Hasta La Gadget!

Back in November of last year, Mojang the company behind Minecraft, announced that the game was coming to the Raspberry Pi platform. In case, you don’t know about Raspberry Pi, it’s a very small computer design (credit-card sized) that can be used as a core system, and extended for many purposes. It’s incredibly cheap ($25 – $35 with more connectors) and is powered by a Broadcom BCM2835 system on chip (SoC) which features hardware graphics etc.

Minecraft for Raspberry Pi is completely free, and is now available for download. According to Mojang, Minecraft Pi will have a limited set of features. We’re not sure what this will evolve into, but the cost of building a Minecraft Lan-party just drop by a factor of 10X.

For those not familiar with Minecraft, it is an open world game in which users can shape their world by taking action (adding/deleting) basic building blocks of materials. The game has many aspects such as a purely creative mode where players can fly, or a survival mode where they need to manage resources and hunger. In the most difficult mode, the world resets upon death. Ouch.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Next Batman: Arkham Game Expected For 2013 Release, The Last of Us Release Date Delayed Until June 18,

I know you can’t wait for the third season of Game of Thrones when it hits at the end of March. Me too. Well, here is something to help tide you over until then. This amazingly detailed Minecraft King’s Landing was created by the people at Westeroscraft – who are gradually recreating the entire domain of Westeros using only Minecraft. And even though it is awesome, it makes me sad because we still have to wait for next season.

I want to watch it now! I’ll just take a deep breath instead, and absorb all of detail of King’s Landing. Just look at all of those buildings, the docks, the countryside. This city is alive – though we all wish King Joffrey wasn’t.

The only thing missing is an immense battle with green wildfire spraying over the ships in Blackwater Bay.

Hit this link for a gallery of hi-res images. They did an amazing job. But I still want to watch the show now!

[reddit via Nerd Approved]

Many gamers played a bunch of different games on Xbox Live throughout 2012, but there are a handful of titles that obviously rise above the rest in terms of activity. Today Microsoft‘s Major Nelson released a list of the top 20 Xbox Live titles of 2012, and we’re seeing some entries that are predictable and others that are somewhat surprising. Care to guess which game landed at the top of the list?

If you guessed Black Ops II, you were right. Activision’s latest entry in the Call of Duty series settled at first place for the year, followed in second by Modern Warfare 3. Halo 4 managed to work its way into third, pushing the incredibly popular Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition into fourth place. That Minecraft finished in the top five is important – normally, we’d expect the most-played games of the year to be full retail releases, while Minecraft is an Xbox Live Arcade title.

The original Black Ops (which has been on shelves since November 2010, remember) rounds out the top five, so it seems that only Halo and Minecraft had the player base to challenge the Call of Duty series. Borderlands 2 just missed the top ten with its 11th-place ranking, while it seems that a healthy number of people were playing Skyrim all through the year, as Bethesda’s epic managed to secure 13th place. Despite the fact that it was only released on December 4, Far Cry 3 broke into the list nonetheless, coming in at number 18. Here’s the full list of Xbox Live’s most-played games for 2012:

1. Call of Duty: Black Ops II
2. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
3. Halo 4
4. Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition
5. Call of Duty: Black Ops
6. FIFA Soccer 13
7. FIFA Soccer 12
8. Battlefield 3
9. Halo: Reach
10. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
11. Borderlands 2
12. Assassin’s Creed III
13. Skyrim
14. Madden NFL 13
15. Gears of War 3
16. NBA 2K13
17. NBA 2K12
18. Far Cry 3
19. Grand Theft Auto IV
20. Forza Motorsport 4

Major Nelson also shared lists of the top Xbox Live Arcade, Xbox Live Indie, and Games For Windows Live titles for 2012. Though Minecraft was pushed out of the top spot on the overall list, it came in at first place on the Xbox Live Arcade list, with CastleMiner Z taking the first place crown for the indie list. Surprisingly, Grand Theft Auto IV was the top Games for Windows Live title of 2012, beating out more recent games like Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition and Batman: Arkham City. If you’d like to see all four full lists, they can be found over on Major Nelson’s blog.

