Maybe I ask for too much.
I should add context to this sentence. I fucking loved the original Dawn of War.
It was brilliant. The perfect RTS in my books. It was challenging, fun, diverse. It was well written. It had the occasional hilarious voice acting. It was accurate to the original fluff (That's right I'm disgustingly geeky, I could debate for hours about the finer points of the Warhammer 40k universe, and I'm not ashamed about it... Ok I'm ashamed).
Then Dawn of War 2 came out. I remember it clearly. I actually had to drag my computer to my friend's house to activate it as I was in halls of residence at university and they had the Steam ports blocked. I did this because I assumed THQ (the developers) would have created the same gold they had with Dawn of War and it's three expansions. Gold with better graphics.
Those bastards did not.
They raped the Dawn of War franchise. Taking away all the finely crafted RTS elements and turning it into a Company of Heroes clone. A badly constructed "Squad-based strategy game" in which the player does the exact same thing over and over again. Walk through a map, capture some strategic points. Kill a boss that throws explosives around. It was the most tedious game I had ever encountered. It was poorly written. It was limited. I hated it.
A few months later I bought the expansion. I don't know why I did. I took a big old bite of shit sandwich with the first game, finished it, painfully, then decided to order another one.
A year or so passes! Our hero (me) is growing a year closer to his inevitable demise. A friend approaches him.
"What do you want for your birthday?"
I panicked, and pointed at steam. I got Dawn of War 2: Retribution.
I'd like to say it was an accident, just like the story I tell about how I got my iPhone (It was a fucking accident!) but I don't think it was. I had read previews. They told me that the game was going back to it's routes, giving us back the ability to create troops again, build buildings, have epic battles. I was excited again.
Why does everybody lie to me?
Retribution is possibly worse than the original shit-covered Dawn of War 2. This is because they gave me what I wanted... The ability to create troops...
Hence my original statement about wanting too much...
You can build troops again, joy! Except they kept everything else the same. It's still squad based, you just can have more squads. Well I say more, it's gone from 4 squads to 6-8. Not a patch on the screen full of troops you would encounter regularly in the original games. You can't build buildings. You just find strategic bases, that let you build troops. This has made the game disgustingly easy. You find resources everywhere. Boxes no longer give you supplies, those are now unlimited, only costing energy, again making the game easier, instead the boxes are full of Energy and Resources, which you use to buy squads. Once you've gotten these squads you just walk through the level, destroying things until you get to the inevitable final boss of each level, in which you right click it, occasionally move out of exploding things and tediously await the next identical level.
It has no character. Each level has just been written differently for each race, so while it seems you're getting five (5 FIVE!) campaigns, you're getting one, with different skins. The Tyranid's (my favourite race) campaign writing is particularly awful, with the writers completely missing the point of them. You're no longer fighting characters and getting involved in the storyline, it's merely killing a group of unnamed troop choices. It feels like multiplayer gaming, without the human contact.
The levels are again the same. Monotonous. The original games had amazing levels. Levels in which you had to capture generators to power a Titan's (giant robot) arm to destroy a trench-full of enemies, and other epic sounding events like that.
The problem with this game is they tried to be like the original games again, in the easiest possible way. The entire game needs to redone in order to get back to what made the original games great. The writing needs to be reworked massively. The gameplay needs to change radically from the awful squad based pit of despair it is currently in. The levels need to change completely so it's not the same thing over and fucking over again. I ended up watching television whilst playing this game just to get through enough of it so I could write this review. It was painful to do. Games should not be painful.
To sum up. I hate this game.
Saturday 26 February 2011
Tuesday 22 February 2011
Bulletstorm Review
Never before have I been in such a state of ambivalence whilst playing a computer game.
Bulletstorm is fucking ridiculous. Now, I expected this, the developers seemingly approached the game with a mentality of ridiculous...ness, but it's worse than that. I think they may have gone too far.
Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself, I think I need some sort of structure in these reviews after reading the minefield that was my Minecraft review. Let's start from the beginning.
