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It's like lego with zombies
Aug. 3rd, 2011 02:37 pmMinecraft is a bit of an indie phenomenon in the PC Gaming world. Conceived and primarily written by Markus "Notch" Persson, it's technically still in beta and is a first-person game with a purposefully retro blocky style that revolves around doing whatever you please. The game is based around the concepts of acquiring resources in the game world (mining, punching trees, killing stuff etc) and building things (castles, piston-driven TVs, reproduction works of art etc). There's also dark-loving monsters that like the taste of your blocky pixel self such as zombies, archer skeletons, giant spiders and creepers (which are best described as suicide bomber ninjas).
How I mine 4 fish?
The game can be played in several ways and there is no end goal as such. There is no story or setting, no protagonist (though your character is a regular bloke called Steve) and no evil villain (Creepers don't count). It's a sandbox world where you are given potential and it's up to you what you want to do with it. If you like, you can turn off monsters, spawn all the materials you want out of thin air, break the game's own laws of physics (which are like the real world's laws of physics, except when they aren't) - in other words you can God Mode if you like and the game becomes a creative building simulator; like Lego without so many of the gravity worries. Or you can play on a player-made custom map where resources are scarce and the goal is to survive as long as you can in a bleak world with a lot of hungry monsters. Or perhaps an adventure map with quests and objectives. Or gather some friends together and compete to see who can do the best. Or you can load up one of innumerable custom-made mods that add everything from new materials to new rules and functionality to completely new realms.
The game is written in java and as such is incredibly customisation-friendly. The modding community for Minecraft is huge and the ability to easily re-write core chunks of the game has surely contributed to its incredible success. Examples of these can be seen in the Yogscast clips that showcase the more elaborate mods with humorous commentary on YouTube.
Yes, the graphics are blocks with texture maps 16x16 pixels big. That's the idea. There's mods about which will reskin the game if your eyes start bleeding but I think it'd lose a lot of its charm that way. Sound effects are amusingly basic with rough 'n' ready sound clips pinched from the Freesound project for cows mooing, thunder etc. Music is the complete opposite with a mixture of simple ditties and very high quality ambient tracks that play at seemingly random intervals. Notch even stuck some achievements into it, whose poor grammar has spawned the low-flying meme of "Achievement Get!"
The game is often compared to Terraria because the themes are almost exactly the same: start with diddley squat, mine/harvest yourself stuff to make better stuff including shelter, weapons and armour. Watch out for zombies, slimes and other foul creatures lurking where it's dark. However Terraria is a 2d affair with more monsters including bosses and less focus on building creativity; it appeals more to those that prefer their games with some action.
I've noticed that most people who start with Minecraft then try Terraria find the lack of creative freedom in Terraria to be annoying for a minecraft clone. Folks that start with Terraria find Minecraft to be lacking the action and adventure of Terraria and contains too much pointless building.
My own experiences with Mojang's merry little Minecraft world have been mixed. Initially I didn't get what the fuss was about and the mad frenzy of seemingly everyone I knew in the world ever had passed me by. It looked eyebleeding and boring and almost a year went by with me ignoring all these stupid videos of blocky things making more blocky things that were popping up everywhere I ventured online. It wasn't until I was gifted a copy of the game and one evening ended up bored to death because my mother was visiting and hogging my room, that I finally caved in to a friend's nagging and hopped onto his minecraft map to see what all the fuss was about. Initially I was wandering about just doing random stuff, poking random things, seeing what I could make out of what. The open-ended world tugged at my inquisitive and exploratory nature, and I was full of questions about what you could and couldn't do, what did and didn't exist. A couple more outings onto my friend's map later and I decided that actually this was a right barrel of monkeys.
After picking some brains I found the best way of going about playing was to load up on CraftBukkit tools to host my own map servers and after an evening of trying to get the damn thing working, then talking to the router, then figuring out how to let others on, I had my own world to play with. A beach house, sauna, cavern of doom, netherworld holiday camp, armed and armoured airship, sekrit underwater observatory, railroad, giant tree house, floating lookout, lava tank, lots of dead zombies, custom skins for Steve and an invasion of friends later I realised that yes, this game was worth the hype I'd ignored previously.
I did give Terraria a try, incidentally. My knowledge of Minecraft served me well enough but I have to say I got bored of it fairly quickly ended up going back to Minecraft.
