Category Archives: Game Logs

The Crafting of Mines

This seems like my first game log in quite a while – in fact it is. I’ve simply not been playing a lot lately, disappointingly, and the one game I’ve been playing the most I’ve been putting a lot of effort into “100 percenting” so it is taking what seems like a huge amount of time to complete. I’ll report back on that when I’m through with it but check this out in the meantime!

A little while ago a friend introduced me to this small, still in development indy game called Minecraft and I’ve quickly become addicted to it. It’s basically a game in which you can freely build things in an open world – from tunneling underground, to building massive structures. The main game-type has you doing so while building up resources, crafting, and dodging and/or fighting the occasional creature.

“My humble little hobbit hole.”

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it is about this game that is so charming: Is it the Doom meets Mario style of simple, low-res graphics? Is it the Lego like ability to build anything in a world which is essentially a big toy box? For me, I think the sense of immersion I get from exploring these strange, randomly generated, infinite worlds is the most appealing part. I’ve always considered myself to be at least a little bit of an “explorer” but Minecraft has really managed to reveal just how extreme that side of my gaming psychology can be.

I could spend a lot more time attempting to describe Minecraft and its many glories but as luck had it early into writing this post I read this fantastic article on Bitmob describing the game. Check it out for some thoughts on and a quick introduction to the game.

Anyway, here’s the meat and potatoes! A short chronicle of a few days (of mostly ~1 hour play sessions) in a newly generated world:

Day 1:

I started by building a house on an ocean front beach near to where I started. There were mountains close by with several caves in them as well as quite a few trees scattered about and of course an abundance of water for farming later on. My current preferred way to start out with a house in Minecraft is simply to dig a pit, whatever size I feel like, 2 blocks deep, and then use the dirt I gathered from the dig to build a 1 block high dirt wall and ceiling. This is advantageous because it can be done quickly before nightfall on your first day without any tools. You can then block up the door, or half block it if you prefer, to keep safe for the night.

“A view of my home from above as night sets in.”

I started the usual way – chopping down trees by hand to get some wood to construct a workbench with. Next I made some wooden tools, specifically pick axes, and set out to survey the hills. There were a number of caves in the nearest, largest mountain, but absolutely none of them seemed to contain any ore. After upgrading my tools to stone I set out for some coal. A little more searching, this time in a small, craggy rock face across the valley from the aforementioned mountain, yielded a pretty massive vein of coal. Now I could really get down to business! I started by making a mass of torches as well as some additional stone tools and a furnace.

Day 2:

I spent a night digging a stairwell in my house’s floor down to a long, straight hall which I lit with torches as needed. I came across some coal here and there but nothing spectacular. As day broke I went back outside and began gathering additional wood and cloth while searching local caves for signs of iron. Unfortunately iron and coal were rare finds and as night set in I took refuge in my home once more. I ended up crafting myself some glass to turn the top of my lowly, dirt house into a classy skylight. I tunneled a bit more below my house turning my long corridor to the right. I came up with vague plan to make a series of tunnels, forming a grid, and then cleaning out the entire space between them, harvesting any resources I might find along the way and making a massive room to serve as a foundation for further mining efforts. Just as I decided to start doing just that, turning another right corner with my original tunnel, I hit a natural cave.

“A massive natural tunnel leading deep into my mine.”

I had broken into the cave towards the top of it and carefully made my way to the bottom. The large main room broke off in several directions. I set an array of torches as I began to explore what turned out to be quite a massive cave system which included 2 underground rivers and what seemed to be a large amount of iron and coal. I was quite excited to start excavating and fully investigating this cave system but I needed to quit for the day. As I didn’t quite explore every last inch of the cave, meaning there were possible unknown, unlit tunnels where creatures could be hiding, I built a door onto the tunnel leading down to the cave. I also finally built myself a real front door to my house while I was at it.