Long ago (about a year ago I think) a company called People Can Fly (who were recently bought out by Epic Games, the company that brought us the "oh-so-fun" Gears of War games) announced a game called Bulletstorm. They released trailers, in which the player was seen generally fucking people's lives up. Mutilation and dismemberment were sprayed across the screen and the player seemed to be rewarded for such acts by highlighting different ways of expunging the glorified pixels and awarding points accordingly. This lead to Americans going mental and claiming that everyone who plays this game will become a rapist (http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/02/08/bulletstorm-worst-game-kids/ I wish I was joking).
Of course, being the mentally unstable individual I am, and due to the fact I'm now banned from parks, I pre-order this title, knowing that it would be an amusing journey through my own, and indeed the developer's warped psyches.
After waiting an inordinate amount of time for the game to unlock on Steam (another way in which Americans have annoyed me today, seeing that I had to wait for the American time zone release for some unbeknownst reason, seeing as it was released in America two days ago (but again, I am going offtrack)) I was finally able to enter the game and give it a go.
So let's being with the story...
Right this might be difficult. I have just stopped playing the game for a short break to start writing this review and I have already forgotten every single characters name bar one, and he's not even the main character. This is not a good sign. Almost all characters in this game are completely unmemorable. I feel no attachment to any of them. I feel connected to none of them. The only one who is vaguely three dimensional (also the character I can remember the name of "Ishi") is literally turned into a fucking robot, so he no longer shows emotion. You could see he was the placeholder "nice guy" as he saves a little girl who was plopped directly into the plot for no real reason, only to show that... Ishi was the nice guy.
The game starts with you, the main character, who I will henceforth refer to as Captain Wolverine McBadAss, as that is clearly the inspiration for said character in a nutshell, and his stalwart companion, who shall be referred to as Lieutenant Biker O'Cares'not (it doesn't matter what he's called he dies pretty sharpish anyway) "interrogating" a bounty hunter on your space ship. I say "interrogating" because you're drunk, your friend is drunk, the bounty hunter has a bottle of nondescript booze duct taped to his head and you don't care what he says, he's going to be sucked out of the air-lock anyway. Which turns out to be a bad thing, as you were too drunk to check if the dude had a grenade the size of his fucking head on him and somehow swims round the side of the ship and blows up a window. You close it, and still drunk, act nonchalant and tell your crew to run away into space. You then appear at a big ship, containing your NEMESIS and decide to open fire then drive your ship into the big ship seemingly killing everyone including yourself (despite Ishi telling you you're a drunken madman, oh Ishi why do they never listen? Perhaps it's a commentary on the subversive racism of modern society, probably it's just because you're the sensitive pussy of the ship and no one cares don't worry soon you'll be Mecha-Ishi).
CUE FLASHBACK SCENE
Of course they show you, in a 3 minute scene, why you are a misunderstood alcoholic and not just a cunt. A scene in which you kill an innocent man, then look on his computer, where Ishi (god bless him) shows you that , OH MY GOD! You've been killing innocent men. How could you, General I'm Clearly the Bad Guy Look At My Fucking Teeth!? You then save the innocent man's daughter, well I say save, you tell her to put her head down as people are shooting at you, then you leave her in the building and get the fuck out. Heroes, one and all.
CUE BACK TO THE FUTURE
You're alive! Crashed, but alive! But Ishi is hurt! Not Ishi! Wolverine McBadAss seems genuinely distraught, and is sent out by Doctor Threelines (guess how long he survives) to find a battery to make Ishi even more of a Japanese cliché. You do this, come back, and watch Biker O'Cares'not and Doctor Threelines die as you all protect Ishi. WMBA (as he shall henceforth be called) is seemingly unfazed by this but concentrates all his attention on Mecha-Ishi, who has lost all emotion and is essentially being controlled by a vacuum cleaner, a vacuum cleaner of DEATH, who tries to kill WMBA on multiple occasions.
The rest of the story is just getting off the planet. WMBA goes from yelling encouragement to his own genitals and weaponry at killing people, to telling their newly acquired sexy-lady-companion to forgive Ishi, for he's not a bastard, just part toaster. He switches from telling Ishi how sorry he is about the fact he now has a hard drive in place of some of his brain, to singing a song to the robot dinosaur he finds about how it's a better robot that Ishi because it's 50 foot tall and shoots lasers. (I'm running out of the electrical component gags now).
