I had also forgot to mention from my previous post that you still have your dog in Fable 3, it seems to only attack enemies that have been knocked to the ground now instead of attacking during normal combat which I think is pretty cool seeing you may have been waiting for a charged spell or firearm shot.

The version I bought was the limited edition which came in a very cool faux book case. The case had a faux leather clasp to hold it closed and a hidden draw which had the fable 3 cards and guild seal coin. The limited edition in game extras are: A special heroic mace and sword, a special heroic rifle and pistol, a new breed for your dog (which is done via a special potion you are given and its interchangeable so if you don’t like the new breed you can just change it back), a new clothing set and a set of tattoos. As far as I can tell there are also two new areas in the game that can be visited or two new quests, I’m not sure as I haven’t got to them yet. Photograph’s of my limited edition version can be seen below.

Click to see full size

Minecraft is a game that’s gotten a lot of press, money and my time recently. We’ve spoken a lot about it over on TurtleStomp, and the recent Halloween update seems the perfect excuse to take some time to write about this brilliantly addictive game.

The world around you is made up of various types of block. Punch a tree and you’ll get a block of log, place these logs down and you’ve got the start of a little shelter, or perhaps you could craft yourself some planks and create a crafting bench, start building some primitive wooden tools and mine some stone to build with. There are a large variety of building materials and crafting resources in the world around you and once you understand what each of them do you can let your creativity run wild.

Creeper: Does your sssshelter have room for me?

Strictly speaking however, Minecraft is a game of survival. You’ll find yourself thrown into an unpopulated world with only your wits and cunning about you, no tutorials and no helpful in-game guardians guiding you through the game. You’re on your own, at least, you are until nightfall… Spend too long punching sheep during your first day and you’ll soon meet the other inhabitants, and probably fall foul of the long-range skeleton’s arrows, the bite of the persistent zombies, the fangs of the agile spiders or perhaps the explosion of the deadly Creeper.

Maybe you should go back to getting creative and build a shelter, no?

The game is a massive time-sink, so don’t take it on until you have a lot of spare time or have far better willpower than I. It’s definitely the sort of game you think you can just pop on for half an hour before finding yourself still awake at 6 am the following morning, frantically putting the finishing touches to your mountain base as you dodge skeleton arrows, running back to the safety behind closed doors. In short it’s addictive. Really addictive. I’ve found that long periods of mining can be strangely therapeutic, the soft piano music intersection by the thud of pickaxe on rock, and it can lull you into continuing hour after hour.

After playing single player for a while, getting to grips with the crafting recipes and learning not to dig directly downwards you might want to jump onto a Survival Multiplayer server. SMP is a vastly different experience. All of a sudden you’re not alone, and collaborative projects seem to become a large focus of gameplay. Impressing your neighbours works too, and I’ve often found myself putting in an extra hour at 2am because the player setting up house next to me has built a pretty sweet balcony and garden and my ramshackle hut looks awful beside it, the bastards! Monsters won’t spawn on SMP just yet, and you’ll notice you can’t die either, all signs of the game’s alpha status but hopefully these will be fixed in future updates and we can look forward to Creeper hunting parties!

I think it's time to run.

Now, the Halloween update bought lots of new aspects to the game. The hell realm, or “The Nether” as it has been dubbed, a new dimension used for fast travel filled with enormous shrieking fire-ball flinging Ghasts, and the skeletal zombie pigmen boasts a range of new block types including the forever-burning stone (Known as firestone, brimstone, bloodstone), the mob-slowing stone (Known as slow-sand, Legion) and the mysterious yellow glowing brittle rock (Known as Sulphur, Australium), which I’m looking forward to seeing uses for. The update also bought us biomes, regions within the World with different weather or geography which may, in the future, hold specific resources that will only be found there.

The title of this article is in fact inspired by one of the newest additions to the game, the fishing rod. Whilst the rod was craftable ingame a while ago, it received a purpose in the Halloween update. You can now right-click to cast the rod, with the ability to catch fish from the sea or rivers (Also incredibly therapeutic and addictive) as well as hooking any other mob and flinging them around. This can lead to hooking a skeleton, and yanking him forward into his own arrow, killing him. It’s clear that the fishing rod is the new manliest weapon, and any true denizens of Minecraft should be out fishing for Creepers at night, go on, it’s explosive fun.

[GeneShark can often be found playing SMP on the dahou.se Minecraft server, email daryl[at]moretothegame.co.uk if you’d like to be added to the whitelist to come play with us!]