Day 3:

I was pretty anxious to get to mining and immediately returned to my newly discovered basement cave system. I started by mining all of the ore out of one of the smaller tunnels close to the entrance and then signaling that I was done with it by building some dirt pillars around the entrance of it. I may do something a bit more interesting with closed off areas later on. I then went another direction and began exploring pathway up towards the ceiling that I had missed last time. Unfortunately it didn’t have anything of note in it and it ended up in a small, square room a lot higher up than the rest of the cave. I thought to myself “hmm, I wonder how close I am to the outside?” and mined a single rock from overhead. I saw some water above me and thought “cool, I’m under a river!” Barely enough time for that thought to have processed passed before the cave started flooding. I ran for my life. This being my first encounter with underground water accidents I thought my mine was done for but luckily the water produced a nice, clean waterfall and didn’t flood too much of the surrounding area.

“An underground river spilling into a lava flow.”

I continued to explore the cave system, constantly finding new areas further and further in. This thing was even more gigantic than I originally suspected, eventually leading down into some huge natural caverns. The first time I ran into a bow carrying monster I must have jumped 10 feet out of my chair in what was probably the most scary moment I’ve had in a video game since playing Doom 3. That *thwack!* sound just totally caught me by surprise. Exploring Minecraft doesn’t really put me in that sort of a tense mood like Doom 3, Dead Space, and other similar games do though – I’m usually much more curious about exploring then I am nervous about what will happen to me around the next corner which I suppose is why this surprise attack freaked me out so much. I ended up crafting a set of iron armor and an iron sword for such encounters in the future.

“Score! I found a second diamond vein while taking screenshots!”

Eventually I reached the bottom of the caves – a complex system of smaller caves teaming with iron and coal interconnected by giant underground rivers of lava. The lava let off a warm glow which was quite enjoyable after fumbling around in the dark for so long. This is also where I discovered my first diamond vein which yielded 3 of the precious stones. As I explored more of the depths of the cave system it became completely obvious that I wasn’t even close to having explored the entire thing yet so I came to a good stopping point and returned to my humble home to call it a night.

Day 4:

More exploration! I spent almost the entire session yet again exploring my newly discovered mines, though this time a bit more methodically than before. I was able to seal off a couple of sections, having mined out their coal and iron, with the dirt pillars I used yesterday though I also, for better or for worse, discovered some exceedingly large and often deep new sections. I marked the entrances to those sections with a series of new torches to point me in the right direction. Even after I explore all of the conventional cave, which may yet take quite a while at this rate, the entire bottom floor of the deepest section of the system seems to be riddled with a sprawling maze of lava filled tunnels, some of which I suspect lead to yet more caves and tunnels.

“It may be hard to see in the thumbnail but there are two skeletons, a creeper, and a spider on the other side of this waterfall.”

After I do finally explore it all and mine out all of the precious ore I’m toying with the idea of going through with my blocks and my pick and basically remodeling the entire cave system so that it looks man made – fixing craggy edges, rough floors, and strange turns. It might be too much work though, given the size of this thing, especially considering how massive some of the caverns are. After that I plan to look for a new place to build a better, much more complex house and new places to mine.

Unlocking The Vault

So, after a pretty sporadic schedule of playing I finally managed to get all the way through my first Borderlands co-op game, finishing the story and every available side quest at around level 36.

“If there aren’t really roving bands of angry midgets bandits in the future I’ll be soooo disappointed.”

The ending was a bit of a let down – if you’ve ever read any forum threads or news comments on the game then you’ve probably already seen a bunch of people complaining about it. I didn’t think it was that awful though I suppose I didn’t exactly have high expectations given how bad the game seemed to be at narrative throughout. Without spoiling anything let’s just say that the ending isn’t what most people would expect it to be, and even the best explanations of what went down still leave various questions on the table. The best and most likely explanation is that the story parallels the myth of Pandora’s Box but even that isn’t extremely fulfilling. Like I said though, Borderlands isn’t exactly a game you play for the story. The silly blocks of quest text coming from mannequin-esqe NPCs would have left much to be desired if shooting and looting weren’t so much fun.