It's impossible to feel anything but disdain for the characters, storyline and writing, oh god the writing. The "script" of this game is apparently the love child of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Duke Nukem and Little Britain. There are rarely any conversations, only people screaming insults at each other. Now I'm British, so I love a good bit of swearing, but there's something about Bulletstorm that seems so dull. It's like a kid who's found it's big boy words for the first time and can't help but use them whenever possible. This is genuinely a conversation between the main character and his sexy female counterpart
SFC: "If you follow me I'll kill your dick!"
WMBA: "Kill my dick? How the fuck are you going to kill my dick? I'll kill your dick!"
Why is it that computer game writing is getting worse and worse, it's like someone tipped the bottom of the sitcom barrel out onto a computer.
Now, surely, you're thinking, "But Badger! I thought this game was supposed to be ridiculous! You've got to ignore the storyline and concentrate on the ridiculously fun game-play!"
Well, firstly, I doubt anyone is actually reading this so you're probably not thinking that, but if you are, there's one problem with that...
It's not that fun.
I mean... it's a bit of a laugh. The kicking people into cacti is fun for a bit, or using the laser lasso to pull someone off a cliff is enjoyable to a point, but then you start slogging through the game and it soon loses it's pazzaz. The weaponry just doesn't have enough kick to it. You standard assault rifle shoots what feels like pebbles at your hordes of enemies, the shotgun feels like it's just tickling the enemy most of the time and I felt that I spent most of my time just going for headshots to get through the drudgery of the levels. For a game that prides itself on it's crazy point scoring game-play it does little to encourage the player to score points. Racking up a big combo is a fun for a while, but the gimmick, like the rest of the game, grows tired, quickly. It suffers from a mutation of the dullness of Gears of War games, the disease of running down grey coloured corridors with lots of chest high walls, killing the same thing over and over, only this time, at least, the scenery isn't a dull, chaotically changing from waterfalled city, to desert wastelands, seemingly at random.
There are other hints that this game spent too long on the gimmick, little details that don't matter on there own, but together destroy the illusion of immersing yourself in a game. Such as the fact that whenever Captain Wolverine McBadAss checks his wrist radar, he changes back to his default weapon looks at his other wrist, puts wrist away, changes back to the weapon he was holding originally. This may seem like nitpicking, but it's just an example of bad coding that distances the player from the gaming experience.
Along with the PC version (the version I have) being a console port and various useful settings being removed from the interface, requiring some .ini file tinkering. The game feels unpolished. Pretty, yes. Gimmicky, yes. Fun, for a while. But this game gets too dull, too quickly, and gives you no incentive to look past the faults.
Bulletstorm is fucking ridiculous. Now, I expected this, the developers seemingly approached the game with a mentality of ridiculous...ness, but it's worse than that. I think they may have gone too far.
Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself, I think I need some sort of structure in these reviews after reading the minefield that was my Minecraft review. Let's start from the beginning.
Long ago (about a year ago I think) a company called People Can Fly (who were recently bought out by Epic Games, the company that brought us the "oh-so-fun" Gears of War games) announced a game called Bulletstorm. They released trailers, in which the player was seen generally fucking people's lives up. Mutilation and dismemberment were sprayed across the screen and the player seemed to be rewarded for such acts by highlighting different ways of expunging the glorified pixels and awarding points accordingly. This lead to Americans going mental and claiming that everyone who plays this game will become a rapist (http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/02/08/bulletstorm-worst-game-kids/ I wish I was joking).
Of course, being the mentally unstable individual I am, and due to the fact I'm now banned from parks, I pre-order this title, knowing that it would be an amusing journey through my own, and indeed the developer's warped psyches.
After waiting an inordinate amount of time for the game to unlock on Steam (another way in which Americans have annoyed me today, seeing that I had to wait for the American time zone release for some unbeknownst reason, seeing as it was released in America two days ago (but again, I am going offtrack)) I was finally able to enter the game and give it a go.
So let's being with the story...
Right this might be difficult. I have just stopped playing the game for a short break to start writing this review and I have already forgotten every single characters name bar one, and he's not even the main character. This is not a good sign. Almost all characters in this game are completely unmemorable. I feel no attachment to any of them. I feel connected to none of them. The only one who is vaguely three dimensional (also the character I can remember the name of "Ishi") is literally turned into a fucking robot, so he no longer shows emotion. You could see he was the placeholder "nice guy" as he saves a little girl who was plopped directly into the plot for no real reason, only to show that... Ishi was the nice guy.