Call of Duty unsurprising tops Xbox Live activity list for 2012 is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Well folks, after a long week, we’re back from CES 2013. We covered a lot of stuff during our time there, and while you can find all of our coverage by navigating to our CES portal, we’ve also put together a few wrap-ups that bring together the most impressive of what we saw. First up for the day was our PC and Windows 8 wrap-up, which was shortly followed by our Android CES wrap-up, and then finally our gaming wrap-up. Considering the massive amount of news that came out of CES, you might be thinking that the number of wrap-ups seems a little low. You’d be right – we’ve got more wrap-ups coming this weekend, so sit back and watch as we recap all of the biggest stories to hit during the show.

Of course, the news and rumors never stop, and with one show behind us, it’s time to begin looking toward the next one, with new whispers claiming that Huawei will unveil a new 8-core processor and a new P-Series phone at MWC 2013. The HTC M7 and Sense 5 UI suffered another leak today, and we heard that Facebook is testing a new $100 charge to message strangers. The CST-01 watch hit its Kickstarter funding goal in just 48 hours, with HP and Lenovo facing a tough battle in the PC sales space in Q4 2012.

The Lenovo IdeaTab A2107 has landed at AT&T for $199, and iOS hacker Pod2g has launched PodDJ for iPad. Nokia has confirmed that HTTPS traffic is temporarily decrypted on its servers, and a new Windows RT jailbreak is getting some potential Surface homebrewers excited. There’s also new hack that could turn Cisco desk phones into a way to secretly listen in on conversations you probably shouldn’t be hearing, which is very unsettling news indeed.

The Nexus 4 is getting updates to Jelly Bean 4.2.2 in some countries, and Mojang said today that Minecraft sold more than 15 million copies across all platforms in 2012. Black Ops II was unsurprisingly declared the best-selling game of 2012, while the Xbox 360 has the distinction of being the best-selling console for two years running. Of course, we have plenty of hands-on posts from CES 2013 that went up today, including looks at the Pentax MX-1 digital camera, the Moen MotionSense Touch-Free Faucet, a pair of Galaxy S III cases from Pelican, Ion Scratch 2, Vizio’s new Windows 8 Tablet, and finally, the company’s upcoming Windows 8 all-in-ones and notebooks. That does it for tonight’s Evening Wrap-Up, we hope you enjoy the weekend everyone!

SlashGear Evening Wrap-Up: January 11, 2013 is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

We already knew that sales for Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition came in over the 5 million mark for 2012, but today we’re getting a broader picture of the sales the franchise managed last year. Mojang has shared a list of Christmas Day stats for all versions of Minecraft, and in doing so, the company has also revealed how many sales each version brought in throughout 2012. Needless to say, the numbers for each impress, while the final tally for the franchise in general is pretty staggering.

First though, let’s check out those Christmas stats. Mojang says that on December 25th, 70,808 players either purchased or redeemed codes for the PC and Mac version of Minecraft. When we zoom out and look at the week of December 24th, that number grows to 241,845 purchases. In all, the PC/Mac version of Minecraft brought in 4,177,843 sales throughout the year, which isn’t bad for a game that has been available for a number of years already.

Of course, while the PC version’s sales were impressive, they couldn’t top the sales of the Xbox 360 version. Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition was purchased 100,416 times on Christmas day, jumping up to 325,591 sales during the larger Christmas week. 5,002,370 sales was the final tally for Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition, which again is something that we already knew.

With the huge number of people getting a new smartphone or tablet on Christmas day, it definitely isn’t surprising that the sales for Minecraft: Pocket Edition managed to come in on top of the Xbox 360 and PC versions. The mobile version of Minecraft netted 283,939 sales on Christmas day, 706,419 on Christmas week, and 5,899,727 for 2012 as a whole. Both iOS and Android sales are counted in this figure, so it would appear that Mojang is cleaning up across all platforms.

Add up all of those numbers for 2012, and we come to 15,079,940 sales for all versions of Minecraft in 2012. That’s hundreds of millions of dollars for Mojang, so the studio is definitely sitting pretty as we head into 2013. We imagine that Minecraft sales will continue to be strong as more players decide to finally jump on the bandwagon and see what all the talk is about, so don’t be surprised to hear Mojang touting similar numbers at the end of this year. We’re you one of the millions who picked up Minecraft in 2012?

[via Mojang]

Minecraft sales top 15 million in 2012 is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.