If you were to ask me to sum up Minecraft in as few words as possible, I might describe the game in its current state as "Left4Dead mixed with Lego." Some of you might be going "eh?" right now, but bear with me.
Introduction
Minecraft is an indie game created by Markus Persson, who goes online by the name of Notch. The game is only in the alpha stage of development, but as of right now this hasn't stopped over 100,000 people from purchasing the game, which is currently being sold for 10 Euro(that's around $13.50 in USD). Notch plans to raise the price once it enters the beta stage to 20 Euro, after he adds multiplayer support. There are currently two main gameplay types; Creative and Survival. I'll go into Creative mode later, but for now I will explain Survival mode.
Let me first say this; Minecraft is not graphically amazing by any standards. However, I'll soon explain why this doesn't matter one bit. The game consists of a randomly generated world made up of chunky blocks with different textures. These blocks are the materials of the world (dirt, stone, sand, water etc) and there are many different types of block, all used in different ways. When you start up Survival mode, you'll see a world in front of you something like this -
Look at those graphics! If you're put off by them, DON'T be.
In that screenshot, you can already see 4 types of block; sand, dirt, trunk (or wood) and leaf. You 'mine' a block by holding down left click over it. At first your character will punch at the block until it breaks. You will then obtain the block for your own nefarious purposes, and it will go into your character's inventory, which looks like this.
Happy little chappy, isn't he?
I've nabbed some dirt from the bank, and I can now place it anywhere I want by aiming and right-clicking. The block then appears in my chosen location, and I can keep doing this if I wish, just simply moving and replacing blocks (hence the Lego reference earlier).
Not exactly moving mountains.
However, there's a catch. There is a day/night cycle in Minecraft, lasting approximately 20 minutes (10 minutes of daylight, 7 minutes of night, 1.5 minutes each of dawn and dusk). At night, or in any dark place such as underground caves, monsters come out to play. At the moment there are giant spiders, skeletons with bows, slimes and two types of zombie implemented, and they are out to get you. The hearts on the interface are of course your lifebar, and the monsters take sizeable chunks out of it if they hit you. Once the sun comes up though, the zombies burn in sunlight, and the spiders scurry back to their holes. So your early objective in Minecraft is simple - survive the nights by building. Now, to survive the first night, a lot of people build a simple hut out of mud, but my character doesn't particularly want to do that, so I'll quickly demonstrate some of the 'craft' part of Minecraft to help him settle in to a simple stone house, and show you a little more what the game is about.
To help our character thwart the inevitable zombie invasion, we can craft tools. Remember the crafting window next to our character in the inventory? That 2x2 square is where it all starts. First, I'm going to get 4 bits of wood from those trees we saw earlier, and put the wood in my crafting window. You can see on the right what I can make with that wood (planks), and I can simply left click to create them and then place the new item in my inventory at the cost of my wood. 1 pure wood makes 4 planks!
Genuinely awesome carpentry.
Now we get serious. I put one plank in each square in the crafting window. That makes a workbench, which when I right click it, gives me a 3x3 crafting window. Sweet! From there, I can turn some of my planks into sticks and make a crude wooden pickaxe by putting those sticks and some planks into a T formation in the workbench crafting window.
Badass.
This pickaxe helps me mine stone quickly without spending ages gradually punching the stone away with my fists (ouch). The wooden pickaxes are kinda weak though, and only let me mine 33 blocks before they disintegrate, so I use the same T formation with the sticks, only instead of the planks I use blocks of stone, which makes a stone pickaxe (No really?). This lasts twice as long as the wood one, AND does the job faster! Splendid, eh? Now I have my bunker, I can spend the last few minutes of daylight gathering more wood and stone, and when it gets dark I can hole up and spend the night crafting tools for the day ahead.
It doesn't look like much, but this thing is zombieproof. Except for the exploding ones. Yes really. Exploding zombies.
You get the picture anyway, and this system of getting bigger and better will get you hooked on making your house/castle totally awesome. You can make weapons too, so you're not totally defenceless, and zombies sometimes even drop stuff you can use (including gunpowder for explosives and spider silk to make bows). There are also animals strolling about too, and killing them yields various materials too, like pork which restores health, or wool to make cloth. The game focuses less on the graphics and more on letting you create whatever the hell you want from either the blocks or the extensive crafting system.