The game starts with you, the main character, who I will henceforth refer to as Captain Wolverine McBadAss, as that is clearly the inspiration for said character in a nutshell, and his stalwart companion, who shall be referred to as Lieutenant Biker O'Cares'not (it doesn't matter what he's called he dies pretty sharpish anyway) "interrogating" a bounty hunter on your space ship. I say "interrogating" because you're drunk, your friend is drunk, the bounty hunter has a bottle of nondescript booze duct taped to his head and you don't care what he says, he's going to be sucked out of the air-lock anyway. Which turns out to be a bad thing, as you were too drunk to check if the dude had a grenade the size of his fucking head on him and somehow swims round the side of the ship and blows up a window. You close it, and still drunk, act nonchalant and tell your crew to run away into space. You then appear at a big ship, containing your NEMESIS and decide to open fire then drive your ship into the big ship seemingly killing everyone including yourself (despite Ishi telling you you're a drunken madman, oh Ishi why do they never listen? Perhaps it's a commentary on the subversive racism of modern society, probably it's just because you're the sensitive pussy of the ship and no one cares don't worry soon you'll be Mecha-Ishi).
CUE FLASHBACK SCENE
Of course they show you, in a 3 minute scene, why you are a misunderstood alcoholic and not just a cunt. A scene in which you kill an innocent man, then look on his computer, where Ishi (god bless him) shows you that , OH MY GOD! You've been killing innocent men. How could you, General I'm Clearly the Bad Guy Look At My Fucking Teeth!? You then save the innocent man's daughter, well I say save, you tell her to put her head down as people are shooting at you, then you leave her in the building and get the fuck out. Heroes, one and all.
CUE BACK TO THE FUTURE
You're alive! Crashed, but alive! But Ishi is hurt! Not Ishi! Wolverine McBadAss seems genuinely distraught, and is sent out by Doctor Threelines (guess how long he survives) to find a battery to make Ishi even more of a Japanese cliché. You do this, come back, and watch Biker O'Cares'not and Doctor Threelines die as you all protect Ishi. WMBA (as he shall henceforth be called) is seemingly unfazed by this but concentrates all his attention on Mecha-Ishi, who has lost all emotion and is essentially being controlled by a vacuum cleaner, a vacuum cleaner of DEATH, who tries to kill WMBA on multiple occasions.
The rest of the story is just getting off the planet. WMBA goes from yelling encouragement to his own genitals and weaponry at killing people, to telling their newly acquired sexy-lady-companion to forgive Ishi, for he's not a bastard, just part toaster. He switches from telling Ishi how sorry he is about the fact he now has a hard drive in place of some of his brain, to singing a song to the robot dinosaur he finds about how it's a better robot that Ishi because it's 50 foot tall and shoots lasers. (I'm running out of the electrical component gags now).
It's impossible to feel anything but disdain for the characters, storyline and writing, oh god the writing. The "script" of this game is apparently the love child of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Duke Nukem and Little Britain. There are rarely any conversations, only people screaming insults at each other. Now I'm British, so I love a good bit of swearing, but there's something about Bulletstorm that seems so dull. It's like a kid who's found it's big boy words for the first time and can't help but use them whenever possible. This is genuinely a conversation between the main character and his sexy female counterpart
SFC: "If you follow me I'll kill your dick!"
WMBA: "Kill my dick? How the fuck are you going to kill my dick? I'll kill your dick!"
Why is it that computer game writing is getting worse and worse, it's like someone tipped the bottom of the sitcom barrel out onto a computer.
Now, surely, you're thinking, "But Badger! I thought this game was supposed to be ridiculous! You've got to ignore the storyline and concentrate on the ridiculously fun game-play!"
Well, firstly, I doubt anyone is actually reading this so you're probably not thinking that, but if you are, there's one problem with that...
It's not that fun.
