As we continue through the top 5 of our countdown, we come to the game that we posted more about than any other game in the past year. Unquestionably the biggest indie hit of 2010, and it spent the majority of that year in alpha. This is Minecraft…
Matt:
We like Minecraft a lot. After spending countless hours in the free creative mode building up a world full of skyscrapers, hedge mazes and lava monsters, we knew this game had serious potential. With the promise of free updates forever, Paul and I purchased the game and discovered the real game – survival multiplayer. We got so into it that we went and started renting our own server from Multiplay, which allows you to store a permanent world for you and up to 8 friends to join simultaneously and start to build your own little empire in an infinitely huge world map.
As the name suggests, your main objectives in the game is to mine for materials, then craft things with them. Such a simple premise makes the game easily accessible to anyone, and the charmingly simple art style has become iconic across the gaming world already. After a few months of exploring, building and mining, we have developed networks of tunnels with mine carts and storage boxes, along with armouries full of weapons and valuable gold. Sometimes we hunt spiders for their silk (used to make bow’s), other times we sail out to sea in little row boats in the hope of discovering new lands to explore, and sometimes we spend hours carrying buckets of lava up from the depths to dump in the sea in a carefully constructed container, hoping to make a portal to HELL. Sadly, this didn’t work…
To date, the game has sold nearly a million copies, something even big game publishers dream of. The fact the game was mostly created by a single man is incredible. Markus “Notch” Persson has formed his own new company and hired several employees after the success of Minecraft, and I hope they continue to grow and truly can’t wait to see what Notch comes up with next. But for now, I have an empire of my own to build…
Paul:
A short, blocky man wakes up in the middle of nowhere, with no signs of civilized life, no tools or weapons, and nowhere to go. The man, sensing danger may be around every corner and over every hill, decides he needs to build things, lots of things, infinite amounts of things, on the infinite amount of land that disappears into the horizon of every direction. Where will he go? What will he build? How will he survive? Well, first of all, he will punch a tree to bits (with his bare hands), craft the wood, and make some wooden tools. Then he will dig some rock with his wooden tools, craft the rock, and make some stone tools. Then he will dig deep into the deadliest depths of the nearest cave to find iron ore, craft the iron ore, and make some iron tools, all the while keeping his eyes peeled for the monsters that lurk deep within. But the caves are by no means a place to stay safe. The block headed man needs a home, a base, to shelter him from the harshness of the wilds and the darkness of the tunnels below, from zombies, skeletons, giant spiders, and the deadliest of all.. the fabled Creeper; one wrong move around this monstrosity of a creation, and our hero can kiss his home goodbye, after which he can likely kiss his own arse goodbye, too. With water, lava, gold and diamond, pigs, cows and ducks, there’s just so much to do and so much to see, blocky simply needs to reach for the sky. Building blocks higher, higher and higher, to build a lava tower, or perhaps a waterfall, maybe a sky scraping roller-coaster, or how about a suicide jump into the sea. The higher he goes, the safer he is from the monsters, but the lower he goes, the deeper and darker into the caves he gets, the more riches and spoils of combat there are to be found. But the best thing of all? Blockheads friends can all join him, and together they can explore the infinite lands of Minecraft.
Minecraft is awesome.
I recently played through Cult of the Lamb, a satirical take on the concept of running a demonic cult. It turns horrific things like sacrificial rituals, cannibalism and straight up gaslighting abuse into hilarious amusements by filtering everything through its cartoonish lens. You are a sheep, after all, and all your followers are sycophantic anthropomorphic […]
Hello, world! This post marks the moment in time and space when BangClickReload got a little redesign and was dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Every post before this point is rather old and might not look right, and unless I decide to go through them all to fix them, they’re going to […]
I’ve been pretty absent from PC gaming for some time, since moving to Canada in early 2017, because I haven’t had a proper computer to play games on. That has recently changed, since I got myself set up with a new gaming rig that can handle pretty much anything that’s out at the moment. I […]
Moooooorning. We’re at Multiplay’s I41 this weekend and its rather good. It’s the UK’s biggest PC gaming LAN event, where you bring your own pc along with 3000-odd other people, eat a ton of junk food and Red Bull, and of course play as many bloody games as you can possibly cram in. So far, Paul has played through the entirety of CODBLOPS singleplayer and we played through Unreal Tournament 3’s singleplayer campaign in co-op in 2 marathon sittings. If you like games, you’ll probably like it here.
Format: PS2
Release date: 2005
AKA: Demento (Japan)
One of my all-time favourite gaming memories is playing Haunting Ground with my mates at the flat in Baldock for 16 hours straight. It was me holding the controller for almost all of those 16 hours. It’s a bit obscure, so if you haven’t heard of it, it’s a survival horror game by Capcom, in which you play as a pretty little fragile girl called Fiona, who must escape from a huge labyrinthine castle. Oh, and you can’t fight. Your only option is to run away and hide from the nasty people that are out to get you. You do have a companion throughout though, the best dog in gaming, a white German Shepherd called Hewie. My friends know that I love dogs, and Robbie played a rather mean trick on me near the beginning… He said “press square, it lets you stroke the dog.” I stood beside Hewie, pressed square, and watched in horror as my Fiona kicked the dog. I didn’t listen to Robbie again for the rest of the game.
The aforementioned nasty people are few and far between in Haunting Ground, which is what makes it so unique. There’s only 5 enemies, I think, and you deal with them one at a time. After evading the deformed, simple-minded gardener who wants to either be your friend, eat you, or rape you (or possibly all 3), you then are stalked by a Terminator-style cyborg woman armed with a shard of mirror. All you can do is hide, which suits me, I’m quite good at hiding and running away from enemies in horror games. Each time you come face to face with one of the enemies, Fiona’s sanity decreases dramatically, and if you can’t find a suitable place to hide fast enough, she might panic and begin running around completely out of control. We nicknamed this ‘disco mode’ because the screen starts flashing, music plays and you have no choice but to hope she runs somewhere safe or that Hewie is close enough to find you and calm you down. It’s brilliant.
I reached this difficult bit which involved navigating a room with lava falling from the ceiling. After playing all night without sleeping, long after the sun had risen, it proved too difficult for my sleep-deprived brain so I handed the controller to Ben, who did it for me. It was the only bit of the game that I didn’t play. It must have been close to midday on the day after we started playing by this point, and I had to power through to reach the end. The finale involved fighting a final boss of some kind, which I barely remember, but in order to defeat him and get the ‘good’ ending, you had to have built up enough trust and friendship with Hewie throughout the game. Fortunately, that one accidental kick didn’t damage my bond with Hewie, and he ended up heroically leaping out from a tunnel to attack my pursuer, saving my life. I will never forget his bravery… 16 hours of hard work bonding with a digital dog, it paid off and I got the good ending. He really is the best dog in any game and has yet to be surpassed. Haunting Ground is a fantastic game…actually, it’s not, but I love it anyway.
Finally! An awesome little teaser trailer for Battlefield 3 has been released, and most importantly, you can quite clearly see a jet. A JET! After Bad Company simplified the series a little, taking away the ability to go prone,and worse, the JETS, we are very happy to see they are going back to the old way of doing things with BF3 by bringing all that back. Very, very happy. Let’s just hope they take the Destruction 2.0 from Bad Company and plonk it right in here.
And apparently.. it’s due out Autumn this year. Yay!
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