Minecraft: The Time Vampire
We have all had those games that just seem to make time disappear. Be it a game where you say "just one more level" or a game where it is "just one more quick dungeon." Soon a thirty minute excursion becomes three hours. No game has ever made time disappear for me like Minecraft has. This past weekend, I played about fifteen hours and spent majority of that time digging holes in mountains, excavating caves, and building and underground lair.
When I first was told about Minecraft, it was explain as such:
Minecraft is a game about squares.
In a world made of blocks, you (a rather blocky person yourself) must use your wits and common sense to build and carve a way to safety. This is a dangerous world, make no mistake – monsters appear from out of the dark, mountains themselves can roar at you, and an errant poke in the wrong direction could bury you alive under tons of soil.
But all is not lost. You’re a smart adventurer, after all. After tearing down some trees with your bare hands and building yourself a rudimentary shelter, you’ll begin to explore the mineral wealth of this new land – iron, coal, gold, and even stranger treasures await you deep in the cores of these mountains. The question is, can you work your way to the heart of the earth, plunder its riches, and return to tell the tale?
Developed by one-man creator Markus Persson (also known as Notch), Minecraft is a Java-based, sandbox-style adventure. It fits squarely among more difficult survival games such as Dwarf Fortress and NetHack, while keeping the simple charm of one’s younger building-block days. It is outwardly simple, internally complex, easy to play, and difficult to master. Perhaps best of all, despite being constructed of laughable square blocks, the game manages to deliver a wonderful atmosphere of fear, paranoia, determination, and reward all in one package.
Some of the best features:
- Infinite terrain, well not quite infinite, but 8 TIMES THE SURFACE AREA OF THE EARTH. It will procedurally generate new and interesting terrain. You will be amazed by some of the stuff this game makes.
- Vast cave networks. You can get lost in them for hours.
- As sandbox as a sandbox game can get.
- Notch puts out a secret update every Friday, usually a new feature.
- Planned biomes.
The game is 100% procedurally generated. You can play it single player or online with friends. The best way to describe it would be almost like a mixture of Dwarf Fortress and Legos played from a first person perspective.
You start out with nothing. You will harvest some lumber from trees and build crafting stations and beginning tools. From there, you will start digging into the earth and building whatever you want. The only limits in this game are your imagination. If you like playing in sandbox games, I highly suggest you spend a few minutes in Youtube watching videos people have updated of their creations. The game is currently in alpha and is only $13. If you are the least bit interested, I highly suggest you purchase it now since the price will double when it eventually enters beta. This game is a steal at triple the price.
Have a look at these trailers players have made:
Minecraft Fan Trailer 1
Minecraft Fan Trailer 2
Minecraft is awesome!
Games of May
May has been an amazing month for games. As for me, I have been playing a little old, a little new and a little REALLY old.
World of Warcraft - A large group of friends server transferred after four years on Bleeding Hollow. Another group quit. I did start a new character with a real life friend of mine that we plan on leveling together. I am considering it my "farewell to Azeroth" tour. I am anxious for Cataclysm and even more anxious for the beta.
Mount and Blade - I have had this on my Steam games list for months now and I finally gave it a try. I should have tried it sooner. The game is essentially a medieval combat simulator. You build armies and charge into battle on foot or horseback to fight enemy armies and take their land. It can be incredibly tough at times. There are two ways to play the game: autosave or manual save. Manual save is your traditional save method. You can save at any time and reload from saves if you wish. Autosave saves after every action you make. Every action becomes permanent and there is no taking anything back.
Nethack - The autosave gameplay of Mount and Blade brought me back to Nethack. The game is over 20 years old and I still get lost in it for hours at a time. One thing that constantly amazes me about Nethack is I never feel cheated. I never feel like it is the games fault that I died. It always feels like my fault. Every mistake is a learning experience.
Alan Wake - I do not usually play horror games, but since Alan Wake is set in the pacific northwest (my favorite area of the US), I could not turn it down. I do not like horror games or movies so the game honestly scares the crap out of me at times. I prefer to play the game in short bursts during daylight hours only. The atmosphere the game creates is phenomenal.
