Minecraft, the Ordnance Survey and an in-game map of Britain

This has made the news recently and is worth checking out as it is easily one of the best "serious" uses of the Minecraft game phenomenon.

Ordnance Survey has used their data to recreate, in-game, over 220,000 square kilometres of mainland Great Britain and also surrounding islands, all done by an intern in the company. This was by using more than 22 billion blocks to put this all together.

 

 

You can read more about the process here, and, more importantly, also download this and use it (you will need to have Minecraft installed).

Murasaki Baby PS Vita game

It's always great to see a game with non-photorealistic graphics, particularly if it also flies in the face on what is conventional gaming too. Murasaki Baby by Italian studio Ovosonico. Part of Sony's recent Gamescom presentation the game is a great example of hand drawn art combined with a novel gameplay mechanic.
 

 

The game is to come out on Sony's PS Vita and is well worth checking out in the video above.

Toast Time game from Force of Habit

It's great to see a former BU student doing well; this is Ashley Gwinnell who is involved with the Bristol-based Force of Habit start-up. They have recently released a title for Android phones called Toast Time.

The game can be purchased here. Versions for other platforms are also in the works.

VS Games 2014 location and website announced

The first web page of the VS Games 2014 website is now up and running. As announced during VS Games 2013 in Bournemouth UK, the next outing of the conference will take place in Valetta, Malta between the 9th and the 12th of September 2014.

More information can be found here, with the CFP set for November.

Awards at VS Games 2013

VS Games 2013 has drawn to a close; 3 awards were handed out during the conference to the best papers for 3 different categories. These were the following;

 

1) Best Full Paper Award; Barata, G., Gama, S., Jorge, J. and Gonçalves, D. "Engaging Engineering Students with Gamification"
2) Best Short Paper Award; Kremer, D., Schlieder, C., Feulner, B. and Ohl, U. "Spatial Choices in an Educational Geogame"
3) Best IEEE Member Award; Paraskevopoulos, I. and Tsekleves, E. "Use of Gaming Sensors and Customised ExerGames for Parkinson’s Disease Rehabilitation: A proposed Virtual Reality Framework"

 

 

All of the prizes for these awards were kindly donated by Springer.

I Am Street Fighter documentary made available by Capcom

Capcom themselves have uploaded an official documentary on the Street Fighter series (focusing on the dedicated fandom for the iconic fighting games). Well worth watching if you're interested in both the game but also its evolution from the very first title of the series to the (still-very-popular) cel-shaded modern version.

 

 

 The video is over 70 minutes long.