For a second, I'll come back to Creative mode. This is basically god mode, where you can choose any of the many blocks in the game and place however many you want in your world. I personally don't find this as fun as the Survival because there's no threat, but some people enjoy the simple building side, I guess, so there's your short explanation of that mode!
Now I've introduced the game, I'll slide more towards reviewing it.
Graphics:
This is a game where graphics are not an issue. The simple yet colourful world provides an ample playground for your imagination, and doesn't need to be beautifully rendered to provide you with a foundation on which to build your own designs. That being said, the lighting is wonderfully used to create mood, and torches will be more than light in the dark caves; they'll be your best friend. This is a game that would only be improved very minimally with better graphics, and that becomes apparent very early on into the experience. No more comment needed.
Gameplay:
For me, the value of the gameplay experience in Minecraft is two-sided. The game provides the player with a simple and diverse crafting/building system, and says "Go create." Minecraft doesn't play itself for you, there are no guidelines, no ulterior motives other than to survive and build. It doesn't sound like much but believe me, it really is. The player is given a massive world to explore and dig up; there are deep caves full of spiders, there are islands in the sea, underground springs and rivers of dangerous lava (did I mention exploding zombies?) All of the materials you see can be harnessed and used for the player's own creations, and most of them can be used in multiple ways via the workbench. Whether making tools, weapons or decorative items such as bookshelves for your house, that's entirely up to the player. Now, the building and crafting side of the game would probably keep a lot of people amused for a long while, but the game has more to offer - the monsters. It's in combining the threat of zombie or spider attack with the very personalized building mechanic that Minecraft shows some genius touches.
For starters, sound in Minecraft is used absolutely flawlessly. Good horror directors know that the best horror comes from what you CAN'T see, not over-the-top gore or gruesome looking creatures. The zombies in Minecraft are nothing scary to look at, but the sounds they make in the darkness are positively creepy. You can hear them creeping around in what might be hidden caves to the left and right of your mine, you can hear them prowling round your house at night and hissing at you even though you know your iron door will keep them at bay. Digging a hole into the depths of the world at any time of the day and hearing the nearby hiss of a spider or the moan of a zombie just out of sight makes you genuinely hesitant to proceed. Yes folks, I kid you not, in Minecraft I am afraid of the dark again, and in this respect, it might be one of the best survival horror games I've ever played.
Then there's those damn exploding zombies. When you've spent hours in scary, foreboding mines, built your house and farm brick by painstaking brick, and then some exploding (green) zombie comes along at night and explodes next to the storage shed sending a wall and a chest full of stone flying everywhere, you FEEL it. You'll find yourself charging frantically at the exploding zombies just to keep them away from that railway track you just finished work on. You'll find yourself building precious stuff higher up to keep those green bastards from getting at it. Minecraft evokes something primal after a while, something deeply territorial and instinctual that makes you want to say to the zombies "This house is MINE! (Craft)"
See what I did there? Heehee, I made a funny.
I digress. Remember as well folks, this is a game in alpha, it isn't even a finished product yet and its sales are already in six figures. So to finish up (FINALLY, you say), I'd like to talk about Minecraft's potential.
The Future
Aside from the obvious potential that the crafting system has, there is one thing I cannot WAIT to try, and that is the planned online multiplayer. It makes me wonder what people can and will do with it (other than grief). In the hands of responsible roleplayers, a kingdom might even take shape, with people taking on specific roles such as blacksmith, farmer, or king of the land (I believe there are people already planning this on the Minecraft forums as I write). Worlds shaped not by one hand but by many, all the imaginations of people coming together to create. Will we see the ability to create factions and go to war maybe? All the possibilities excite me, and I for one am waiting with baited breath for the opportunity to be a part of it.
To sum up, I've had Minecraft for 6 days and have played it for a good 4 hours a day. I've already got my money out of it, and I'm sure I'll get much more enjoyment out of it, especially with the multiplayer. This gets a definite recommendation from me, and for an indie game made by ONE guy, this is absolutely epic.