I mean... it's a bit of a laugh. The kicking people into cacti is fun for a bit, or using the laser lasso to pull someone off a cliff is enjoyable to a point, but then you start slogging through the game and it soon loses it's pazzaz. The weaponry just doesn't have enough kick to it. You standard assault rifle shoots what feels like pebbles at your hordes of enemies, the shotgun feels like it's just tickling the enemy most of the time and I felt that I spent most of my time just going for headshots to get through the drudgery of the levels. For a game that prides itself on it's crazy point scoring game-play it does little to encourage the player to score points. Racking up a big combo is a fun for a while, but the gimmick, like the rest of the game, grows tired, quickly. It suffers from a mutation of the dullness of Gears of War games, the disease of running down grey coloured corridors with lots of chest high walls, killing the same thing over and over, only this time, at least, the scenery isn't a dull, chaotically changing from waterfalled city, to desert wastelands, seemingly at random.
There are other hints that this game spent too long on the gimmick, little details that don't matter on there own, but together destroy the illusion of immersing yourself in a game. Such as the fact that whenever Captain Wolverine McBadAss checks his wrist radar, he changes back to his default weapon looks at his other wrist, puts wrist away, changes back to the weapon he was holding originally. This may seem like nitpicking, but it's just an example of bad coding that distances the player from the gaming experience.
Along with the PC version (the version I have) being a console port and various useful settings being removed from the interface, requiring some .ini file tinkering. The game feels unpolished. Pretty, yes. Gimmicky, yes. Fun, for a while. But this game gets too dull, too quickly, and gives you no incentive to look past the faults.
Minecraft Review
I know this review has been done to buggery, but this game is so fucking peculiar and seems like a good place to get back into reviewing that I have to do it.
I don't know how I discovered Minecraft, maybe it appeared to me in a dream, maybe I actually created it and just forgot about it, sold the rights to a Swedish man and fled into the night, probably I just discovered it on the internet. All I know is I found this obscure indie game long before the masses clung onto it and made a certain Swede a very rich man.
The first time I played Minecraft was back in alpha, when all you could do was run around and place blocks. I fucking hated it. I played it for ten minutes, thought life was too short, and went back to playing another game in all likelihood. I just didn't understand the concept, I ran around, I put down a block, I made a little house, I got bored. I don't think Minecraft was in a stage where it knew what it was either. It was sort of like lego, but far less interesting. (You can make a fucking death star out of lego now! Kids these days)
Months passed and I kept hearing more and more about Minecraft, it had change, evolved I was told, but I'd been lied to in the past so much (I still don't forgive Warhammer Online for getting my hopes up so much), I wasn't sure I could take another heartbreak. But nevertheless I dove in and pre-ordered it, it cost me €9.00 I believe, about £7 of my hard received student loan, so I thought what's the worst that could happen?
The worst happened, I fell in love, I forgot to shower, I'm not ashamed to say I shat myself.
The first night playing it, I found out how to make stuff, I made myself a little pickaxe, I ran around punching trees, for of course that is the first thing any man who wakes up in a strange world must do, I was a king of my own world, Lord of the Sheep Emperor of the Cows, HIGH WARLORD OF THE... Oh hey there little buddy, what do you do?
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
This was my first encounter with the horror, the terror that is the Minecraft creeper. Minecraft is a game which has some of the worst graphics of any game released in recent history. This is not a criticism, it's just the design that the developers have gone for. It works, everything is pixelated and blocky and that's fine. What I want to know, is how these sadists have managed to instill such fear in me merely by arranging pixels?
The Minecraft creeper is a metaphor for everything that is brilliant and terrifying in this game. It is a strange creature. It has four legs, the pixelated face of a double stroke victim, and a penchant for eating explosive materials and generally fucking up your life. Everything about it is terrifying, the simple coding of the game adds to the pure horror of these fuckers. You walk towards it, thinking it's just ambling around, until you reach it's aggro range. The second you step over this horrifying threshold the creeper's entire body cracks round and faces you, it's face, looking like a green turd that someone has crudely scribbled a clown's face on with their fingers staring at you. It doesn't run towards you, it merely approaches you, in the shortest route possible. The first time this happened I was a bit creeped out but I wasn't scared as such, more curious. It walked towards me and uttered a simple sound, a sound that now terrifies me to my very soul.
SSSSSSSSSSSSSS
Then my face exploded, I was instantly killed, thrown downwards into the crater that this creature had created, showered with all my belongings which miraculously survived the ordeal and was presented with a Respawn screen.
