Notes

Back To Basics: Here's What Minecraft

How would you review Tetris, if you were reviewing it today? "The puzzling is very tight, and the soundtrack is catchy." The thing is that Tetris is so much greater than that. However, it's almost impossible not to associate it with its cultural resonance. Minecraft, the free-form building and survival game, hasn't yet seeped into the global consciousness to the same degree, but it has become something far more than a mere game.



It is one that more than four millions people have already purchased and played. It is the best example of an independent success story. It has never been near a publisher, nor an investor. Markus 'Notch" Persson is the lead developer. This one-word nickname guarantees instant media attention and gamer attention for all pronouncements it's attached too. There are T-shirts, costumes, conspiracy theories about an ingame nemesis who doesn’t exist, podcasts, YouTube videos, and more YouTube videos than one person could ever watch in a lifetime. There is also a dedicated video commentary website featuring a girl with pink hair who has a frighteningly loyal fanbase.



Identifying quite where the game stops and where its online legend begins is a tall order. Review Minecraft? You should also review Justin Bieber. ("The hair is very shiny but the voice quite weedy; 7/10.")



Except, somehow, Minecraft wasn't released until today, and thus today is the day it is intended to be reviewed on. It's been available in beta and alpha versions for several years now. Anybody who purchased the first PS10 and later the PS14 were granted immediate access, as well as all future updates. There isn't even any mystery around the 'release' version, with a near-finished build having been available for the last week or so. Review Minecraft? You're welcome to review Minecraft.



Back to basics: here's what Minecraft, the game, really is. It's a block-based sandbox that gives you two key player abilities: create and destroy. You can give with one mouse-button, and take away with the other.



You can hit almost anything with your cuboid or any other tool you have, and it will eventually fall apart. You'll then have some building material. You can then throw it in the universe, where it will appear as a cube. You'll create something if you mine more materials, stack additional cubes around your blocks, and even a little imagination.



It could be a tower that towers over the entire world. It could be a Gothic castle that pierces the sky, or it could be an elaborate Gothic castle. It could be a functional minecart with track. It could also be a crudephallus. It could be Justin Bieber. It could be almost anything, and that is Minecraft.



It is so simple in so many ways and yet so complicated in so many other ways. If you set yourself ambitious construction projects that require patience, time, and ever-rarer blocks, it will be a remarkable project. You don't have. You can be a casual clicker or a meticulous digital architect and still make something you are proud of.



The game can be broken into two key forms that go beyond the Lego-like, minimalistic core. One is a multiplayer mode. This allows for the collective efforts of many people to create some of the most amazing sights in the game. Extremecraft If you find a popular server, you'll see incredible things: impossible cities, vast underground mining, waterways carved out into functional circuitry and working farms.



With simple 'recipes' of materials, which thanks to the mildly annoying lack of a tutorial you'll need to look up online or use shape-based guesses to come up with, you can make tools, structures, weapons, fire, portals, doors, ladders, all sorts. Whenever a new block type has been added to the game, Minecraft's building potential has grown exponentially. The endlessly changing world combined with the developers’ canny programming-minded sense of which new block types could theoretically possibly be used for makes Minecraft a marvel of electronic possibility. It is the fundamental 'what-if?' You can imagine the possibilities that videogames can present.



Unfortunately, most of us won't participate in such grand creations. We are too lazy, anxious, and easily distracted. Most of us will just dig a hole in the ground and then put some torches on the walls. We'll feel like we're at home. And that, I think, is Minecraft at its most important.



Your creations are yours no matter how hapless or inept they may seem. Because you are the one who created the hole in ground, it will feel like home.



Ah, the monsters. That leads me on to the other key facet of Minecraft: the one that might be a little less vital to the game itself, but is the zeitgeist-y heart of Minecraft's online fame. Ghasts. Endermen. Spiders. They are lumbering and stupid block beasts. If they see you, they will relentlessly try and kill you. They usually come at night, which is good because they are mostly quiet at night.



In the brief daytime, you build. In the long night-time, you hide. Or you fight. It is about survival. You will need to build shelter and then armour and weapons to defeat these single-minded, incredibly crude and dangerous hunters. Rarer blocks and ever more complicated mining and crafting creates sturdier gear which will keep you alive for longer - although, in most Minecraft modes, death is but an inconvenience that loses you whatever you're carrying and flings you back to the geographical start point. Your location and any precious, precious blocks that you were about to mine are the real loss. If you haven't been careful, it can be difficult to find them again.



New-ish to Minecraft, but front and centre in the release version, are an experience system and an endgame. Killing things gives you experience. Experience can then be spent on an extremely complicated buff/enchantment scheme. This latter-day component of the game is not the best. It encourages grinding more that imagination. However, it's being developed further and will hopefully be more than a MMO-style layer to stat-chasing.



The pursuit for a climactic boss-fight is equally undercooked, even if it's clearly ambitious. This is done by obtaining rarest ingredients and building portals that take you to the game’s additional dimensions: an underground hell dimension and its ethereal inverse, The End. You will face harder fights and more rare materials. Eventually, you will be greeted by a great dragon.



This final fight is ridiculously and intentionally tough, its reward is an arguably too-big-for-its-boots 'poem' and, well, it just doesn't quite feel in the spirit of Minecraft proper. It is a goal that you should aim for. This applies to both those who find it difficult to leave Skyrim and those who are determined to complete everything. This aspect, and the levelling, seem a long way distant from the simpler virtues of construction and survival that first made Minecraft the internet's darling, and I worry slightly about this toybox of a game staggering under the weight of such additions if more are to come.



These narrative and role-playing aspects are completely optional. You can build a tunnel to anywhere you want. Or, you could build another rockyphallus. Minecraft is yours to do with as you please: its single greatest feature is that, every time you start a new game, it gives you a new, random and infinite world, strangely beautiful in its blocky minimalism (very much thanks to truly lovely lighting and music), a new adventure and a new, endless box of digital Lego.



Minecraft is a towering achievement in the very possibilities of gaming, and it does this without losing itself to either esoterica or cynicism. It's a game anyone can play and everyone can get something out it, no matter how imaginative or skilled they are. They will make something and have an experience that is uniquely theirs.



The last two decades of public-eye programming have provided a vital and enjoyable lesson for modern gaming. Be your own person, listen to players, and be proud of what human beings can accomplish, rather than what your can make them do. Minecraft might be inseparable from its own fame by this point, but one thing's for sure - it deserves every bit of it.


Read More: https://www.extremecraft.net/