Minecraft texture packs review

What's up folks?
Today it's saturday and I finally have some time to write something in here, yesterday evening I was checking out minecraftforum.net suddenly I realized that the "texture packs" section was really active and I decidet to try out some of the most downloaded ones.
I made up an house in a bunch of minutes (don't blame me, I know it's ugly!) and wanted to see the difference by switching from a pack to another.
First of all, in case some of you don't know, you need MCPatcher in order to switch from a texture pack to another within the game.
You can easily find it here: MCPatcher thread.

Here's what i got:

-Original textures

-Derelict x64

Creepy, it shows how would your buildings look like after a hundred years, it creates a sad setting, everything looks abandoned. In my opinion, great texture pack!
I just didn't like how does a diamond block look like, I mean, you have to be super aware on how it looks like, I really don't know if I would recognize it in a sea of stone.
Official thread on minecraftforums: Derelict topic.

- Deuteros 128x

While just above I talked about something rustic, here we have some screens about Deuteros. This one gives a complete different feeling, it looks like you just jumped it the future somehow, the mineral blocks have an awesome design, and I really loved the torches concept (4th screen). If you are looking for something different, then this is what you need!
Official thread on minecraftforums: Deuteros topic.

Had some more screens but I guess the post is already too long, I know that someone dont like to scroll thousand times in order to browse my homepage.
Have fun, and tell me what do you think about these two incredible texture packs! :D

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Let's talk about Cobalt.

Hello readers!
I just got home after my first university week, I just can tell you that it feels AWESOME! I mean, living with friends and no parents around is something really worthy, never felt this indipendent.
But anyways, new weekend, new posts and today I'm going to talk a little bit about Cobalt.

What is it?
It's a platformer indie game that is going to be released anytime soon!
It's developed by Oxeye Game Studio, in collaboration with the well known Mojang (creators of Minecraft and Scrolls) it has some juicy 2D graphics and an really interesting gameplay, it includes also an enjoyable multiplayer mode that in my opinion is going to be the strongest point of the game.
But more in general, as the developers would say, this game is all about: "jumping, rolling, shooting, t h r o w i n g, dancing, HACKING, rolling, flying, sliding, climbing, looting, deflecting, racing, pinata-ing, passing, scoring... and even more rolling!"
 
Here is the last official teaser:

Did you listen at the music when the title "COBALT" comes in? if you did, isn't it an incredible soundtrack? I fell in love with those few notes there!
In fact Cobalt was nominated for the "Excellence in Audio" award at the 13th annual Independent Games Festival; you can find the musician on Soundcloud or Twitter, just search for "Anou".
At the end of this month the alpha's pre-order is going to be up BE SURE NOT TO MISS IT! :D

Official site: playcobalt.com

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50 followers! and real life

First of all I really wanna thank every single follower that I got in this month, damn I really appreciate it.
It gives me the strenght to focus myself on my little blog even more than before, but, from tomorrow I'll be living in Udine to attend the university's lessons, sadly, in my little flat that I rent with a couple of friends there isn't internet at the moment and I'll have time to post updates only during the next weekends.
Anyways, we will work to get our internet connection as soon as possible, though, it might take several weeks.
So I can tell you that in the future you have to expect: a Minecraft daily every saturday and most probably an entire new blog about my Starcraft life. Indie games like Scrolls and Cobalt, that you should check out, are going to have a post all about them on the next monday and I will write it during my lessons I believe :P.

So, this is it, I'm really glad that someone enjoys my posts, and I still hope that there will be more as life goes on, thank you really much and see you around :D

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Starcraft, Day 9, and some other thoughts

Today I don't feel like post a new Minecraft daily, in fact yesterday morning I saw one of the most inspiring videos of my entire gaming life. Yea, it's Day9's daily #100, when he spent 2 hours of his life to talk about his personal experience through starcraft.
I mean, beside the fact that having all the support from your family is one of the most important things, whatever you're up to, I learnt that if you really want to do something, you can do it just by practicing.
You just have to keep your goal sticked in your head and go on, even in the worst case ever that may occur.