Another delayed episode right here, this time with a genuine reason! My upload speeds continued to aim for zero this past week, so TurtleStomp had to get in a guest host, or… a few… guest hosts…

Click through and have a listen to TurtleStomp S2E3

This is my goodbye. On 7th December, I will disappear. Possibly for good. It’s been great, and I love you guys, but this is important.

Bejeweled 3 has been announced. With new game modes, unlockable game variants (including Poker. Poker in Bejeweled.) and shiny new graphics to threaten my free time, my degree, and my relationship with people who are not colourful gems that I can place next to each other to make them disappear.

Watch this space for a review. If I can stop playing.

So here’s the round-up:

Saturday

MOREtotheGAME (Daryl)

• Reporting on the srs business side of MCM from Daryl. For the lolzier side of things, see @turtlestomp 9:31 AM Oct 30th via My INQ Mobile
• Live staged and costumed assassin’s creed fights sound interesting. Just have to find out where and when. (MCM expo sat) 9:49 AM Oct 30th via My INQ Mobile
• Super scribblenauts was interesting. Sparkly ninjas beat dull pirates any day. (MCM expo sat) 10:12 AM Oct 30th via My INQ Mobile
• Cheese and Sam just got owned by myself and Jowan at mario basketball. Rainbow power literally helped us win (MCM expo sat) 10:45 AM Oct 30th via My INQ Mobile
• Mountain Dew and Vanilla Coke HELL YEAH! (MCM expo sat) 11:06 AM Oct 30th via My INQ Mobile
• Pocky, t-shirts and other assorted shopping. Pockyyyyyyyy!!! 11:26 AM Oct 30th via My INQ Mobile
• Subway Lunch, more expo soon… 11:56 AM Oct 30th via My INQ Mobile
• FWA wrestling…. Slightly homosexual (MCM expo sat) 1:30 PM Oct 30th via My INQ Mobile
• On a down from mountain dew, can’t..find…energy…to…twe- (MCM expo sat) 2:25 PM Oct 30th via My INQ Mobile
• Enough MCM for today, now going back to the hostel to eat and cash in our findings (MCM expo sat) 3:48 PM Oct 30th via My INQ Mobile
• Wonder how @nickstone333 is getting on with his coverage of Nottingham Gamecity 4:21 PM Oct 30th via My INQ Mobile

TurtleStomp (Mark)

• Turtlestomp has landed at MCM. MasterCheese will be tweeting all our hijinks for the weekend. Let’s go! 9:26 AM Oct 30th via Twitter for Android
• Bought big gay tail. Love Tom. 10:10 AM Oct 30th via Twitter for Android
• Mario Sports Mix for the Wii. Amazing game but what the Fuck just happened? Seriously, my brain hurts. 10:41 AM Oct 30th via Twitter for Android
• Nomnomnom, Subway. Desperately needed that. 11:47 AM Oct 30th via Twitter for Android
• Awesomesauce at MCM. Way too much Pocky and forcing business cards upon people. WE MUST BECOME POPULAR. #MCMExpo 12:48 PM Oct 30th via Twitter for Android
• Wrestling seems out of place at MCM. But what the hell, it’s hilarious. #MCMExpo 2:43 PM Oct 30th via Twitter for Android
• Quick note to everyone who cares: This week’s Turtlestomp, with special guest host, will be uploaded as soon as we have interwebs ^_^ 4:15 PM Oct 30th via Twitter for Android
• Calling it a day. We’re fucking exhausted and need to do some writing. #MCMExpo 4:19 PM Oct 30th via Twitter for Android
• @DDRUK We’ll be back tomorrow to defend our coveted third place Rock Band title from MCM 17! Prepare for Gay Bar. #MCMExpo 4:22 PM Oct 30th via Twitter for Android

Sunday

TurtleStomp (Mark)

• Lol, working breakfast. We are so srsbsns it hurts. 8:35 AM Oct 31st via Twitter for Android
• Day 3 of expo. Time for lulz and bubble gum. And I’m all out of gum. #MCMExpo. 2:17 AM Oct 31st via Twitter for Android
• Explodemon has many happy and fun with boom. #MCMExpo 3:13 AM Oct 31st via Twitter for Android
• Preparing for epic Rock Band hilarity at the @DDRUK stand. This can only go well. #MCMExpo 4:18 AM Oct 31st via Twitter for Android
• We have played in @DDRUK‘s Rock Band tournament. We only failed once, hells yeah #MCMExpo 6:23 AM Oct 31st via Twitter for Android
• Bearded Tellytubby. Oh yeah. #MCMExpo 7:21 AM Oct 31st via Twitter for Android
• As sad as we are, MCM must come to an end. Farewell until next time, you were awesome. #MCMExpo. about 23 hours ago via Twitter for Android
• And, with MCM over, I board my train back to the real world. Thanks to everyone who made it what it was, and watch this space. #MCMExpo about 19 hours ago via Twitter for Android

Hopefully we’ll be back next May, with more nonsensical tweetery. Watch out for previews and articles from throughout the expo!