Red Dead Redemption - This game is the next evolution of Grand Theft Auto. I generally do not like western movies but I am very much enjoying this game. It is a very solid game in the Grand Theft Auto vein but I am enjoying it more than any of the recent GTA games (my favorite GTA game is Vice City).
iPhone Games - I am going to have to dedicate an entire post or even multiple posts to all the iPhone games I have been playing. The list includes Angry Birds, Final Fantasy, Sword and Poker 2, Siberian Strike, Fruit Ninja, 100 Rogues, Skee-Ball, Zen Bound, Doodle Jump, Fling, Peggle, Words with Friends and Mega Jump.
This month has really been a case of too many games, too little time. I still have to finish Darksiders (I'm about 60% done) and I have Super Mario Galaxy 2 here still sitting unopened. Absolutely no one has the right to complain about gaming this year. We are still in the first six months of the year and we have had more fantastic games released than are often released in an entire year. I just wish I could add a few extra hours to each day so I could play them all.
Canon, Sequels, and the Problem of Player Choice
Warning: This post may contain spoilers from Mass Effect 1 & 2, Dragon Age: Origins, and the Final Fantasy series.
Story. It is the reason why I play most games. I enjoy uncovering the story of the characters and of the world. The problem lies with how much you allow the player to interact with the world. If the player can interact a lot with the world like in Bioware games such as Mass Effect and Dragon Age, the ending can be very different. If you do not allow the player to change the world at all like in Final Fantasy 13, then the ending may be the same for all players but the players may feel held back.
When you allow your players to change the world, how do you handle canon?
When the third Mass Effect game is over, what will be canon? There is only, we can assume, one static fact between all games and that will be the defeat of the Reapers at the hand of Shepard. All other details of the world will be different. Do the Rachni live? Does Wrex live? Does Cerberus have Collector technology? These can be very important things in the world.
If I let the Rachni live and someone else killed them, their existence is in limbo. In a sequel to the Mass Effect trilogy, would you include the Rachni or not even mention them at all to avoid the question all together. Do you pick an overall canon for the story? This could upset players who made their own unique story.
There are no problems like this in games where the player has no control over how their character acts in the environment. In Final Fantasy 10, Tidus and Auron are going to die at the end no matter what you do. Nothing you do can change this. When they came back with the sequel, there were no problems of people with conflicting stories because everyone played the exact same story.
All of this came to a head recently when I was playing Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening. Within this expansion to Dragon Age: Origins, you can import your previous character. One problem exists in that in the end to Origins, you had to make a choice. With this choice, either you die, your companion dies, or no one dies. On my mage, I made the heroic sacrifice and died in the end. When I loaded up the Awakening expansion, it let me import that character even though she had died. Other choices I had made in the game seemed to not have an affect on the world either. I think this bothered me more than having no choices in a game.
So what is the best solution? Do you let the player have no choice and keep a strict canon? Do you let the player have a myriad of choices but have no canon? Or do you let the player have choices but have an "official canon" even if it may disagree with what the player did?
Gaming By Proxy
I play a large amount of video games every year. After a while however, I can come to feel jaded with game. I have been gaming for so many years that I rarely get that "shiny new" feeling when I play a video game. Very few games do something that is truly new and innovative and with having gamed so much, I have seen so many of the tricks there are out there. Lately, I have been gaming by proxy.
I have really been enjoying see games through the eyes of friends and family that have never really had deep experiences with gaming before. The current target of this is my mother. While she grew up with me gaming in the household, she never really played many herself. And the game she did play were mostly throwaway games. When I moved out, I left my extra PS2 with her and she started buying games that she though she might like. One problem she had was the same problem many people new to gaming have. She thought "if the box art looks good, the game is probably good, right?"