You can find out more about Minecraft at www.minecraft.net
If you made it this far, thanks for reading!
JJ
Home, Sweet Home
Introduction
Minecraft is an indie game created by Markus Persson, who goes online by the name of Notch. The game is only in the alpha stage of development, but as of right now this hasn't stopped over 100,000 people from purchasing the game, which is currently being sold for 10 Euro(that's around $13.50 in USD). Notch plans to raise the price once it enters the beta stage to 20 Euro, after he adds multiplayer support. There are currently two main gameplay types; Creative and Survival. I'll go into Creative mode later, but for now I will explain Survival mode.
Let me first say this; Minecraft is not graphically amazing by any standards. However, I'll soon explain why this doesn't matter one bit. The game consists of a randomly generated world made up of chunky blocks with different textures. These blocks are the materials of the world (dirt, stone, sand, water etc) and there are many different types of block, all used in different ways. When you start up Survival mode, you'll see a world in front of you something like this -
Look at those graphics! If you're put off by them, DON'T be.
In that screenshot, you can already see 4 types of block; sand, dirt, trunk (or wood) and leaf. You 'mine' a block by holding down left click over it. At first your character will punch at the block until it breaks. You will then obtain the block for your own nefarious purposes, and it will go into your character's inventory, which looks like this.
Happy little chappy, isn't he?
I've nabbed some dirt from the bank, and I can now place it anywhere I want by aiming and right-clicking. The block then appears in my chosen location, and I can keep doing this if I wish, just simply moving and replacing blocks (hence the Lego reference earlier).
Not exactly moving mountains.
However, there's a catch. There is a day/night cycle in Minecraft, lasting approximately 20 minutes (10 minutes of daylight, 7 minutes of night, 1.5 minutes each of dawn and dusk). At night, or in any dark place such as underground caves, monsters come out to play. At the moment there are giant spiders, skeletons with bows, slimes and two types of zombie implemented, and they are out to get you. The hearts on the interface are of course your lifebar, and the monsters take sizeable chunks out of it if they hit you. Once the sun comes up though, the zombies burn in sunlight, and the spiders scurry back to their holes. So your early objective in Minecraft is simple - survive the nights by building. Now, to survive the first night, a lot of people build a simple hut out of mud, but my character doesn't particularly want to do that, so I'll quickly demonstrate some of the 'craft' part of Minecraft to help him settle in to a simple stone house, and show you a little more what the game is about.
To help our character thwart the inevitable zombie invasion, we can craft tools. Remember the crafting window next to our character in the inventory? That 2x2 square is where it all starts. First, I'm going to get 4 bits of wood from those trees we saw earlier, and put the wood in my crafting window. You can see on the right what I can make with that wood (planks), and I can simply left click to create them and then place the new item in my inventory at the cost of my wood. 1 pure wood makes 4 planks!
Genuinely awesome carpentry.
Now we get serious. I put one plank in each square in the crafting window. That makes a workbench, which when I right click it, gives me a 3x3 crafting window. Sweet! From there, I can turn some of my planks into sticks and make a crude wooden pickaxe by putting those sticks and some planks into a T formation in the workbench crafting window.
Badass.
This pickaxe helps me mine stone quickly without spending ages gradually punching the stone away with my fists (ouch). The wooden pickaxes are kinda weak though, and only let me mine 33 blocks before they disintegrate, so I use the same T formation with the sticks, only instead of the planks I use blocks of stone, which makes a stone pickaxe (No really?). This lasts twice as long as the wood one, AND does the job faster! Splendid, eh? Now I have my bunker, I can spend the last few minutes of daylight gathering more wood and stone, and when it gets dark I can hole up and spend the night crafting tools for the day ahead.
It doesn't look like much, but this thing is zombieproof. Except for the exploding ones. Yes really. Exploding zombies.
You get the picture anyway, and this system of getting bigger and better will get you hooked on making your house/castle totally awesome. You can make weapons too, so you're not totally defenceless, and zombies sometimes even drop stuff you can use (including gunpowder for explosives and spider silk to make bows). There are also animals strolling about too, and killing them yields various materials too, like pork which restores health, or wool to make cloth. The game focuses less on the graphics and more on letting you create whatever the hell you want from either the blocks or the extensive crafting system.