“Much less fun when you’re on the receiving end.”

I wasn’t super happy with the loot system. It’s pretty badass, no doubt, but from the mountains of loot we got it seemed like I rarely ever found an item that was a worthy upgrade. I would have preferred finding “good” items just a little more frequently. It just needs to be tweaked a little. I never did find a support machine gun with both high damage and a good rate of fire, and it took 10s of levels between each of my shotgun upgrades, for example. It kind of left me itching to play Diablo 2 yet again, to be honest. 😉

I have some other complaints about the game too, but nothing too major. It was a fun co-op experience, fun enough that I wouldn’t mind experimenting with second playthroughs and other classes if some parts of it weren’t so tedious to think about replaying. When I get an upgraded hard drive for my 360 (sometime very soon, I hope) I’ll definitely be buying and playing through the Zombie Island and Secret Armory DLC expansions. I’m actually probably more hyped up for the possibility of a proper sequel.

As usual for 360 games, not my screenshots. Pretty sure these are from some official PR releases.

March?!

Damn, it seems like it has been an eternity since my last update. I guess it has been almost a month already. I guess time flies when you’re not having much fun too.

First and foremost after finishing up with The Ballad of Gay Tony I started playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on my 360. I wanted to go ahead and start playing it right away to capitalize on the massive buzz surrounding its much lauded online multiplayer.

“There goes the neighborhood…”

I played my share of Call of Duty 4’s multiplayer and liked it a lot. Modern Warfare 2 is more of the same, only now cranked up to 11. Of course adding more rewards, perks, unlocks, challenges, etc. does tend to change the game quite a bit despite the similarities and I’ve talked to a fair amount of players who prefer COD4’s less insane (and possibly more balanced) multiplayer to that of MW2. Still, MW2’s increased focus on rewards succeeds in achieving an almost MMO level of addictiveness that is hard not to appreciate. In fact I had a hard time convincing myself to play the single player while the multiplayer was there, calling out my name. It isn’t usually the most tactical or cooperative of online military shooter experiences but it is definitely a hell of a lot of fun and has become my go to “kill a few minutes” online game on console.

I did eventually finish up the single player campaign on “hardened” difficulty and unfortunately enjoyed it about as much as I enjoyed Call of Duty 4’s. Most of the observations I made in my write up of COD4 a few months back remain true in its sequel. It’s a highly polished experience but I’m just not a big fan of the whole “get funneled around the map while running and gunning through hordes of enemies” thing and would rather be granted the freedom to use some actual tactics to complete my objectives. I suppose the checkpoints are a little better this time around. There have also been claims that there are now always a finite number of enemies so you can never run into nigh impossible situations facing seemingly infinitely spawning enemies that you often could in previous COD games. While this may be true it is honestly hard to tell as the unpleasant, often controller-smashingly frustrating “meat grinder” sections of old are still alive and well here. If you don’t care about the additional achievement and this frustration doesn’t sound like your idea of fun then do yourself a favor and play it on one of the easier modes and for god’s sake stay the hell away from “veteran” difficulty.

“Boom! One of the first of MW2’s innumerable huge explosions.”

While I’m bitching the plot of this one makes the COD4’s story look like a classic war documentary or something. It’s completely over the top and full of weird plot holes. Games Rader has a pretty funny article about it. I really wonder what happened over at Infinity Ward to make them go from writing stories more or less based on real life WWII events to the bizarre shit they’ve given us in the last two COD games. It doesn’t bother me that much – it’s more amusing than anything. These stories at least give us plenty of opportunity to shoot stuff which I suppose is their primary purpose.

As a complete aside I’ve always liked the way Infinity Ward handles first person cinematics and the perspective in general. The spacewalk scene and the flare popping scene on Whiskey Hotel’s roof both come to mind from MW2. There are others as well. They might not always look accurate but they always look cool and feel fairly immersive. It’s too bad they never actually do anything with it by venturing outside of the usual FPS gameplay conventions.

