John Carmack presented in front of a big audience the Minecraft game running on his virtual reality gear hardware.

Carmack stated that the hardware is “the ideal platform for Minecraft” as it offers the ability to explore a Minecraft world, all being wireless and fully immersed in the environment.

Polygon has more details about the story in this article.

The end of 2015 is making producers monetize better their games by launching special versions to take advantage of the end-of-the-year holiday sales.

For the first time, Minecraft becomes playable on the Nintendo Wii device. Forbes announced the Minecraft Wii version, available December 17 (just one day before the Star Wars release). The price point is $30, which is below the standard games pricing on Nintendo around $60.

Keeping up with the trends, Call of Duty also launched Black Ops III in November 2015. The game was overall well received. IGN gave it a score of 9.2 (out of 10) and said that: “With fun 4-player co-op, new powers, and a fleshed out Zombies mode, Black Ops 3 is the biggest Call of Duty game yet”.

GspRating.com got a bunch of new Game Service Provider additions — so everyone has a couple of new hosts to explore around. Unfortunately some of the older providers went out-of-business and we’ll continue to purge their listings so you always have an up-to-date experience when looking for a provider on our site.

Happy holidays!
— the GspRating.com team

Battlefield Hardline, a first-person shooter video game produced in collaboration with Electronic Arts got released mid-March 2015.

The trailer of the game posted on YouTube got millions of views with-in days after the launch. Actual gameplay videos are also available.

Game reviews are available at GamesRadar and MetaCritic, with reviews being overall less positive than expected.

Independent video game developer Mojang has another reason to celebrate, after Minecraft passed 11 million sales for Windows and Mac. The official Minecraft website shows that over 11,000,000 people have purchased the game to date.

The game was only launched officially in November 2011, meaning that Mojang has hit the milestone in a little over 18 months.

As of New Year’s Eve, the Minecraft Xbox Live Arcade game passed 5 million units sold in 2012.

4J Studios are the folks responsible for porting the game to the consoles; they were happy to break the news on Twitter as it was happening. The game was launched on the live arcade store on May 9th 2012 for 1600 Microsoft Points (or $20).

Including the 360 Edition, the Mojang’s Minecraft franchise has reached over 17.5 million sales to this day. 453,000+ copies of Minecraft were sold this past 2012 Christmas Day alone.

24 October 2012 is the official release date for Minecraft Update 1.4. The pre-release for server administrators was available a week earlier. You can watch a YouTube video to check out the new features offered by this update (including invisibility and flower pots!).

In October 2011 Mojang announced a program which used Minecraft in order to improve urban planning in different Swedish neighborhoods.

On 5th September 2012, as a result of that program’s success, Mojang announced that he will partner with UN Habitat in a joint project called Block By Block which aims to involve youth in the planning process in urban areas by giving them the opportunity to show planners and decision makers how they would like to see their areas in the future.

Mojang will be the main financial sponsor. The program is designed to run for 3 years; the first pilot project, in Kibera – one of Nairobi’s informal settlements – is already in the planning phase.

Gamescom is a trade fair for video games held annually in Cologne, Germany. This year the event took place August 16 to 19, 2012. Gamers got the chance to see multiplayer scenes from Black Ops II [YouTube video].

Black Ops II is the third installment of the Call of Duty: Black Ops series. It is scheduled to be published by Activision and released on November 13, 2012.

Activision Publishing’s chief executive Eric Hirshberg spoke with BBC in an interview where he said, in connection with this release, that >> The game is very innovative, it has several firsts for the CoD franchise including the fact that it takes place in a future setting which unlocks a whole host of creative possibilities for our developers from new weapons to new settings to new art directional ideas. << [full interview here].

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is launching officially on 21st of August 2012 for Xbox Live Arcade, PSN, PC and Mac. The company explained on its blog that it was important for them as they developed CS:GO to make sure it was as moddable and extensible as any CS game, so they’re including a Zombie mod as part of the official launch.

Global Offensive is the 4th official member in the Counter Strike game series; other titles include the original Counter-Strike game (launched November 8, 2000), Counter-Strike: Condition Zero (March 20, 2004) and Counter-Strike: Source (October 7, 2004).

Building a sequel of Minecraft would be like trying to improve Lego. Nevertheless, Notch said that the studio will “probably do Minecraft 2”, just not until work on Scrolls is wrapped up.

Instead of waiting for Minecraft 2 to appear, the folks at ComputerAndVideoGames.com wrote a list of potential improvements that we might see in the game’s next version. Among them: players custom-building quests to keep their visitors busy, and a bigger selection of multiplayer modes. [read the full article]