Race for the Wool: My OTB is open for bizness

Hello sports fans. I’m not feeling well so I apologize in advance for the following nonsense. This is indeed another Minecraft post, however it is not a post in the traditional sense. One of the more novel experiences in the game of Minecraft is the creation of games within the game. Early on in development a group of players developed a game called Spleef which involved custom-built in-game arenas and was in my opinion comparable to MMA fighting. A bit homoerotic and incredibly boring. Minecraft has also been used for development of adventure maps and so-called parkour maps, or platforming maps as us old fogies would recognize them, and perhaps I will discuss these in a later post. But today I’m here to discuss a unique game within the game. Race for the Wool sets itself apart from other Minecraft games by boiling down the essential elements of Minecraft into a competitive form. The concept popularized by crafter Vechs seems simple enough. Two teams race down mirrored “lanes” to reach three different chests containing different colors of wool. These three wool types must then be returned to the starting point and placed on a “victory monument.” Between the teams and the wool lie several obstacles in the forms of terrain, mobs, traps, and mazes. More importantly PvP is essential and consists of arrow attacks, TNT cannons, and redstone traps.

Minecraft: It’s here, but is it truly finished?

Tophat's King Mushroom and his young prince sit in their royal court.

Friday is a big day. It marks the 93rd anniversary of the end of the Great War, it is the release of a horror film I really don’t care about, and  it’s the official release date for Minecraft. But Enosh, haven’t you been posting about Minecraft for like a year now? Ah, yes but if you’d been paying attention you would know the game was still in alpha and beta testing at the time. Minecraft’s development cycle has been a bit out of the norm I’ll grant you that. First of all, the game has been publicly available almost as long as it has been in development. Once the game entered beta Notch and his newly hired programmer Jens Bergensten continued to add features, something usually reserved for alpha testing. Even though the game will be officially released during the inaugural MineCon in Las Vegas, there is no guarantee that the new features will stop there. In fact, Notch has said in all likelihood feature additions will continue free of charge for all alpha and possibly beta adopters, I don’t remember.

Minecraft: I’m bored with dogs, lighting and pistons

It's the little things that make a city. Like your friendly neighborhood hot dog stand. I mean hort dorg.

So, I love Minecraft. There is no disputing this. Notch made an awesome game.

He’s focusing on the adventuring aspect of the game now. This could become the most important part of the game so it deserves his full attention as the “week after 11/11/11″ launch date creeps ever closer. The trouble is he has said this will take him an increasingly long period of time which means the once brief period between feature additions is becoming a yawning chasm. At the behest of his community of rabid followers Notch released the piston update a couple of weeks ago.

Reddit: Great for Minecraft, hit or miss for comics

I’m new to Reddit. I wasn’t there in the beginning and I don’t know anything about its purported decline. I have no dog in that fight. After a few weeks of fiddling around with the site I have found it surprisingly addicting. Though I suppose I should not be as surprised as I was. After all, I’ve always been a big fan of reading random things on the internet. Originally I checked out the site, which could be described as a collection of rateable headlines for an incredibly wide variety of topics, as a means for gathering information on the webcomic industry.

This plan failed miserably.

Terraria: More like Metroidcraft

YEAH!!!!111

Okay, fine, I admit it.  I have an unhealthy addiction to infinite sandbox games.  Plop me down in front of a totally sweet building/digging  world and leave it just open-ended enough to guarantee that there’s no real end to it, and I’ll sink countless hours building imaginary worlds and blowing up as much as the game engine allows.  I’m not sure why this is.  I’m no architect.  I guess I just like that feeling of progress, that you’re actually accomplishing something even though you’re really just placing some pixels on top of more pixels, which is realistically done all the time.

So when Terraria was released on Steam this week, I couldn’t help but pick it up.  Touted as a “2D Minecraft but not,” Terraria focuses more on crafting and exploration than straight up building, offering tons of new content to see, explore, and get pissed off at in your quest for newer and better loot.

Minecraft: Yes, it’s still an awesome game

So for those of you keeping score at home, you may have noticed I haven’t done a game review in quite some time. Like the middle of November. That’s because during that time span I’ve only played one game. Well, there were a few days in there where I finally downloaded the RDR zombie expansion pack when it went on sale, but I still haven’t beaten it.

So what I’m getting at here is this. I am fully and unequivocally addicted to Minecraft. The game, like many of the applications developed in the only programming language I actually have feelings for, java, stressed my wife’s laptop to its breaking point. I could not stop playing, that was clearly out of the question. So instead I carefully monitored the CPU temperature and occasionally, ok frequently,  stuck the exhaust port out the window to ensure the little lappy didn’t go up in smoke.

Boxer Hockey: The worst of friends play the weirdest of games

A shot of Enosh, taken in Minecraft, just before he started foaming at the mouth and ranting about delightful architecture

Enosh is busy putting the finishing touches on his submission for Notch’s Minecraft texture pack contest this week, so I offered to do double duty this week.  He’s been working on it pretty non stop since the contest was announced, and seems rabid obsessed with finishing his custom texture pack to make his reproduction of the famous “Falling Water” house look accurate on our server.  The contest ends on Dec. 20, and is being hosted over at WEBHALLEN so go check some of that out.  If you haven’t had a chance to pick up Minecraft yet, now’s the time to do so.  The game is going to double in price when the game switches into Beta next week, and it seems like if you have an alpha account, you’re going to be in pretty good shape for future updates, including the final, for-retail version of the game.  Whenever that’s supposed to happen.

Minecraft: The best incomplete 8-bit game ever

Wow. This must have taken some serious man hours.

As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up a naive PC gamer. I was partial to the LucasArts games, Day o f the Tentacle, X-wing, and the like. There’s  nothing like a machine with more input buttons than letters in the alphabet. Not to mention the PC was high-definition with full anti-aliasing before it was cool. So what’s one of the best games on the PC today? I’m arguing  it’s an 8-bit block builder called Minecraft. This indie game is unique in that the game is still in alpha development and is available for sale at half the projected retail price. That’s right! You can own a partially built game that could potentially break your computer.