Jeb has tweeted that Minecraft 2.2 has been released. Among the changes are new redstone lamps (light blocks activated by redstone current), new world generation, Jungle biomes and more.
As usual, Hat Films has made a funny and informative short video highlighting some of the changes.
Read on for a full list of changes!
According to Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter via Gameranx.com, the next generation of Playstation console is “essentially a PC” in terms of its technological make-up. He writes that Sony and AMD are collaborating on the console’s CPU, moving away from the PS3’s Cell architecture to an x86 processor for the new console. This is good news for PC gamers because it could possibly mean more cross platform games, better PC “ports”, and probably faster console price reductions (considering how quickly the prices in the PC industry drop).
If they’re going to be partnering with AMD we’re likely to find something along the lines of the AMD A4 or AMD A6 inside the machines. These are APUs rather than traditional CPUs. An APU integrates a CPU and a GPU on the same die thus improving data transfer rates between these components while reducing power consumption. They’re not as good as some of the high-end CPUs paired with high-end GPUs, but they get the job done and on a closed-system they can be fully taken advantage of without having to worry about things on a normal everyday PC taking up their fair share of the processing power.
Toss in 2gb or 4gb of RAM, a 320gb HDD (possibly a smaller solid state?), and a blue-ray drive and you could be looking at a $300-$400 system. Personally I’ll be happy if this is the case simply because the games will be written for x86 architecture meaning we’ll see a lot more games end up on the PC that we didn’t get before (ahem, Red Dead Redemption…)
The lost subscriptions are one sign, but the laying off of almost 600 employees is another. Hoot has brought to our attention in the forums that Business Wire reports Blizzard is laying off approximately 600 employees. The company anticipates approximately 90% of the affected employees will come from departments not related to game development – which means about 60 are being laid off from the game development departments.
They do say that it’s not going to affect any of their upcoming releases such as Mists of Pandaria or Diablo III. In addition, Blizzard is still recruiting and looking to hire qualified developers for a number of open positions. Further details are available at http://jobs.blizzard.com. It looks like it was more shrugging off excess overhead that they gained during their WoW growth than a “we’re not making any money so we’re laying off all these people!” Layoffs are always a sign of interior house cleaning though and it does point to the fact that Blizzard probably isn’t making as much money as they were during WoW’s height.
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