Most of the gaming experiences my mother has had involve movie tie-in games. She has played games like some Nightmare Before Christmas games, some Shrek games, a Wall-E game. She would become frustrated with games since first of all she has never really worked on her gaming twitch reflexes and secondly, movie tie in games are mostly garbage that are overly punishing. Since she is a pretty new gamer, she has a tendency t0 panic in games. When a monsters come at her, while any average gamer would shrug it off, she panics. This causes many additional deaths. She also is not that good at jumping and platforming.
About six months ago, she picked herself up a Wii and WiiFit Plus. When she asked me if there were any good Wii games out there, I had to give her the unfortunate news that 99% of Wii games are pure garbage and the few that are of quality are mainly the first party games like Mario and Zelda and involve a good deal of fighting and platforming. She recently picked up a Nancy Drew game and a game that is a puzzle mystery on the Titanic and has been enjoying both of those. It warms my heart to say this, but her genre of choice is essentially point and click adventure games. Unfortunately, not many ones of quality exist on the Wii. I would get her to play some of the Telltale games on the Wii but she would not enjoy Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People or the Sam and Max games. I might try to talk her into getting the Tales of Monkey Island from Wiiware.
There is one game of substance I did get her to start playing recently. After hearing high praises about it on the Game of the Year Giant Bomb podcast, I purchased Silent Hill: Shattered Memories for her. My mother loves horror movies. She has probably watched more horror movies than total movies I have watched. She uses Netflix and was at one point getting 8+ movies a week. To this day, I think she has over 15,000 movies rated on Netflix (whereas I am at around 2000). One problem for her was most horror movies do not really scare her anymore. Just as very few video games 'wow' me every year, very very few horror movies ever scare her.
I figured Silent Hill: Shattered Memories would be a perfect game for her because it had deep story, fun puzzles and there was no combat. Unlike previous Silent Hill games where you are given a gun and often have to shoot enemies, in this one you just ran away from them. At this point, she has had the game for about a week and a half and has not progressed more than about a half hour in the game. She has not even reached the point where she can save her game for the first time. She has played the game about six different times now, but she says every time she starts playing she is completely paralyzed with fear. She talks about how this is a kind of terror she has never felt from a horror movie and after about a half hour she is so completely terrified that she just turns the game off. She goes back to the game almost every day and every day progresses maybe five minutes deeper into the game but still has not reached the point where she can save (which is only a little more than a half hour into the game).
Talking to her on the phone about the games she has been playing is one of my new favorite things. I know not everyone enjoys listening to the the stories of other people playing video games (but if that is the case, why are you reading a blog? 
) but I am an often jaded gamer and she is still so new to gaming. Hearing her talk about the games with such passion and vigor helps me remember a time when it was all new to me.
Bioshock 2: Better Gameplay, Lesser Experience
I managed to wrap up Bioshock 2 a few nights ago and I have finally compiled my thoughts on it. Overall, I am left feeling lukewarm. I guess it was a flaw on my part to hope this game would capture the magic of the first game again. I am a story freak. I love good stories. The game play can be terrible and I will still play it if it has a compelling narrative. I struggled through Bioshock 2.
In the end, the game is roughly 10 hours long. I started playing on launch day and only played 30 or so minutes a day because I just did not find myself interested in what was going on. The other night, I sat down and marathoned through the last half of the game to just get it done with.
The game play has been tightened quite a bit since Bioshock 1. Plasmids can be upgraded to have more effects and they can be dual wielded with guns. The gun upgrade stations are still in the game and I actually found them to be a lot more centrally located. In Bioshock 2, it was no challenge to find all 14 upgrade stations. I maybe had found half in the first Bioshock.
The story in the game is really what left me so lukewarm. It just feels... unnecessary. It is not bad, but just not necessary either. The most apt description is a "straight to video" sequel. Another way it has been describe is having an "expansion pack feel". It is like Half-Life: Opposing Force or Half-Life: Blue Shift. That is what the plot of this game feels like. The villain is ret-conned into the game and does not seem that threatening in the first place. There are quite a few massive plot holes that tend to stick out as well. The story of the first game was not perfect, but the Andrew Ryan "would you kindly" twist was one of the most memorable moments in video games for me. This... did not pack any punch.