I THOUGHT THIS GAME WAS FUCKING GLORIFIED LEGO!?
After this event, I instantly developed a phobia for these walking bastards. This world I had created and explored was tainted, the creepers had found me. I left it. Deleted the game. Cried for a while. Then started anew.
In the new world I was paranoid. I got into the game and was worried about nightfall. I had to find shelter, I had to find light, I had to survive. I punched a tree, made a pickaxe, dug into a cliff face, found some coal, made a door, and cowered. The first night was the hardest. The creeper brought friends, skeletons, zombies, spiders. They all hated me, but they couldn't get me, I was safe. I was better than they were.
After this night, I realised how good this game was. Never before had I been so invested in a character. This was not glorified Lego at all. It was something far better.
This is where my obsession began. After that first night I was prepared. I mined down, I found iron, I created tools, I collected stone and I built. I built a tower, it had walkways and arrow holes and a grand staircase leading up to the doors. I carved out rooms inside, I built it higher, I made it into my actual fortress, away from the evils of the outside world. My obsession grew.
I discovered just how far my obsession went when I began playing Minecraft at my friend's house. I was just showing him what I was doing on his computer. I made a little tower and he looked on, vaguely disinterested. I again made my tower bigger, then I made a mine, I mined over to another location, built another tower. He then started giving me suggestions, and one of the strangest conversations I've ever had in my life occurred.
"Made a glass walkway between your two towers"
"That's crazy, they're like two miles apart it'd take me ages, I'll have to make all the glass and I'll probably die whilst doing it"
"Fine"
*ten minutes passes*
"What are you doing Badger?"
"Making a glass walkway"
*two hours later*
"Walkway is done"
"Great, I'm off to work, you going to get a train in with me"
"Nah, I've got something to do on here, I'll hang out with your housemates"
*one hour later*
"Badger what are you doing?"
"Minecraft, check it out, I'm thinking of doing something else"
"Make a ballroom"
"Seems kind of girly don't you think?"
"Fine"
*three hours later*
"Ballroom is done, wait everyone is in bed... It's four in the morning... I need to seriously think about my life"
I then went to bed ashamed, my friend returned from work later and we talked about the game the next day. He suggested I split the continent, creating a new river. I said this was ridiculous, the continents are huge.
Three days later I had fucking done it.
This game is quite possibly the most enthralling game I have ever played... but I don't know why. Having read this review most of it seems like gibberish and not much of it sounds like fun at all, but it is, I have wasted so much time making things in this little pixelated world that it seems ridiculous that I can't explain why it's fun.
Minecraft is a game you have to try for atleast an hour, it looks like shit, the concept is shit, but when you play it, it's so much fun, and isn't that what computer games are supposed to be?
I don't know how I discovered Minecraft, maybe it appeared to me in a dream, maybe I actually created it and just forgot about it, sold the rights to a Swedish man and fled into the night, probably I just discovered it on the internet. All I know is I found this obscure indie game long before the masses clung onto it and made a certain Swede a very rich man.
The first time I played Minecraft was back in alpha, when all you could do was run around and place blocks. I fucking hated it. I played it for ten minutes, thought life was too short, and went back to playing another game in all likelihood. I just didn't understand the concept, I ran around, I put down a block, I made a little house, I got bored. I don't think Minecraft was in a stage where it knew what it was either. It was sort of like lego, but far less interesting. (You can make a fucking death star out of lego now! Kids these days)
Months passed and I kept hearing more and more about Minecraft, it had change, evolved I was told, but I'd been lied to in the past so much (I still don't forgive Warhammer Online for getting my hopes up so much), I wasn't sure I could take another heartbreak. But nevertheless I dove in and pre-ordered it, it cost me €9.00 I believe, about £7 of my hard received student loan, so I thought what's the worst that could happen?
The worst happened, I fell in love, I forgot to shower, I'm not ashamed to say I shat myself.
The first night playing it, I found out how to make stuff, I made myself a little pickaxe, I ran around punching trees, for of course that is the first thing any man who wakes up in a strange world must do, I was a king of my own world, Lord of the Sheep Emperor of the Cows, HIGH WARLORD OF THE... Oh hey there little buddy, what do you do?
