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.

Online Gaming: It’s not you, it’s me!

BEHOLD. The powerful tool of multiplayer gaming in 1994.

Remember the time when multiplayer gaming was an enormous hassle?  I recall renting a SNES multitap adapter ; a magical device that let four controllers be connected to one system.  Fire up some Super Bomberman, get some friends to bring their controllers, and the fun would last for hours.  Sure it might SOUND crazy for you and two buddies to drive to a friend’s house, whose not even home, and accost his mother to borrow a gamecube controller, but back before the internet was an important part of any console (except the Wii because Nintendo set sail for fail on that one) these were the kinds of things that had to happen to truly experience a game with friends.  The present day is a different beast of course.  Friends lists are one of the most important features on Xbox or PS3.  However, even more so, the ability to just randomly jump into a game and shoot strangers in the ass, then virtually teabag them, is to me still a relatively new, strange, and completely horrifying experience.  The ability to connect to the masses to play games is for me not quite as an awesome prospect as it probably should be.  I wonder:  am I the problem or is everybody else?