The Infinite Stream 21/01/2012

The Infinite Stream is where we post about items that are news-worthy but not necessarily require their own full article.  Check after the jump for news from 21/01/2012!

Minecraft to get Jungle biome and animals
Despite being officially 'released' last November, Minecraft has continued to be updated as regularly as it had prior to the 'release date'.  Patches are still coming thick and fast, adding new content as well as fixing bugs.  The latest update, coming in the next week or so, will add a jungle biome (enormous environments that make up the randomly generated worlds in Minecraft), with tall trees and many many dangling vines.  New lead developer, Jens 'Jeb' Bergensten, has also said that the new biome will also be getting its own unique set of animals - presumably including cute cube monkeys!
This update is part of this week's Minecraft Snapshot which allows users to try out the new content in a sort of beta-test, before it is released generally - the snapshot can be found here.


(Via Gameranx)


Peter Jackson explains the tone of the Hobbit movies
In a recent interview with MTV, Peter Jackson described how he is trying to make his Hobbit movies have a consistent tone with the Lord of the Rings films. "We wanted it to be a part of the five-film series," he explained. "Fortunately, Tolkien wrote a lot of extra material in the appendices of 'The Lord of the Rings,' where he himself kind of tied the two stories together, 20 or 30 years after the publication of 'The Hobbit.' So we've been able to use some of that material."
Jackson stated that the films will not be as much of a children's story as the book, to keep the tone consistent with the LOTR trilogy, but it would keep/have jokes in it to honour J.R.R Tolkien's work.


(Via MTV)


ESA drops SOPA and PIPA support
Earlier this week the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was shelved to come back to another day, but that did not stop it from being the major talking point of the last couple of days as well.  Many individuals, companies and organisations kept up their support for the act, continuing to lobby for it to become law (in America).
One of the major organisations still supporting the act was the ESA, the trade association of the video game industry in the U.S., until yesterday that is, when they announced the dropping of their support of the SOPA and PIPA bills.  This week had seen major movement towards boycotting the ESA in any way possible, including a press and developer boycott of their E3 event in the summer.  Whether the proposed boycott had anything to do with their change in position remains to be seen, but I think it highly likely that it at least brought attention within the ESA, to the fact that the proposed bills (in their current form) were wildly over-reaching and unnecessarily powerful.
The ESA are likely to support these or other bills again once there is a more reasonable proposal put forward, as stopping the piracy of games is one of their ideals, but I think we can call this a win for Internet freedom for the moment!


(Via Kotaku)