The game is not bad. The game play is much improved over the first, but for me good story is always more important than good game play. I am probably in the minority in this, but I am more willing to play a flawed game with fantastic story than a game with improved game play with an inferior story. I am more about the immersion and experience than the game play. Bioshock 2 is not bad, it was just a story that did not need to be created.
Mass Effect 2: Post Game Review
Disclaimer: This post contains mid and endgame spoilers from Mass Effect 2.
I finally wrapped up Mass Effect 2 this past weekend and I am really happy with the experience. This game is what a sequel should be. Bioware took what they did with the first game and refined it into an even better experience. It is very obvious that they took to heart a lot of the fan criticisms of the first game (mainly the mako exploration and the inventory managing). Had this game come out a month earlier, it would have been a toss up between this and Dragon Age for my 2009 game of the year.
I finished as a paragon male Shepard and am already itching to start up as a renegade female Shepard. Between waiting to see if they put out any DLC and this week's release of Bioshock 2 however, I think I am going to put my second play through of Mass Effect 2 on the back burner.
My problems with Mass Effect 2 are really minor nit picks in the grand scheme of things.
I thought there were too many characters. It was not that the characters were not interesting. The only character I did not ever really use was Jacob. The problem was that I liked so many of the characters and you could only take two with you at any given time.
After being spoiled on party interaction in Dragon Age, I wish there was more banter between characters. I also wish the characters would also interact more in conversation with NPCs. Most the time, characters will only have conversation points if you are doing a quest for them or are talking to directly to them on the ship. But, I can understand that this game is supposed to be the story of Commander Shepard so he should have the focus.
I also thought it was very unfortunate that by the time you got Legion into your party, there was a time limit put on your character. Once you get Legion, your ship is attacked by Collectors and all of your crew is taken. The more time you spend running around the galaxy doing side quests at this point, the more of your crew dies. Legion is a Geth and so having him on your side makes for some very interesting interactions. I would love to take him to more of the character and loyalty missions, but I do not want to end with my crew being wiped out.
I was reading an interview with some of the Mass Effect 2 developers and apparently usage statistics are from people playing are getting sent back to Bioware so they can see which characters people use the most. They are going to take this information to give the more used characters bigger roles in Mass Effect 3.
The only other minor nit pick I have is that if you do 100% of the quests in game and hack and loot every locker and safe and body, you will still not have enough money to buy all of the games upgrades. I was using an imported character so I started with a bonus of 150k credits and by the time I reached the point of no return, I was still about 300k credits shy of being able to afford everything.
Nonetheless, these are relatively minor things. They are nothing like the glaring problems of the first game. Word in the pipeline is that they are going to put out some decent DLC for this game (unlike ME1) and that we could see ME3 as early as first quarter of next year. Between the top notch gaming experiences I have had with Dragon Age and Mass Effect, my confidence in Bioware to put out a great game has never been higher. It makes me wonder if The Old Republic could actually turn out to be the "Next Big Thing" in the MMO sphere.
Relics of RPGs Past
I am about 80% done with Mass Effect 2 now. Rynala wrapped up the game on her character yesterday. Being a bit of a completionist myself, I have been doing every little side quest possible before moving forward with the story. For Rynala, she was lukewarm on the first game. She saw the game as "good, but flawed". She was originally reluctant to event start playing ME2. Now, she loves the game so much that she just started her second play through. She is probably even more excited than me for Mass Effect 3.
Many of my friends have finished the game as well and while most are giving it nothing but praise, there are some that think the game has drifted too far from the RPG roots. You can see this sentiment echoed in various places on the internet. Personally, I feel this game is just as much of an RPG as the original and the areas of the game that were changed were areas that did not enhance the game originally.