For a second, I'll come back to Creative mode. This is basically god mode, where you can choose any of the many blocks in the game and place however many you want in your world. I personally don't find this as fun as the Survival because there's no threat, but some people enjoy the simple building side, I guess, so there's your short explanation of that mode!
Now I've introduced the game, I'll slide more towards reviewing it.
Graphics:
This is a game where graphics are not an issue. The simple yet colourful world provides an ample playground for your imagination, and doesn't need to be beautifully rendered to provide you with a foundation on which to build your own designs. That being said, the lighting is wonderfully used to create mood, and torches will be more than light in the dark caves; they'll be your best friend. This is a game that would only be improved very minimally with better graphics, and that becomes apparent very early on into the experience. No more comment needed.
Gameplay:
For me, the value of the gameplay experience in Minecraft is two-sided. The game provides the player with a simple and diverse crafting/building system, and says "Go create." Minecraft doesn't play itself for you, there are no guidelines, no ulterior motives other than to survive and build. It doesn't sound like much but believe me, it really is. The player is given a massive world to explore and dig up; there are deep caves full of spiders, there are islands in the sea, underground springs and rivers of dangerous lava (did I mention exploding zombies?) All of the materials you see can be harnessed and used for the player's own creations, and most of them can be used in multiple ways via the workbench. Whether making tools, weapons or decorative items such as bookshelves for your house, that's entirely up to the player. Now, the building and crafting side of the game would probably keep a lot of people amused for a long while, but the game has more to offer - the monsters. It's in combining the threat of zombie or spider attack with the very personalized building mechanic that Minecraft shows some genius touches.
For starters, sound in Minecraft is used absolutely flawlessly. Good horror directors know that the best horror comes from what you CAN'T see, not over-the-top gore or gruesome looking creatures. The zombies in Minecraft are nothing scary to look at, but the sounds they make in the darkness are positively creepy. You can hear them creeping around in what might be hidden caves to the left and right of your mine, you can hear them prowling round your house at night and hissing at you even though you know your iron door will keep them at bay. Digging a hole into the depths of the world at any time of the day and hearing the nearby hiss of a spider or the moan of a zombie just out of sight makes you genuinely hesitant to proceed. Yes folks, I kid you not, in Minecraft I am afraid of the dark again, and in this respect, it might be one of the best survival horror games I've ever played.
Then there's those damn exploding zombies. When you've spent hours in scary, foreboding mines, built your house and farm brick by painstaking brick, and then some exploding (green) zombie comes along at night and explodes next to the storage shed sending a wall and a chest full of stone flying everywhere, you FEEL it. You'll find yourself charging frantically at the exploding zombies just to keep them away from that railway track you just finished work on. You'll find yourself building precious stuff higher up to keep those green bastards from getting at it. Minecraft evokes something primal after a while, something deeply territorial and instinctual that makes you want to say to the zombies "This house is MINE! (Craft)"
See what I did there? Heehee, I made a funny.
I digress. Remember as well folks, this is a game in alpha, it isn't even a finished product yet and its sales are already in six figures. So to finish up (FINALLY, you say), I'd like to talk about Minecraft's potential.
The Future
Aside from the obvious potential that the crafting system has, there is one thing I cannot WAIT to try, and that is the planned online multiplayer. It makes me wonder what people can and will do with it (other than grief). In the hands of responsible roleplayers, a kingdom might even take shape, with people taking on specific roles such as blacksmith, farmer, or king of the land (I believe there are people already planning this on the Minecraft forums as I write). Worlds shaped not by one hand but by many, all the imaginations of people coming together to create. Will we see the ability to create factions and go to war maybe? All the possibilities excite me, and I for one am waiting with baited breath for the opportunity to be a part of it.
To sum up, I've had Minecraft for 6 days and have played it for a good 4 hours a day. I've already got my money out of it, and I'm sure I'll get much more enjoyment out of it, especially with the multiplayer. This gets a definite recommendation from me, and for an indie game made by ONE guy, this is absolutely epic.
You can find out more about Minecraft at www.minecraft.net
If you made it this far, thanks for reading!
JJ
Home, Sweet Home
