It's been quite some time since the last article was posted here on Game for a Laugh. I apologise for the lack of content over the last month but i promise i have a really good excuse, and it has nothing to do with the dog eating my laptop (although i swear he did try that once due to a rather fetching Pedigree Chum screen saver). You could say that i've been doing research for the blog, but i don't think that you should have that much fun researching something, unless it's porn or product development at Frankie and Benny's. Nope, the reason that it's been so quiet can be summed up in one word.
Minecraft.
I've heard a fair bit about Minecraft over the last year or so, until recently i just ignored it due to the large number of AAA titles that were on the horizon. Red Dead Redemption, Fallout New Vegas, GT5, Portal 2 and Fight Night Champion, which i'll be writing about later on, all took my attention away from the small game originally developed by one man in the snowy depths of Sweden in May 2009. That is, until i saw a video feature on IGN about the popular indie game scheduled for full release on 11.11.11 (that date sounds familiar).
You'd think i would have learned by now. Games such as the super successful Angry Birds proved that low budget games with reasonable price points can be just as enjoyable and deep as the biggest budget blockbusters. Minecraft cost me just short of £14 and has swallowed literally days of my life in the last month, Angry Birds did just the same thing a few months earlier.
Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself here, let's talk a bit more about what Minecraft actually is.
Minecraft was developed by Swedish game designer Markus Persson after he quit as a developer for King.com to concentrate on his independent work. Partly inspired by Infiniminer, a mining game by Zach Barth, it was initially released on May 17th 2009 and continues to be in Beta to this day. The game is graphically very simple, the environment is rendered in 3d but the textures themselves are extremely reminiscent of Doom. While it won't blow your socks off in the looks department it's great to see a game that is so confident in its game play that it couldn't care less how it looks, and to be fair to it the graphics actually grow on you after a while to the point where it becomes charming. The low res graphics also have a practical purpose however. Persson has been quoted as saying that he wanted to create a game that could be played on anyone's PC. He certainly achieved that since i can play it on my Laptop with very little slow down at all.
Gameplay consists of mining blocks of wood, dirt, cobbles and gravel and then using these resources to craft your shelter, weapons, clothes, tools, torches and even your own bed. The list of items you can craft is truely exhaustative, everything from sheep sheers to garden hoes can be made with the right ingrediants. The real appeal of this game is simple, You create everything. It's like seeing the condensed history of man in video game form.
Make a shelter, form stone tools, mine metals, make better tools, protect yourself from the things that come for you at night... Oh wait i forgot to tell you, there are Zombies in this game too.
While daylight hours are the time when you collect resources and form the world as you want it to be, darkness belongs to the things that go "bump" in the night. This sets out a very rigid structure for how you should proceed. Make a shelter and arm yourself before night falls or you're in serious doo doo! Of course the options allow the player to turn the zombies off or on at any time, giving you the opportunity to build a fortress before you need worry about uninvited guests slathering after your poor overworked brains, but for the hardcore out there you can struggle through your first night with the hoard after you.
It's the shear freedom and creativity in this game that appeals to me. Minecraft is a sandbox game in its truest form, allowing you complete freedom in what you do with it. Form your own kingdom? Go ahead! Make a recreation of Hyrule and have yourself a 3D Zelda adventure? Why not! Make a 1:1 scale model of the Enterprise? Well it's a pretty nerdy thing to do but Yes, indeed you can!
The reason i can't put this game down is simply that it's endless, both in possibilities and in game play. Every day i set off in a new direction and find another strange unexplored island full of caves and resources to be tapped in to. How can i stop when there's so much still to explore?!
Now i know how Sir Walter Rayleigh felt...
