday, too, location TBC.

After the first night, it's not that hard to survive in single player; you just need to make sure to get torches as fast as possible then you can seal yourself into a well lit hole for the night. By the second night, you should have a bigger hole to live in and a craft table. I've been using the single player to get used to how everything works, and have a nice little fortress set up with floating greenhouses full of crops. They make it feel like a game adaptation of Silent Running, all I need are a few robots. I also have a door down to a mine which goes down to the lowest level, and have just broken through into my first proper cave system. It's full of water, lava and zombie sounds; I wasn't prepared to fight so sealed it up with a door to go back later.

It's really expensive now, but you get source code...

Holy god, I thought I'd give this a quick go offline yesterday, and about 5 hours later realised I was starving and really needed to pee. Then I thought "I'll just put these pork chops through the furnace first", and built a greenhouse in the side of a mountain, which took another 3 hours or so.

Somethin' Else filmed it all for us, not sure where or when the videos are going up though.

Margaret Robertson did a talk at Playful today, presenting entirely with Minecraft instead of Powerpoint. It was pretty good, though the best line was "I was up until 4 last night mining stuff to put in my presentation"

Evil Genius had some of the finest art (in general) I'd ever seen at the time On bad boardgame art, Canal Mania is pretty bad, namely because if you cover the C it looks like something very different is going on: The original Katamari Damacy has a great cover though: (Full piece)

http://vimeo.com/animalcolm This one is lovely: http://vimeo.com/14844291

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Dunno. All Dalai would say publicly was "We haven't made any announcements". Not privy to anything beyond that either.

I sometimes struggle to find time for games, but if something is organised I might be able to join in. Certainly willing

This is actually a thing. A real television show called MANswers: 9LuBkqzgLzU

Congrats! Are you doing anything in Edinburgh for the Fringe next year*? If so see you there. *An almost surefire way to not make money...

I felt pretty bad that that worked better than getting them into cover, but I've also come to accept that it sometimes rewards speed and kamikaze tactics more than careful planning. Anyway, I'm on chapter 8 or so now, and am loving this. It's a fine game, and takes me back to XCOM in a way Advance Wars really didn't. Especially now I have all the troop types available, it strikes a really nice balance of futzing around with resources and combat. Occasionally a mission is really hard, but working out I could use the Eidelweiss to block the Batomys and give me more time to take down the machine guns was very satisfying, likewise twigging that I should lower the health of all radiators before killing one of them. Also, in typical XCOM style, I had to go back to a save when Selvaria took out a lancer then a shocktrooper inflicted permadeath. Her reinforcements meant my troops, positioned safely on the right of the Batomys, didn't stand a chance the first turn she arrived, but a few tweaks to positioning and the tank was gone in one more turn with no casualties. The lack of autosave between missions was unpleasantly retro at first, but this is an excellent game

That Kotaku story in toblix' post has been updated with Sony saying of the cover art: "Nothing to do with us. Here's a placeholder cover".

Planning another show and yell thing for the Saturday night... I doubt it'll be as chaotic as the last one, but can't promise.

I have phases where I hardly play games at all, then tend to binge. I seem to have gone through years long phases of RTS and FPS, though working with games means sometimes the last thing I want to do on getting home is play one.

This is rather nice: http://yttm.tv/ Slide it to a year, it shows you videos of things from that year.

Congratulations on completing another lap of the solar system!

Haha