“This mission makes it disturbingly clear that someone at Infinity Ward hates waiting in line at the airport.”

Oh, before I move on let me reiterate a piece of advice that has been passed around a lot since it was first announced that Party Chat wouldn’t be supported in some of MW2’s game types. Its usefulness goes far beyond replacing Party chat though and finding it isn’t nearly as intuitive as it might sound.

How to mute everybody, all the time on Xbox Live: Hit your guide button. Scroll to the right to the “Settings” section. Select “Profile”, “Edit Profile”, and then select “Privacy Settings”. Select “Voice and Text” from the menu and change it to “Friends Only”.

This will make it so that you can ONLY hear people on your friends list in chat (and vice versa so you won’t be spamming public chat with weird half conversations.) It’ll also block that ever so pleasant after match hate mail you might get from time to time. It can allegedly have some odd effects in some games but for the most part muting all of the insufferable shitheads that plague Xbox Live is easily worth any negatives I can think up. I just wish it were a tad more accessible so that one could simply toggle it on and off for those moments when you might actually want to work together with your teammates and the like but I guess that might go against the spirit of everyone having voice on Xbox Live. *shrug*

“Molgrun the Wary at level 7.”

On the PC front I really haven’t been playing much lately. I grabbed a copy of the collector’s edition of Lord of the Rings Online for dirt cheap and decided to check it out after not setting foot into (onto?) Middle Earth since beta. Other than the utterly ridiculous patching system I had to endure I had fun. I still contend that it is an excellent game but it definitely feels “slower” and a little bit less exciting than some of the other post-World of Warcraft MMOs out there. Actually, it very clearly feels to me like a good pre-WoW theme park style MMORPG that they’ve bolted on lots of WoW influenced features to, which I suppose is probably pretty accurate. That said like Turbine’s other current MMORPG offering, Dungeons & Dragons Online, I could easily see myself playing LOTRO if I had a regular, small group who I liked to run instances and the like with. I played my Dwarf Guardian for just 15 or so levels before I felt WoW itself calling me back.

It has been quite a while since I’ve really played WoW besides occasional romps with some low level characters some friends and I play but as I mentioned before I finally purchased the Wrath of the Lich King expansion recently and have now finally decided to start working my main character up to level 80. I’ve only been playing it very sporadically when the urge and/or boredom strikes and it has been working quite well for me so far. The new content is, for the time being, pretty fun (if not more of the same) and no matter how sick I get of it I always find it hard not to appreciate what Blizzard has done with WoW over the years. It still feels like the most complete, most polished, and best bang for your buck MMORPG out there.

“Borderlands: not your kid’s cartoon violence.”

Speaking of MMORPGs Star Trek Online was a game that I was pretty hyped up for around this time last month but unfortunately due to waiting on some features and fixes I wanted patched in and the horrible stability of the game servers during the first few weeks after launch I really haven’t played much STO since it officially launched last month. I’m sure I’ll get back into it sooner or later but for the time being Cryptic kind of missed the boat on hooking me in.

Finally, back to the Xbox 360 I started playing Borderlands. I’d had my eye on Borderlands since first hearing about it but when it finally came out it just didn’t seem to equal the sum of its parts. Of course, next thing I knew peer reviews started rolling in and people loved it. When I heard how good co-op was in particular I knew I had to grab it to play through.

It is very much a traditional FPS combined with the quest, skill, and loot systems of an MMO. Actually, I’d probably equate the loot system with more loot centric games such as Diablo and its ilk. It sounds kind of disjointed and odd but it actually works well enough. The game definitely has some issues (which I’ll probably expand upon more in a later entry) but the combination of the random loot-a-thon treadmill and the furious combat is fun and very addictive. In fact I think I may need to cut this short and continue the hunt for more purples…

As usual my Xbox 360 screenshots were shamelessly swiped from elsewhere. The LOTRO one is mine though! 😉