Talking now, about my Starcraft II life, I decided that I am definitely going to be promoted in gold league (yea, I'm an high rated silver and I'm not proud at all), today I played several games with people fairly better than me, which means that I'm actually somewhat ready to the promotion, but damn, it isn't coming.
Said this, just to introduce an idea that I just got, I'm thinking to open a brand new blog only about my Starcraft II games, thoughts, rages (a lot of them :P) and so on.
Not because I'm sure that someone will follow it, but mainly because I really like to write down my real feelings, that makes me feel better, i guess
Will think about it :)

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Strongholdz! Daily #4

Heya followers,
Today I'm going to spend some minutes of my life to talk about STRONGHOLDS! but still I'm going to bring these sort of informations as one of my Minecraft dailies. Many of you may already know that in every new generated world there will be only three strongholds, also all of them will appear near your spawnpoint, with "near" I mean that you can actually reach them without wasting hours of your precious life. Of course many of them are underground, that means that you need a tool in order to find them which is this one: Official Minecraftforum thread, and if you are too lazy to click on that link just click on the play button down here ;)

Guess it's time to start:
In the afternoon Dartino said that he had found a stronghold which was not that far from my home, we didn't care about the approaching night, and our journey started. The darkness began to eat us alive when we reached the coordinates, there was nothing out there so we decided to dig all the way down hoping to find it.

After a while we started to think that the stronghold wasn't even there till I found this:

even though the flowing lava caught my eyes I also recognized unusual stone blocks down there, HOORAY! the stronghold was lying there! We went down as fast as we could and started to explore thousand rooms, we encountered even silverfish, it didn't look as deadly as we thought but I anyways killed him before getting a hit.

(yeah, silverfishes look like some dust lol)
We continued to climb stairs, push buttons, fight zombies and skeletons but every damn place of was equal to each other, till we found nothing but a fountain, there were three more ways to explore.

All of them were as scary as this one: (zombie noises coming out of nowere didn't help to keep calm)

In the end, we found it! the last iron door was sitting in front or us right after it there was the dusty library, sadly, we were expecting to find a pretty great treasure in there but there wasn't. There was just a chest with some paper and a few books, but hey, the adventure was anyways worth it!

So this was my daily #4, hope you liked it :)

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Diablo III beta commented by Day 9

As I said at the beginning, I'm not going to cover only indie games in here, this is the right time to talk a little bit about Diablo 3. The beta keys are getting distributed only in the US as far as I know (hoping to get one as soon as the beta becomes available in Europe).
Day 9 made an entire walktrough in one of his recent streams, two days ago, to be more precise, and I feel like sharing this with you all readers.
CHECK OUT THIS AWESOMENESS:

Shared this mostly because I'm a huge Day9's fan, top player in Starcraft 2 and famous commentator.
If you care to see more about him check his youtube channel : Day9ty.
As you can see, Diablo III is going to be a huge success and after years of rumors it's becoming reality and I personally can't wait anymore!

Cheers ;)

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SMP for the win!: Daily #3

Hello hello,
I'm coming up with my third Minecraft daily bringing you a lot of news, as you can see, I mentioned SMP (for those who don't know what's that, it stands for Survival MultiPlayer), yeah! me and some friends started to play on a server. We actually bought it here: www.multiplaygameservers.com this site gives out servers at an incredible low price, with low latency for a really smooth gaming experience.

So there we go!
We got our little shelter during the first day, and with our poor, or nonexistent gear, everything looked so cool

 

Although some more came in, now we are 6 active people if I remember correctly.
Anyways Tehnooberer took a plain spot on a swamp biome the rest of us decided to feel a little bit safer and build our home on some peaks not that far away from him, and we started to work hard, at aleast, them. I realized that I'm not one of those creative minds, and I always end up by building something technical and useful instead of  creating some hard concepts. This was some of the first results:

And during our first lonely night:

Heres another, let's say, funny fact about our server, difficulty was set as VERY HARD (yea you can't even play in this mode without some server commands) mobs beat you, hunger KILLS and because of this I created a little wheat farm on top of my mountain!

Right before than leaving you, look what I saw when I woke up :P

Me:"hello there mate!"
Creeper:"fffshhhhhhhhhhh"
R.I.P.

I'm done here, in the next update we are going to see  some action in the nether (hopefully) and how to create a slime farm in order to get a lot of slimeballs, but I'm not going to spoil anything else.
See you.

