Minecraft 1.4 is here! - GeekSlam Gaming

So today Mojang, creators and developers of super popular game, Minecraft, released 1.4

As of typing (23/10), the full release hasnt isnt out for download by the public, so i cant give out download info, but by the time this aurticle is on the blog, the update will be downloadable at mojang.com

As of right now, the time of me typing this, there's an hour or so until Minecrafters can update. By the time this article is up, the game will be on 1.4 and it will be available for update.

NEW FEATURES:

I have been keeping up with the weekly snapshots released by mojang which lets me use the new features.

Here's my brief overview:

Food:
There are now 2 new crops you can get: carrots or potatoes. They can be got by killing zombies as drops, they also generate naturally as testificate crops with wheat and also in newly generated swamp biomes.

You can use them as food or harvest them. Carrots can be made into golden carrots like apples can and those are used in potions whereas potatoes can be cooked in furnaces to make cooked potatoes. There is also a small chance if getting a poisonous potato when you harvest them.

You can also now craft pumpkin pie with a pumpkin, an egg and some sugar in any orientation in a crafting table, or in the inventory crafting square. Great for adventurers!

Potions:
There are now 2 new potions you can brew: the night vision potion and the invisibility potion.
The night vision can be brewed with a golden carrot in an awkward potion and can be made as a splash potion.
The invisibility potion can be brewed with a night vision potion and a fermented spider eye.

Note: the invisibility potion does not hide armour, whatever you are holding and potion effects.

Mobs:
There are 2 new hostile mobs, 1 new peaceful mob and 1 new boss mob!

The new peaceful MLB: bats. They spawn in dark places like normal mobs, hang on the ceiling and fly around when seen. They make a bloody annoying screeching noise, are about a quarter of a block in size, take 1 hit from an iron sword to die and don't drop anything.

The new hostile mobs are the witch and the wither skeleton. The witch spawns in newly generated swamp biomes in little huts and can use harming osplash potions against you and positive potions on itself. It can also stop itself from burning in sunlight, scary. I recommend busting out the power and punch bows against it.

The wither skeleton is a black skeleton that wields a stone sword and spawns in the nether (hell biome) it is 3 high and can give you the wither effect when it hits you. The wither effect turns your hearts black and decreases your health and adds it to the wither skeleton. I recommend using a regen potion you worked so hard to get. The wither skeleton drops coal, charcoal bones and the rare and relevant wither skeleton head...

The wither skeleton head is used to summon the new boss mob, the wither. You can spawn it like an iron golen except with soul sand instead of iron blocks and 3 wither skeleton heads on top. You dont want to spawn one as soon as you read this article though. The wither shoots "heads" towards you and can break through any block but bedrock, and this includes obsidian. It can also give you wither 2 and, along with its projectiles, can kill someone very easily. The wither has a (roughly) 50% chance to drop a nether star, which leads onto the next section...

Blocks:
One of The main new blocks is the beacon, crafted with a nether star, glass and obsidian. The beacon allows you to add permanent potion style buffs to yourself as long as your in range. You can increase the range and actuvate the becaon by building piramids out of diamond, iron, emerald or gold blocks and you must pay 1 emerald, diamond, iron ingot or gold ingot to activate the beacon. Altogether, it's probably the most difficult or at least the most "expensive" item in the game so far.

Another, cheaper, block added is the anvil. This block allows you to repair your items without loosing its enchantments, you can also combine tools with enchantments to get better enchantments. This comes at the cost of levels and the raw material its made of, ie a diamond pick would be repaired using diamonds. The anvil can be crafted with 3 iron blocks and 4 iron ingots

Misc features:
- zombies and skeletons can wear armour
- bug fixes
- slimes can spawn in swamp biomes
- item frames allow you to keep a visual reminder whats in chests
- xp farms using spawners are nerfed (not sure, jeb tweeted about it)
-steerable saddled pigs with carrots on a stick
- killed pigs drop a saddle if it was wearing one
- mob heads
- stairs now change to fit a corner shape
- cobble and mossy cobble fences


Thanks for reading this long article, i cant wait to play the full release of minecraft 1.4

Download the game: www.minecraft.net

Ashley

PS3 Ultra Slim Announced

PS3 Ultra Slim Announced

Earlier this week, tech giant Sony announced their newest PlayStation - the PS3 Ultra Slim. Why couldn't they wait for the PS4? Who knows.

Sony hasn't been very clear about it at all and with consoles, specs are hard to find and when you find them they make less sense than they do with phones and PC's.

There are 2 models that we know of:

Super slim version for $269, which has a 250GB Hard Drive and also a copy of Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (game of the year edition) as well as downloadable content for Dust 514. This one looks really nice.

It also comes with a silver stand for vertical placement, the last PS3 didn't have that feature but this is actually a very highly requested and needed feature for a lot of people.

It will be available on September 25th in the US or a slightly different bundle for the UK will be out on the 28th, but with Fifa 13 included.


Also, a slimmer version of the original PS3 Slim (confusing, isn't it?).
This one has a 500GB Hard Drive, it'll be available for $299 on October 30th and will be bundled with Assassin's Creed 3.


Both are very good deals in my eyes, quite expensive but worth it for loyal console gamers. BUT! Here's the big question! Is it worth waiting for the PS4 in 2013? I think it will be, the PS3 (and Xbox 360) was first released in 2006 and hasn't seen many updates or improvements.

We're expecting to see a massive update to console gaming over the next year with a new PlayStation, Xbox and already announced Wii U.

I still think the PSVita is killing handheld gaming and the iPod Touch does a better job than the PSV.

Thanks for reading!


Www.geekslamgaming.tk

FarmVille 2

For those of you Geeklings out there that spend any amount of time on Facebook, you'll definitely know what FarmVille is. I used to play it a lot, but it became boring and tedious, and I've not played the game for months.

Zynga, the creator of FarmVille and various other Facebook integrated games, has just announced FarmVille 2.

They claim to have reinvented the game, the main thing you'll notice is the cool new 3D graphics, and right clicking function.

We've reached out to Zynga with a few questions and will create another post with the answers once we get the response.

Thanks for reading

Keep pwning!

Microsoft drops Kinect price to $109

This post is for those of you that have an XBox but not a Kinect.

Microsoft dropped the price of the Kinect (motion detection xbox peripheral) earlier today to $109.99 from the original price of around $150.

Unfortunately this deal is currently exclusive to USA and Latin America but it will be making its way to other continents fairly soon.

Stay tuned, we'll keep you all updated on when the price drop is available worldwide.

The Launch Of GeekSlam Gaming

The Launch Of GeekSlam Gaming.

www.geekslamgaming.tk

(We've also added a fancy little button on the right to take you directly to the page)

So after about a month of ideas, planning and work, we're now just about ready to launch the new page GeekSlam Gaming. It doesn't really seem like much but even though we are currently covering a lot of the main aspects of technology, we've never properly covered gaming. Why? I honestly don't know.

We are now ready to cover Gaming, we will have all the same content as usual, but with Gaming heavily involved too.

Even though we released a video with some information about GG last week, but we have some more here.

We wont have the Gaming posts or videos on the GG page, they will be on the main blog but there will be a filter so that when you visit the Gaming page you will only see the gaming content.

We will have some reviews of gaming products coming up in a few months time but as you may know a lot of these gaming companies have super annoying contact pages and are really difficult to get through to.

But we will have some gameplays, unboxings, and general gaming coverage up very soon.

We all hope you all enjoy the new content and we also hope that it all runs smoothly.

If you'd like to get involved and produce some content for us, please click here.

Thank you!