One friend of mine complained about the lack of inventory. He wanted more guns to drop and more variety. Personally, I do not see the point. In ME2, there are 2-6 different weapons for each slot. Each weapon has different pros and cons. One weapon may have higher damage but another may have higher accuracy while another may hold more ammunition. You are allowed to pick a gun that fits your style and go with it. In Mass Effect 1, people just kept upgrading to the best guns until they got the Spectre weapons and then they would never upgrade their guns again. Now, you pick the gun you like and that will always be the best gun. You can still upgrade its damage and accuracy through the tech lab but you do not have to spend half the game dealing with an inventory full of guns you will never use anyway.
To me, an RPG is not about constantly fiddling with the inventory or allocating stat points. To me, a role playing game is about playing a role. It is playing the personality of the character and changing the world around me. So many of the things that were trimmed off Mass Effect 1 make sense. They are shackles of the past that are just busy work. Streamlining role playing games is not a bad thing. I would much prefer more time playing the character out in the world and less time having to check spreadsheets and min-max characters. When playing games, we need to ask ourselves: "Is this really enhancing the game or is this just busy work?"
Mid-Game Review: Mass Effect 2
I am currently about 20 hours into Mass Effect 2. I would have been further but between, work class, and getting new furniture this week, my gaming time has not been where I would like it.
So far, I think Mass Effect 2 improves on the foundation of Mass Effect 1 in every way possible. The action is better, the character interactions are more cinematic, and the monotony has been reduced.
From what I have read, I am just around half way through the game. I am going a bit slow and being a completionist though, so I may take longer than most people will. Some friends of mine have already beat the game and clocked in 30-35 hours. I am expecting to get in 40+ with doing all the side quests.
Gone is the planet exploration with the Mako and the relentless gun and armor drops (that would always just get reduced to omni-gel) and replacing it is a streamlined game. I have seen complaints from people that they think Bioware toned down the RPG and dialed up the shooter parts too much but I could not disagree more. I think this game delivers a perfect balance between shooter and RPG, but this is something I will probably deconstruct more in another post this week.
The best quality of the game is hands down the cinematography. I believe that the directing in this game is a huge step forward for video games as a genre and will go far to show the kind of personality and emotional response that games can invoke. The characters are not just flatly delivering lines, their faces and bodies give the visual cues that real people give.
This was more eloquently described by CharlieFoxtrot on the SomethingAwful forums:
"I might be flaring up the discussion about ME2's writing again, but I thought there were some interesting points brought up earlier. Basically, it boils down to this: complaining that ME2 isn't up to Planescape: Torment's standards is like complaining that that Steven Spielberg can't write novels like J.D. Salinger. They're trying to accomplish two different things.
Because games are still relatively young as form of expression, they have to borrow their narrative grammar from other forms. P:T chose a novelistic style, full of dense prose, reflection, and introspection. Technology has reached a point where ME2 can choose a cinematic style and use the grammar of film. And it does it so, so well.
It's helpful to compare it to Dragon Age, a game made by the same company but also trying to accomplish something slightly different. For all the amazing stuff Dragon Age pulls off, they did not put as much energy into cutscene presentation. The camera angles tend to be flat and workmanlike, purely designed to convey the necessary information, and the world and its characters are not expressive enough to stand alone without little parenthetical descriptions from time to time.
ME2 spends so much energy making the game's presentation as flawless and emotionally charged as possible. It's all composed of the little things, like that you can see Shepard smirk a little after making a one-liner, or that people walk around and shift positions when having a conversation instead of standing perfectly still, or that the characters' eyes are articulated enough that you can follow what they're looking at like an audience does a thousand times when they watch real people in a real movie.
It really hit me in Miranda's loyalty quest, in the scene where she looks at her sister and her family and the camera drifts from over her shoulder and racks focus into the distance, and then it cuts away and has Miranda step away towards the camera so that you can read every nuance of her expression. Any film buff can tell you that that is a cinematic technique to get us closer to a character's perspective and get us to relate to them better. But most game designers either aren't sophisticated enough or don't care enough to make use of techniques like that.
