Microsoft's official Minecraft: Education Edition will begin its life in an early access program (kind of like how the original game did) in June. The idea here is to allow educators a chance to give the blocky building game a test run over summer break so they can see how it'd fit into their curriculums, providing feedback along the way. This will also help in the development of additional lesson plans.
Source: Minecraft Education Edition, (2)
Positech's Democracy game series has always offered a grotesque caricature of politics. I've put tens of hours into Democracy 3 (D3) in recent years, and the lesson I've learned is that what starts as a nuanced game about balancing policies to keep a society happy more often than not devolves into a hilariously entertaining social engineering simulator. This week, the one-man British developer released a standalone expansion to the game titled Democracy 3: Africa (D3:A), and the changes it brings add a whole new dimension to the series.
If anyone tells you that playing computer games is a waste of time, you can now offer up a raised middle digit without any guilt. After all, mobile title Quantum Moves isn't just a way to kill an hour, but is actually helping a group of Danish scientists build a quantum computer. The team out of Aarhaus University studied how people played the game in order to crowdsource people's knowledge of fluid dynamics. It turns out that the human brain is far better at solving complicated fluid dynamics problems than a room full of supercomputers.
Via: Popular Mechanics
Source: Nature
Today on In Case You Missed It: Facebook is adding VR to the social network and one of the new tricks will let users take a selfie of their avatar selves inside of different tourist spots. Japanese researchers discovered that a water droplet coating allowed water to be controlled by a laser, capable of pulling 150 times its mass when harnessed like a mini oxen. Finally, a backpack on Kickstarter would charge your devices on the move and roughly nine other things.
Excluding Halo, Gears of War is Microsoft's biggest multiplayer shooter -- for many players, multiplayer is far more important than the main story-based campaign. That's what made Gears of War: Judgement a disappointment for many long-time players. The multiplayer experience was changed enough that long-time GoW fans were left a bit cold. As such, developer The Coalition looked at Gears of War 4's multiplayer as an opportunity to make the best GoW experience it could while sticking to the formula that previously had made it so popular.