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Bastion

So hello guys!
Today I'm going to spend some time to talk about Bastion, a dynamical role-playing game, where you impersonate a kid, that has to build a safe spot called, in fact, the bastion, by collecting objects around the dying world of Caelondia.
Supergiantgames, an indie developement team, has brought to us a phenomenal game and I want to remember that you can get it on Steam at the price of 13,99€, for the greedy ones, theres a free demo that will convince almost everyone.

But let's go a little bit deeper in the gameplay with a list of what I liked when I tried Bastion:

-Dual weapon system: There is plenty of choice of weapons each one with a different powerful secret skill. In addition you will be always able to shield yourself from various enemy attacks.

-Upgrades and proving grounds: You can improve you weapons by using items that you will find while playing, but, also as rewards of the so called "proving grounds" where you have to achieve different goals using a weapon, this is an example that I found

-The storyteller: The dynamic storytelling is just amazing, you should try the game just because of this.

Of course there is much more that I could say, but I would ruin the whole game experience for some of you, I leave you here for today, good luck on saving the world of Caelondia!

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1.8 came out! Digging in the darkness, Daily #2

Yep! Minecraft 1.8 version got released yesterday, I thought that I could anyways keep these dailies up, even because I enjoy writing them.
Anyways after having realized that my blog was turning into a "minecraft exclusive" one, I already announce that my next update is going to cover Bastion, an indie game recently released even on Steam.

But! here's the story:

After a nightmare I managed to sleep, when I woke up, I just started to look around around the lake I found. Not even a minute was passed when I found this, a good looking deep hole in the ground with a funny zombie on fire. This inspired me to dig till down there hoping to find something rare, or at least having a nice time by exploring that place.

 And from my safe gravel block and with my iron sword in the right hand I started to see what was really going on there, it appeared a bigger place than the thought. Carefully i created some stairs that led me down, walled off the hole and everything looked so, scary.

Encountered some creepers, almost had a heart attack, fought some skeletons and zombies but my lighting up process finally was done, except for a strange light beside me. I fastly turned and I saw nothing but lava! looked pretty strange at this height.

Right after this discovery, I literally got attacked by 3 spiders came out of nowhere, fortunately my iron sword was strong enough to kill them landing also a lot of critical hits by jumping then hitting (couldn't manage to get a screenshot of the sparkles that come out after a critical, sadly). Actually I was pretty lucky, they dropped a string each so I could make a bow. With the new weapon I decided to explore the last tunnel left, which looked like this

(damn that, the zombie staring at me in the shadows it's hard to see in this small version of the picture, I suggest to click it to see it clearly :P)
Fought some other zombies and achieved almost a stack of iron blocks in total, nothing more but suddently hunger became unbearable, ran till my safe spot and decided to eat some rotten flash, a new item that gets dropped by zombies. Look what happened:

The food counter became greeny!
although nothing else happened, I'm still wondering what could that be, anyways after having waited for the morning I easily reached the surface, and my home with a new bow and a lot of iron in my backpack!

My second daily ends up here, I hope you've enjoyed it, see you!

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Living in 1.8 prerelease, Daily #1

Recently started to play a new world in Minecraft prerelease (explained everything in the last post) so, today I've guessed that I could share my own adventure day by day here, in order to provide screenshots of the new content, but also making a bit of enteratainment.

So, here we go with the first Daily update:

I spawned right here, there were nothing but trees around me so i picked a random direction and started to walk, after a while I realized that I was already facing a new feature, in fact, after this update we won't see anymore the usual "fast setting change", this means that we will see huge plain areas, mountains or as you can see right down here, deserts.

I decided to turn back just because by that time the only thing I needed to find was coal. Night was approacing and I was lucky enough to literally fall in a hole where I could find a big vein of coal with which i made a lot of torches. The darkness came, so the only thing I had to do, in order to stay alive, was to wall off the entrance and wait there till morning. My first shelter looked like this:

In the morning I was hungry, I had to find some pigs and cows since from now on they drop steaks too. After some hunting without eating i tried out how does starving mean, basically if you run out of food you will lose a half heart each 5 seconds or so, unfortunately I couldn't find my way home and I started to walk through the forest. This was the result, I found some iron on the surface AND! discovered an amazing canyon!

After having enjoyed the view for quite a while I had to find a new spot for my settlement. I chose this one, mainly because of the lack of time.

And in the second night I lived here, yes, it was still a hole but, looked more like a place to call home.

We're done for today, except for an unanswered question that came up in my mind:
Whats the function of that sort of experience bar?

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