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
This was my first encounter with the horror, the terror that is the Minecraft creeper. Minecraft is a game which has some of the worst graphics of any game released in recent history. This is not a criticism, it's just the design that the developers have gone for. It works, everything is pixelated and blocky and that's fine. What I want to know, is how these sadists have managed to instill such fear in me merely by arranging pixels?
The Minecraft creeper is a metaphor for everything that is brilliant and terrifying in this game. It is a strange creature. It has four legs, the pixelated face of a double stroke victim, and a penchant for eating explosive materials and generally fucking up your life. Everything about it is terrifying, the simple coding of the game adds to the pure horror of these fuckers. You walk towards it, thinking it's just ambling around, until you reach it's aggro range. The second you step over this horrifying threshold the creeper's entire body cracks round and faces you, it's face, looking like a green turd that someone has crudely scribbled a clown's face on with their fingers staring at you. It doesn't run towards you, it merely approaches you, in the shortest route possible. The first time this happened I was a bit creeped out but I wasn't scared as such, more curious. It walked towards me and uttered a simple sound, a sound that now terrifies me to my very soul.
SSSSSSSSSSSSSS
Then my face exploded, I was instantly killed, thrown downwards into the crater that this creature had created, showered with all my belongings which miraculously survived the ordeal and was presented with a Respawn screen.
 |
| What the hell are those? |
 |
| Oh god it's seen me... |
 |
| WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU!? |
 |
| HOW DID YOU EVOLVE INTO THIS!? |
 |
| WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU EAT THAT MAKES YOU DO THAT?! |
I THOUGHT THIS GAME WAS FUCKING GLORIFIED LEGO!?
After this event, I instantly developed a phobia for these walking bastards. This world I had created and explored was tainted, the creepers had found me. I left it. Deleted the game. Cried for a while. Then started anew.
In the new world I was paranoid. I got into the game and was worried about nightfall. I had to find shelter, I had to find light, I had to survive. I punched a tree, made a pickaxe, dug into a cliff face, found some coal, made a door, and cowered. The first night was the hardest. The creeper brought friends, skeletons, zombies, spiders. They all hated me, but they couldn't get me, I was safe. I was better than they were.
After this night, I realised how good this game was. Never before had I been so invested in a character. This was not glorified Lego at all. It was something far better.
This is where my obsession began. After that first night I was prepared. I mined down, I found iron, I created tools, I collected stone and I built. I built a tower, it had walkways and arrow holes and a grand staircase leading up to the doors. I carved out rooms inside, I built it higher, I made it into my actual fortress, away from the evils of the outside world. My obsession grew.
I discovered just how far my obsession went when I began playing Minecraft at my friend's house. I was just showing him what I was doing on his computer. I made a little tower and he looked on, vaguely disinterested. I again made my tower bigger, then I made a mine, I mined over to another location, built another tower. He then started giving me suggestions, and one of the strangest conversations I've ever had in my life occurred.
"Made a glass walkway between your two towers"
"That's crazy, they're like two miles apart it'd take me ages, I'll have to make all the glass and I'll probably die whilst doing it"
"Fine"
*ten minutes passes*
"What are you doing Badger?"
"Making a glass walkway"
*two hours later*
"Walkway is done"
"Great, I'm off to work, you going to get a train in with me"
"Nah, I've got something to do on here, I'll hang out with your housemates"
*one hour later*
"Badger what are you doing?"
"Minecraft, check it out, I'm thinking of doing something else"
"Make a ballroom"
"Seems kind of girly don't you think?"
"Fine"
*three hours later*
"Ballroom is done, wait everyone is in bed... It's four in the morning... I need to seriously think about my life"
I then went to bed ashamed, my friend returned from work later and we talked about the game the next day. He suggested I split the continent, creating a new river. I said this was ridiculous, the continents are huge.
Three days later I had fucking done it.
This game is quite possibly the most enthralling game I have ever played... but I don't know why. Having read this review most of it seems like gibberish and not much of it sounds like fun at all, but it is, I have wasted so much time making things in this little pixelated world that it seems ridiculous that I can't explain why it's fun.
Minecraft is a game you have to try for atleast an hour, it looks like shit, the concept is shit, but when you play it, it's so much fun, and isn't that what computer games are supposed to be?
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