The Sunday of MCM is always fun, a chance to leap into things you’ve missed the previous day, full of bargains and less full of people. Today we leapt over to DDR:UK for their Rock Band 3 tournament and the like, keep an eye out for that and more including Goldeneye and Kirby’s Epic Yarn.

As the Expo comes to an end, our feet are dead and our everything is knackered and happy. MCM is a great place for enthusiasts, cosplayers and nerds of any kind to come together and hang out with awesome, like-minded people for a weekend, and it’s brilliant. If you get a chance to go next May, don’t pass it up. You won’t regret it!

Epic Mickey is an upcoming action-adventure game by designer Warren Spector, best known for his work on System Shock and Deus Ex. It heralds the introduction of a re-branding of Mickey Mouse by Disney, to show a new side of his personality away from his ordinary, cheery disposition.

The game takes place in an ink and paper world built by Yen Sid (The sorcerer from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice), which has been ravaged by spilt paint and paint thinner in an unfortunate incident in the ‘real world’. These substances can also be used in game using Mickey’s “magic paintbrush”; paint can rebuild structures and characters that have been damaged, while paint thinner can destroy.

One of the main aspects of the game mentioned to me today, however, was that of player choice. The game is largely open-ended, and decisions the player makes can have a huge impact on the outcome of the story. Even boss fights can be avoided, if the appropriate paths are taken, but this may be at the cost of allies and other goals along the way.

I’ve yet to have a chance to play the game, however, on first impressions, it does not disappoint. The visuals are amazing, especially for a Wii-exclusive title, and the gameplay seems innovative and fresh. I highly look forward to getting a proper look at Epic Mickey and seeing what it really has to offer.

Wii games do not have a tendency to be of the highest quality, especially if they are simply minigames, but Mario Sports Mix was shockingly fun. The mindblowing insanity of the seemingly random scoring system, plus my inability to understand the simplest of control schemes, made the game thoroughly entertaining. This entertainment factor was only multiplied by Daryl and Jowan’s victory by rainbow powers. I’m not even kidding.

All in all, from what I saw, Mario Sports Mix is a fairly good game, but I imagine it would quickly grow dull after a few games, as with most mini-games. It also seems to rely particularly heavily on its multiplayer aspects, which as we all know, has been the downfall of many a mediocre game.

If you’re looking for a quick laugh, Mario Sports Mix will deliver, and it will deliver well. But it is 100% a party game. If you’re a sad loner like me, you can probably give this title a miss, but if you’re a blossoming social flower, go right ahead and buy it. You have my blessing.

The difference between the original and the sequel can be summed up easily by examining the first things I entered into each game. In the first game I entered “Ninja” and “Pirate” to see them do battle. In Super Scribblenauts I entered “Sparkling Ninja” and “Dull Pirate”, and the combat was that much more… fabulous. (The ninja won, by the way)

The time I had with it on the expo floor today was good fun, and I’ll be collecting suggestions from the rest of MOREtotheGAME for adjective/noun combinations and fight combinations to attempt tomorrow when I inevitably gravitate back towards the copy on show.

Things to try tomorrow (I’ll report back):
Exploitable Mutton, Zombified Jesus, Wet Fire, Industrialised Pallet, Organic Platypus, Patchwork Cthulhu, Deadly Tapas, Enormous Knockers, Bat-Like Object. Tiny Giant Enemy Crab, Rainbow Rick Astley, Long Longcat.

With Epic Mickey, Mario Sports Mix, Super Scribblenauts, Blade Kitten, Epic Mickey, loads and loads more games, massive furry rainbow tails and Mountain Dew, day two was indeed amazingly awesome.

Look out for posts on most of the things above, apart from massive furry rainbow tails… I’ve been told by the editor I’m not allowed to  dedicate my time to writing about them… spoilsport.