News in the intertubes is that there's XBox 360, Android, iPad and iPhone versions on the way - the XBox version allegedly using Kinect. This will either be freaking hilarious, or a total failure.
Anyhow I shall leave you all with this: evidence that it's like lego with zombies...
How I mine 4 fish?
The game can be played in several ways and there is no end goal as such. There is no story or setting, no protagonist (though your character is a regular bloke called Steve) and no evil villain (Creepers don't count). It's a sandbox world where you are given potential and it's up to you what you want to do with it. If you like, you can turn off monsters, spawn all the materials you want out of thin air, break the game's own laws of physics (which are like the real world's laws of physics, except when they aren't) - in other words you can God Mode if you like and the game becomes a creative building simulator; like Lego without so many of the gravity worries. Or you can play on a player-made custom map where resources are scarce and the goal is to survive as long as you can in a bleak world with a lot of hungry monsters. Or perhaps an adventure map with quests and objectives. Or gather some friends together and compete to see who can do the best. Or you can load up one of innumerable custom-made mods that add everything from new materials to new rules and functionality to completely new realms.
The game is written in java and as such is incredibly customisation-friendly. The modding community for Minecraft is huge and the ability to easily re-write core chunks of the game has surely contributed to its incredible success. Examples of these can be seen in the Yogscast clips that showcase the more elaborate mods with humorous commentary on YouTube.
Yes, the graphics are blocks with texture maps 16x16 pixels big. That's the idea. There's mods about which will reskin the game if your eyes start bleeding but I think it'd lose a lot of its charm that way. Sound effects are amusingly basic with rough 'n' ready sound clips pinched from the Freesound project for cows mooing, thunder etc. Music is the complete opposite with a mixture of simple ditties and very high quality ambient tracks that play at seemingly random intervals. Notch even stuck some achievements into it, whose poor grammar has spawned the low-flying meme of "Achievement Get!"
The game is often compared to Terraria because the themes are almost exactly the same: start with diddley squat, mine/harvest yourself stuff to make better stuff including shelter, weapons and armour. Watch out for zombies, slimes and other foul creatures lurking where it's dark. However Terraria is a 2d affair with more monsters including bosses and less focus on building creativity; it appeals more to those that prefer their games with some action.
I've noticed that most people who start with Minecraft then try Terraria find the lack of creative freedom in Terraria to be annoying for a minecraft clone. Folks that start with Terraria find Minecraft to be lacking the action and adventure of Terraria and contains too much pointless building.
My own experiences with Mojang's merry little Minecraft world have been mixed. Initially I didn't get what the fuss was about and the mad frenzy of seemingly everyone I knew in the world ever had passed me by. It looked eyebleeding and boring and almost a year went by with me ignoring all these stupid videos of blocky things making more blocky things that were popping up everywhere I ventured online. It wasn't until I was gifted a copy of the game and one evening ended up bored to death because my mother was visiting and hogging my room, that I finally caved in to a friend's nagging and hopped onto his minecraft map to see what all the fuss was about. Initially I was wandering about just doing random stuff, poking random things, seeing what I could make out of what. The open-ended world tugged at my inquisitive and exploratory nature, and I was full of questions about what you could and couldn't do, what did and didn't exist. A couple more outings onto my friend's map later and I decided that actually this was a right barrel of monkeys.
After picking some brains I found the best way of going about playing was to load up on CraftBukkit tools to host my own map servers and after an evening of trying to get the damn thing working, then talking to the router, then figuring out how to let others on, I had my own world to play with. A beach house, sauna, cavern of doom, netherworld holiday camp, armed and armoured airship, sekrit underwater observatory, railroad, giant tree house, floating lookout, lava tank, lots of dead zombies, custom skins for Steve and an invasion of friends later I realised that yes, this game was worth the hype I'd ignored previously.
I did give Terraria a try, incidentally. My knowledge of Minecraft served me well enough but I have to say I got bored of it fairly quickly ended up going back to Minecraft.
News in the intertubes is that there's XBox 360, Android, iPad and iPhone versions on the way - the XBox version allegedly using Kinect. This will either be freaking hilarious, or a total failure.
Anyhow I shall leave you all with this: evidence that it's like lego with zombies...
