We’ve had a surge of hits in the past few days, and it’s 99% because of Minecraft. I’ve covered the game before, and took you on a tour of a world we created in the ‘classic’ version of the game, but a LOT has happened in the land of cubes lately, so I thought it was a good to have a little catch up…
So, to start off, Minecraft is officially in Alpha now. This means it’s full of bugs, lacking in many features, but oh-so-very-playable. Notch, the genius behind the mini-project-turned-mammoth-indie-hit has been working mostly by himself for the last year, but thanks to all the attention the game has been getting he’s now working on it full-time and with a small team of employees and everything. It really is becoming a runaway success and according to the stats page on his site (which was cute to begin with, but it now seems mildly unprofessional to keep in plain view) the game has sold over 200’000 copies. At €9.95, it doesn’t take a genius to work out how much money he’s making – its flippin’ mind-blowing!
The game has been so popular in the last couple of weeks that the website itself ground to a halt, and Notch was forced to switch off all of the server-side functions that handled payments, so for a few days the game was free to play. This simply generated even more interest, and now that its all been sorted and the site is back up and running properly, the game’s going through another boom – Notch blogged about how so many people are “buying the game faster than the payments can be processed!” Oh how terrible that must be…
A randomly generated lavafall. A cow jumped into this moments before I took the screenshot
Theres a heap of new features, with more added on an almost daily basis. 3D clouds, flowing water, a new lighting engine which gives torches a nice glow and procedurally generated maps (they can literally go on forever) are some of the visual highlights. That zombie survival mode I mentioned last time? It’s pretty much there already. The single player survival mode has a day and night cycle, with cows and sheep roaming about the grassy fields and sandy beaches during the daytime, and as night falls all manner of nasties come crawling out of the dark caves to stalk the landscape. If you don’t find shelter – or build up some decent weapons – you won’t make it through even a single night. It’s absolutely terrifying. Building yourself a nice little safe haven and lying in wait for the sun to rise and burn any straggling zombies is certainly an experience.
The crafting is simple yet surprisingly deep. Literally everything can be destroyed and rebuilt as an ingredient for something else – tutorials explaining how to get the most out of your loot is under development, but right now the Minecraft Wiki has a great list of recepies for crafting the essentials. Trees are turned into wood, which in turn can be made into sticks, which can be used as handles for swords and pickaxes. Animals can be hunted for leather, which is good for making armour, or you can eat the meat they drop to boost your health. Different materials can be harvested more efficiently depending on the tool you have. Axe’s chop trees down fast, and pickaxe’s are great at mining minerals such as coal and iron. You can also make a boat for travelling on water, a forge used for smelting, and you can build a storage chest to keep all your loot safe (if you die, you drop everything on the spot, and sometimes it’s not always possible to find your way back).
Cubic cows and pixellated pigs roam freely during the day.
Minecraft is the perfect example of a simple idea executed brilliantly – you’ll always feel rewarded in some sense simply by exploring, gathering, and building and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s unusual to experience a game during its development, to play it while it’s still being built and refined and that makes it feel even more involving. I heartily encourage anybody to join in and come along for the ride, because this thing is only going to get better from here on.
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
It’s difficult to describe the levels of hype that I felt leading up to the release of Half Life 2, and I know I wasn’t alone. This was a generation-defining moment in gaming, the likes of which has never really been replicated, and likely never will, for multiple reasons. Not only was HL2 a huge leap forward for its artistic and technological design, it ushered in an entirely new way to buy games and changed the gaming landscape forever.
Format: PC
Year: 2000
It may look clunky as hell thanks to the original Unreal engine, but Deus Ex was a pioneer in videogames because it gave the player so many choices to make. It resulted in one of the deepest gaming experiences of the time, because it went to great effort to show the consequences of those choices. The story was spread across many ‘hub’ levels, giving you total freedom to approach your objectives whichever way you wanted, aided by an RPG style upgrade tree that you invested in as you played. Wanna finish it without killing a single soul? That is entirely possible. Prefer to tool up with a rocket launcher and just murder your way to the end? Nothing could stop you. Your NPC allies would respond differently back in the Unatco base, depending on what you did out in the field. This level of responsiveness was unparalleled for a long time, to the point that even if you walked into the ladies toilets, your boss would scold you for it during the mission debrief later on. It was many little moments like that which made the game so memorable for me.
Doki Doki Literature Club has dug its way into my chest and ripped me apart over the last couple of nights. It’s a free visual novel game where you get to know a bunch of girls in an afterschool book club… except not really. It looks exactly like any other tropey Japanese dating sim type game, but what lurks underneath this cutesy exterior is something really quite sinister and thought-provoking. The game’s tagline does a good job of reminding you that all is not what it seems: “This game is not suitable for children or those who are easily disturbed.”
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