Of course it would all be for naught if that kind of detail didn't carry over through to everything; it would be like the FMV craze of the late nineties where everyone was saying "It's like a movie and you're the star!" when in reality you were playing a discrete gameplay segment, then watching an FMV, then playing the game some more. Everything BioWare has done in ME2 is about streamlining and perfecting -- not just the gameplay but the story as well. The main directive in ME2 seems to be never to break the flow, and to make every part of the game as seamless and immersive as possible. Rejiggering the systems so that you're not shuffling through an inventory screen or a level up screen every few minutes not only streamlines the gameplay, but also prevents as many jarring immersion breaks from the narrative as possible."
Darksiders – Think like Link, Fight like Kratos
Due to my old standard definition TV going out about a week ago I have finally updated myself to the HD world and as such, I have been having a mini Xbox360 revival. My game of choice currently is Darksiders.
I had heard about Darksiders a few months ago on the Gamers With Jobs Conference Call. It was described as something along the lines of "you go around as one of the horsemen of the apocalypse and kill angels and demons". The concept sounded neat but that was the last I heard of it. When it released earlier this month, from the screen shots it looked like another God of War clone. Luckily, it is not.
Anyone who tells you that this game is most influenced by God of War is a liar. This game is essentially the new Legend of Zelda. Instead of Link, you play as the apocalyptic horseman War who looks like he stepped right out of World of Warcraft character designer meeting. Instead of the kingdom of Hyrule, you find yourself on post apocalyptic Earth. An apocalypse YOU were tricked into starting and there are very many unhappy individuals that want you dead.
The combat, however, feels a bit more polished than a Zelda game. Instead of just your standard two or three attacks, you have a multitude of combos on a variety of weapons that you can buy and upgrade. Enemies drop souls that are used as currency, replenish your health, and replenish your rage. This is where the God of War comparison comes in. But in the end, this game feels like 20% God of War and 80% Legend of Zelda.
The gameplay is incredibly solid. I am playing on apocalyptic difficulty since I was told the normal difficulty was a bit easy. Early in the game it was not unheard of to get two or three shot by enemies. Combat was fast paced and unforgiving and dodging was essential. Now that I have upgraded my health quite a few times the game feels a bit easier though dodging is still very important. Apocalyptic difficulty definitely keeps you on your toes and I would expect nothing less.
A good deal of time is spent dungeon diving. So far, I have been through two proper dungeons: an evil cathedral that was essentially a fire temple and a section of subway and sewers that was essentially a water temple. In each temple you get a new item or weapon to help you solve the puzzles of the stage. Within the fire temple equivalent, I received an item that works the same way as the boomerang in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
At the end of each dungeon, you face a boss that requires you to often show mastery of your weapon and the gimmick of the dungeon. I found the fire temple boss to be much harder than the water temple boss but both were enjoyable.
Overall, I have found Darksiders to be a really fun game. It does not do anything new but I think what it does, it does well. A lot of people scream for innovation nowadays, but personally I am just happy to be playing another Legend of Zelda game.
Back In Rotation
I am finally back to blogging. It has been a busy couple weeks for me so hopefully things are properly settled down now. I spent Christmas at home in our with Rynala and the two of headed to her parent's house for New Years. From there I flew home to Idaho to care for my mom for a week and a half while after she had shoulder surgery and then the last few days I have been sick in bed.
What is amusing out of all of this is that before my long holiday, I figured I would be able to get in a good deal of gaming time. Sure I had some chores and responsibilities to fulfill, but without having work and school I thought I would have more time to game. I was actually surprised by how little gaming I have done over the last three weeks.
Rynala and I have been playing through Titan Quest. We just started the third act and are about 20 hours into the game. I am enjoying the game even if it does get a bit repetitious. Play this game is getting me really hyped up for the Clash of the Titans movie in March.
I have tried to get back into Borderlands but I do not know if I will ever be able to. Besides how much the game just feels like a bad port on the PC, the way the DLC is being handled is infuriating.
I recently picked up Darksiders for the 360. The game is essentially a mixture of God of War and the Legend of Zelda in a post-apocalyptic, demon infested world. I am absolutely loving it.