Minecraft discovers the dark-side of user-generated content.

There are a number of volunteers who have taken it upon themselves to translate the smash hit indie game into various languages, and who have access to the game’s source repositories.

Well, a few days ago, anyone who downloaded the Afrikaans snapshot build would have been treated to this bit of lame-assery:

As the Escapist reports:

Recently-promoted head developer, Jens Bergensten, apologized for the incident and pinned the blame on a “prankster” hiding amongst the multitude of volunteer translators working on the game. “Sorry about that =( I thought I had banned that user,” read one of his tweets.

The offending translation has since been removed, and the forum topic that originally it pointed out has been shuffled off this mortal coil as well.

I’m also rather in agreement with the Escapist’s J.G. Carter, who asks if the N-bomb was honestly the best thing the prankster could come up with. I mean…really? You have the opportunity to punk Minecraft, and the best you can come up with is something that wouldn’t seem out of place in rap lyrics?

On multiple levels: fail.

Film Crit HULK!

Whoever this guy is, I greatly enjoy the comedy he churns out. The Incredible Hulk as film critic…believe me, it works.

The Kindle Fire…worked.

By which I mean, it found some kind of hitherto unrealized — or under-utilized — sweet spot in the tablet market, delivering a competent (and, I must say, very fine-looking) Android experience on more-than-just-decent hardware at an insanely competitive price point.

And people have just gobbled the thing up. To wit:

Since its launch in November, Amazon’s Kindle Fire has made some major gains in the Android Market, and now hosts more end user app sessions than Samsung’s popular Galaxy Tab devices. According to recently published research by Flurry Analytics, the Kindle Fire hosts 35.7 percent of all global Android app sessions (which are defined by the launch and exit of a given app), while the Galaxy Tab hosts 35.6 percent of these sessions…

I do actually quite like the Kindle Fire, more so than my Nook Tab. I kind of regret handing off the Fire to my wife now, in fact, because it beats the Nook Tab in almost every respect. Oh, sure, the Nook has more RAM, more storage, and a Micro SD expansion slot…but in terms of usability, the Fire wins hands down. It also looks nicer (from a form factor perspective) and has an absolutely marvelous UI.

The Orion spacecraft suffers a delay.

The timeline for the next generation of manned NASA spacecraft has been revised. Orion won’t see its first test flight until 2014, now, and likely won’t see manned flight until 2021.

You will read this wrong.

Valve games now available on Impulse.

I know, right? WEIRD!

Actually, as RPS points out, it does make a measure of sense, now that Impulse is the digital storefront for GameStop. And GameStop does carry Valve games.

Bloody well everything is going “free-to-play”, isn’t it?

This time, it’s EverQuest that is making the transition, beginning in March.

Of course, their doing so will probably double or triple the revenue generated by the game, in much the same manner as happened with Lord of the Rings Online. You read it here first, just in case it happens!

EA’s Origin storefront is doing pretty well, overall.

So far, it has 9.3 million registered users, and has generated around $100 million in revenue. The userbase is just under one quarter of Steam’s user base…which is actually pretty decent for a service that is only about one twelvth as old as Steam.

And hey, Origin is still growing. They added eleven non-EA publishers a while back, including CD Projekt Red, and will be adding seven more in the near future.

Starbreeze’s Syndicate FPS will NOT ship with online pass-locked content.

So for those of you who really freakin’ hate that sort of thing, here’s a game for you to throw your support behind!

“We want as little resistance or barriers to entry as possible,” Gamon said. “The co-op is equal billing in this. We wanted everyone who owns a copy of the game to have access to the entire product.” It’s policy for EA to include an online pass in all of its games. Curiously, this policy does not always extend to EA Partners games like Crysis 2 and Portal 2, both of which shipped without online passes. Meanwhile, Bulletstorm required a pass for its online co-op mode.

“Under normal circumstances it would have had an online pass, but because it didn’t have competitive multiplayer and because we wanted as many people as possible to be playing co-op, we got away with it,” Gamon added. “Maybe another reason for not having the Online Pass is we were confident in the scope of the online game.” Throughout the nine multiplayer maps, he says players can expect “a good six, seven hours” on a single playthrough. “That and the single-player campaign means hopefully we won’t see much in the way of early second hand sales and rentals…”

Reason #3,720 to be glad that Ultima is not an Ubisoft property.

Why, Ubisoft? What did the fans of your games ever do to you?

Ubisoft are having a bit of a hardware reshuffle next week, according to Eurogamer, which means major disruption to their DRM servers.

Games that use Ubisoft’s always-online DRM system ping these constantly to reassure the publishers that you’re not a pirate. That means that next week’s switchover will render Tom Clancy’s HAWX 2, Might & Magic: Heroes 6 and The Settlers 7 unplayable for an unknown period of time. The servers are set to go down on February 7. Ubisoft don?t say when they?ll be back up again.

Other games will be playable offline, as long as you’ve completed the one-time activation process. If you haven’t, you won’t be able to activate them for the duration of the downtime. Big recent releases like Assassin’s Creed: Revelations and Driver: Francisco, however, will stay online for the duration of the switch-over.

Ubisoft told us that their hyper-strict DRM restrictions (which extend to limited activations tied to your graphics card) are considered to be “a success.” They told us their anti-piracy measures had resulted in “a clear reduction in piracy of our titles which required a persistent online connection.” For many, next week’s server outages will only reinforce their decision to steer clear of Ubisoft’s games entirely.

Count me among that number.

The most promising RPGs of 2012!

According to RPGWatch readers, at least. See if you can guess what takes their top spot before clicking through!

Oooh! A “potentially habitable” planet!

Only about 100 light years away, too.

A potentially habitable alien planet — one that scientists say is the best candidate yet to harbor water, and possibly even life, on its surface — has been found around a nearby star.

The planet is located in the habitable zone of its host star, which is a narrow circumstellar region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet’s surface.

“It’s the Holy Grail of exoplanet research to find a planet around a star orbiting at the right distance so it’s not too close where it would lose all its water and boil away, and not too far where it would all freeze,” Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told SPACE.com. “It’s right smack in the habitable zone — there’s no question or discussion about it. It’s not on the edge, it’s right in there.”

…

The researchers estimate that the planet, called GJ 667Cc, is at least 4.5 times as massive as Earth, which makes it a so-called super-Earth. It takes roughly 28 days to make one orbital lap around its parent star, which is located a mere 22 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Scorpius (the Scorpion).

“This is basically our next-door neighbor,” Vogt said. “It’s very nearby. There are only about 100 stars closer to us than this one.”

Interestingly enough, the host star, GJ 667C (Gliese 667), is a member of a triple-star system. GJ 667C is an M-class dwarf star that is about a third of the mass of the sun, and while it is faint, it can be seen by ground-based telescopes, Vogt said

Triple star system? Tatooine got nothin’. Also: I, for one, welcome our new Gliesian overlords!

Tonight’s post brought to you by soaked Spidey: