Minecraft Musings

Every so often in life, you’ll feel like you’re experiencing the bleeding edge of advancement and change; seeing Avatar in 3D, getting the latest iPad on launch day, or eagerly drinking in each new trailer for a film you know will rewrite the movie rulebook. You’ll play a game, watch a TV show, drive a car, and know right away that what this is the best yet, that you are experiencing something that will be looked upon in years to come as a groundbreaking moment in its field.

That is what playing Minecraft feels like right now in May 2011, and what it has felt like since I picked it up a few months ago, and it’s thanks largely due to the game’s lengthy pre-release status, with significant new additions to the game cropping up every few weeks that the Minecraft community awaits eagerly like hungry block-munching fiends, and moreover, improve the game and encourage experimentation, playful new approaches to the game, and even more ridiculously fantastical builds. It also helps strengthen a gaming community that feels genuinely collaborative and approachable. This pre-release period feels like it’ll be looked back on in years to come in a similar vein as the time when Americans marched to protest the war in Vietnam in the 1960′s – I was there, man. You don’t know.

What is Minecraft, I hear you mouth silently as you look sideways at your computer screen with an incredulous look of puzzlement on your face? Any player of the blocky indie gem will invariably have to answer this question at some point, and its answer can be philosophical or practical. The game’s creator, the utterly charming Swede Markus Persson, who goes by the alias “Notch”, describes it thusly: “Minecraft is a game about placing blocks to build anything you can imagine. At night monsters come out, make sure to build a shelter before that happens.” However, I would say that Minecraft is what you make of it. It is a game about possibilities. It can be about building. It can be about survival. It can be about exploration. Minecraft is whatever you want it to be, it is a set of tools and toys to play with as you see fit.

Minecraft uses a particularly nifty algorithm which randomly generates stunning 3D worlds - mountains, oceans, rolling deserts, and so on.

Mechanically, Minecraft can be described as a world made up of blocks of various materials, such as stone, dirt, wood, sand, etc. Blocks can be mined, which places them in your inventory. From there, blocks can either be placed back into the world, or crafted into items and new blocks according to the appropriate “recipe”. Different items and blocks perform different functions, some quite complicated. As such, the player can introduce “man-made” blocks to the world, such as glass, bricks, and staircases.

In single player, Minecraft is essentially Robinson Crusoe: The Game. Like the hapless Crusoe, most players’ first instinct is to collect materials, craft basic tools, and build a shelter to protect yourself from the various enemies that roam the land when dark. Having done so, the player may choose to improve their lot by building a farm, more comfortable living quarters, better defenses, or they might choose to explore the land, mine for precious materials like iron and diamond, or build gigantic structures. Whilst a recently introduced “achievement tree” will guide players to the basics, at some point the player will reach a point whereby their actions are determined by the goals they set themselves.

Unless you have a particularly inventive mind or a wild imagination, single player does eventually stale. You’ll have built everything you need and want, have learnt the best ways of dealing with the various enemies, and created a number of pointless artistic structures. It is in multiplayer then, that Minecraft‘s true longevity depends upon.

In multiplayer, the massive structures that pop into your head are finally demonstrable to all. Building projects become the effort of the many, instead of a solo effort. And there is more to experiment with than just building. The inclusion of redstone, a substance that allows for logic-gate circuitry, in addition to various items that use its input, from simple doors and levers to blocks that play a musical note when activated, provides a further basis for experimentation and grandiose projects. Finding a genuinely friendly and welcoming multiplayer server thus transforms Minecraft from a solitary survival experience to a collaborative community builder.

The Creeper is one of the most frightening creatures ever to grace videogames. It is a silent kamikaze suicide bomber who sneaks up on you and explodes. In a game largely about building, an enemy that destroys is to be greatly feared.

It is a game that is constantly growing too. Past updates to the game have introduced new items and blocks that either improve the experience (beds, introduced a few weeks ago, allow for the night to be skipped), provide new distractions (a forthcoming mod will introduce pistons) or simple aesthetic changes (such as the recent introduction of occasional rain and snow). Minecraft feels like the epitome of indie, thanks largely to the fact that the game feels like the work of Notch exclusively, and his informative blog that keeps the community abreast of forthcoming changes and ideas.

Minecraft is due to be “officially” released on 11th November 2011, the same day that Bethesda’s highly anticipated The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is released. What Minecraft will have developed into by then, no-one knows, probably not even Notch. But a game with such a focus on creativity, community and collaboration will no doubt live long past even the release of The Elder Scrolls VI and beyond.

For more information on Minecraft, go to www.minecraft.net or just type “minecraft” into YouTube.

Revival

Well, it certainly has been a while, hasn’t it? My last blog post, a review of Brütal Legend, was uploaded way back in November 2009. What went wrong? Was I struck down with some disabling illness, I hear you cry? Perhaps I discovered God and travelled the globe preaching His word? Maybe I got a successful job as some nebulous business executive, and thusly saw no need in updating a gaming blog whilst I was earning squillions of pounds? The truth is that none of those things happened. Instead, laziness took over and I just stopped updating the blog, then forgot about it.

The New and Improved regalgrubgrub

But enough about the past! We should look to the future, and all of the exciting developments currently underway in the games industry. At the time of writing, there are noises coming from various places on the internet about a successor to the Nintendo Wii, which Shigeru Miyamoto (who for all intents and purposes is Nintendo made human) has said will be shown at the videogames expo E3 later this year. Apparently the new console’s controllers will have their own screen, which sounds like a natural evolution of Nintendo’s past experiments, such as GameCube to Game Boy Advance connectivity in certain titles (The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adevnture springs to mind), and the inclusion of a speaker in the Wii remote. This is really the only bit of news worthy of note regarding “Project Cafe”, as HD visuals and better hardware specs is really a given, in my view.

Enough about that though. I’m aiming to revive this blog, and update the blog with weekly posts, either reviews, articles, or general musings about a current issue or piece of news. I’d also like to venture into the world of video reviews, now that I have a computer with enough oomph to record in-game footage. The videos would likely be uploaded on my trusty old YouTube account, to take advantage of my long-suffering subscriber base. Does that idea excite you? Disgust you? Let me know!

In any case, you can next expect a proper update next week, with brand new content!

Review: Brütal Legend

Never before has a gaming premise, when presented on paper, been quite so eye-wateringly clever and bursting with potential, as Brütal Legend. You can’t help but admire Tim Schafer’s genius: take the Nordic, medieval world of a thousand heavy metal album covers and flesh it out into a full adventure, simultaneously reworking not only the attitude and imagery of heavy metal into that world, but also the sub-cultures surrounding it, and the actual structure of real-world music tours into an all-encompassing game world and system of game mechanics that should be an achievement of unprecedented proportions. Unfortunately, never before has a gaming premise so overflowing with promise delivered such a frustratingly poor experience.

Double Fine gets it incredibly right on a lot of important fronts: the world itself delivers on the visual promise set out in the premise: gargantuan crumbling statues of swords, devils and flying-v guitars litter the land, scarred by shattered highways and the remains of ancient battle, whilst mangled shadow creatures ricochet off the bumper of your ludicrously overpowered roadster as it hurtles across said landscape. Sound design is also an expectedly strong string in the game’s bow – suitably epic moments in-game are met with suitably epic blasts of electric guitar from a wide range of true metal classics. Schafer’s trademark wit and humour is also present and correct throughout, its marriage with Jack Black’s vocal efforts a match made in heaven. But most impressive is the thematic consistency of the entire package throughout.

Cameos from real life Rock legends serve to further enrich Brutal Legend's heavy metal mythology

It seems every facet of heavy metal is worked into the lore of Brütal Legend‘s world. Dry ice has to be cultivated from the Dry Ice Mines, amps ripped from the amp cliffs, and healing bass strings stolen from the web of a huge demonic spider. All main missions serve to fuel the player’s army, which in itself is composed of different fans and staff members that fuel a typical stage show, the show itself providing the context for large real-time strategy segments.

It is at these RTS stage shows the player discovers the fatal flaw in Brütal Legend‘s structure: woefully inadequate information design mixed with a control system hopelessly useless at delivering upon any of the promises made to the player through its other successes. By the second stage show, the realisation dawns that each non-RTS mission was supposed to instruct the player as to either how to control a unit type, what a unit type’s purpose is, or some other supplementary facet of the stage battles. However, the way in which this information is delivered to the player is so haphazardly swift that by the time you actually are required to use the various tools at your disposal, the player is left fumbling in the kit bag, in desperate need of further instruction.

The game simply takes it as read that, as you stumble through a tutorial for a new gameplay idea, you’ve somehow mastered it outside of a more appropriate context, and swiftly moves on to another incredibly complex mechanic, some of which don’t seem to have any kind of instruction on how precisely they work, and in what scenarios such a command might be useful.

For example, in the midst of a stage battle, the player can choose to direct the troops under their command in a variety of ways – by summoning a rally flag which can be carried about or placed on the field, placing a beacon of light on a distant objective, or by telling your troops to attack in a general direction, defend your current position, or follow you directly. It is never made clear how summoning a rally flag might affect troops heading for a beacon, or whether issuing objectives directly will affect one group of troops or the entire army. The business of issuing individual commands to groups of units (presumably with the intention of implementing more complex battle strategies) is not only poorly taught (cropping up in a mission that seems designed to introduce at least three other separate and hideously complicated ideas at the same time), but is in itself extremely cumbersome and awkward: a button has to be held down whilst physically next to the troops receiving the order, and then the already complicated command system navigated whilst the button is held down for the duration of the command! Add to this the need to understand and, moreover, be seemingly fluent in a whole host of other control systems (such as the system by which new troops are created – never made clear and extremely daunting), and the whole system turns out as a complete disaster, succeeding only in enraging and confusing the player, never offering a suitable training ground for the governing ideas behind the RTS segments. The absurdity of these controls become especially unforgivable later in the game when the stage battles reach a difficulty level that would suggest advance tactics need to be used. The game expects the player to have mastered its bastardized shit of a control scheme and use it to play out strategies which a sane person could never hope to achieve. The extreme use of italics here is, I hope, indicative at my complete bamboozlement at how such tortuously awful design could ever make it into a final retail game.

When fighting a stage battle, Eddie grows wings and can fly arround the battlefield. Whilst clearly intended to make up for the deficiencies in controlling troops from the third-person perspective, this solution shows how hamstrung the system really is

Part of the problem seems to stem from a divergence in what the game wants to be. Eddie Riggs’ adventure starts out as a third-person action adventure, with a little sandbox-style driving thrown in for good measure. Indeed, the player can learn various attack combos, further cementing this play style. As such, when the RTS segments appear, they have to work within the context of third-person controls, with RTS-specific controls layered over the top. Controlling an RTS in this way simply does not work.

What really gets my goat is that some of the more general ideas on display here, such as that of a stage show being the scene of a battle, or of the unit types and their roles, could have been put to work in a more robust RTS system and produced an excellent game. What works about Brütal Legend works incredibly well, so much so that the player actively wants the game to somehow overcome its bizarre control issues so that he or she can become further engrossed in the world. Schafer’s ideas are genius, and there is indeed much to admire about Brütal Legend. It is a shame that little of that admiration can extend to how those ideas are actually put into practise from the perspective of how the game actually handles.

5/10

Retrospect: Pikmin

I’ve just finished watching the latest part of a superb Pikmin Let’s Play by the ever-underrated KManrules1331. You would do well to watch his videos. It reminded me of an article I wrote a little over a year ago, and so now I present it to you. Do enjoy.

Retrospect: Pikmin

No one can attest to liking all videogames; the range of genres, themes, stories, art directions and characters are far too diverse, just as with books and film. I, for example, don’t enjoy real-time strategy games. To me, they seem specifically designed for those who are confident and perhaps intelligent enough to come up with very specific strategies. Such overt ‘thinking’ in games puts me off – perhaps it’s because I don’t think too highly of my cognitive abilities, but more that I prefer to be guided on a journey where pleasures are far more clear-cut.

And yet, one of my favourite games of the Gamecube generation is, at its core, an RTS. You command an army (albeit, a flower one), make orders, and micromanage. But, most importantly, Pikmin takes the essentials of the genres and presents them in such a way as to nullify all feelings of panic one might traditionally get when tasked to say, wage a full-scale war against Napoleon during the French Revolution.

Instead, all you are asked to do is rebuild a spaceship. Captain Olimar has crash-landed on a strange planet, and in the process his beloved ship the Dolphin has disintegrated, ship parts flying off to various locations on the planet. All seems hopeless, until Olimar discovers the eponymous pikmin, a bunch of tiny flower men that follow Olimar as if he’s some deity. Utilizing each of the three different coloured pikmin to break down walls, take care of gigantic beasts and carry the scattered ship parts back to base, Olimar is able to escape from the alien world and its poisonous oxygen atmosphere.

Much of Pikmin’s success lays in the way it introduces RTS elements to the player. Whereas most RTS deal in destruction, Pikmin deals in the problem of creation and rebuilding. Even when engaged in combat, there are no feelings of real aggression toward the enemy being attacked. ‘Killed’ isn’t a term thought of so much as ‘harvested’ – it’s simply a representation of survival, of the natural order of things: the corpses left are food used to boost pikmin numbers. Before you even realise it, you’re micro-managing the number of pikmin out on the field, thinking about how best to utilize the day ahead, perhaps assigning a small group to take out some enemies to clear a path to another ship part, whilst some blue (water resistant) pikmin take care of a submerged wall, whilst some others harvest some nectar (which increases pikmin strength and turns their leaves into flowers)… all essentially elements of an RTS game, but yet feeling so far removed as to be almost alien.

Of similar importance is the subject matter. The problem to be solved is a highly personal one, and one a player can most often deeply empathise with: homesickness. Olimar’s diary entries emphasize his feelings of hope at the thought of being able to return home to his wife and children, and his thoughts at the acquisition of certain ship parts are charming home truths (such as the joy of a comfy chair) that further add layers of humanity that the Civilization games could never boast.

The game’s one flaw is also its secret strength. Captain Olimar must recover a certain percentage of his ship’s 30 missing parts before 30 days have ended, else his life support systems will run out. Whilst in technical terms placing a time limit on how long one can play, it also lends the game a sense of focus and urgency that fit naturally with the need to escape and return home. Pikmin is a bittersweet experience, a heartwarming tale of struggle, perseverance, exploration and hope, it is without doubt underrated in terms of its ability to engage not just with the mind, but with the heart.

Welcome!

Hello one and all. Welcome to what promises to be an exilharating middle-of-the-road blog that focuses largely on videogames, but may at indescriminate points veer off on tangents that neither you nor I expect.

Firstly, a little about me. My internet name is regalgrubgrub, which is derived from my GCSE Electronics teacher, Mr. Grabowski, and one of the boss characters from Pikmin 2, Empress Bulblax. My real name is a crustly guarded secret, which is not too difficult to find out if you know where to look, or who to ask.

Some of you might know me from the popular internet website known as “YouTube”. I have a channel there (www.youtube.com/user/regalgrubgrub) where I post what are known as “Let’s Play” videos, which feature me or me and my friend Hot Tub playing a videogame whilst talking over it. Often the so-called “commentary” correlates only partially to what is being played. Nevertheless, people seem to get a certain level of enjoyment from those videos, so I keep on makin’ ‘em.

Some may also know that I’m hoping to break into videogame journalism at some point in the future, so this is an opportunity for me to build a portfolio of writing so as to show off my incredible journalistic talents to the world. I will most likely post game reviews, articles, retrospects, lists, and other things that come to mind. I’ll most likely post some “blasts from the past” here too – reviews I wrote for my university newspaper over the course of my three years there, as a way to plug the gaps in the blog when I get too busy with my TWO (count ‘em) real-world jobs.

In any case, I guess the next few weeks will determine whether or not this is a successful experiment. I hope that my efforts will be sufficient for you to bookmark this hideously deformed monstrosity of a blog, and that over time, you will come to love it like a cat that won’t stop pawing at your bedroom door at 7am.