Minecraft: The world’s favourite con?

I’m a fan who has just had enough.

We were all pretty much funding the development of a game based on a rather large scaled tech demo back in alpha and beta. The only problem I could foresee was that, depending on when you purchased Minecraft, your expectation of where the game was headed would differ from person to person.

I often joked that we were never guaranteed the Minecraft we were playing in beta would be the Minecraft we’d play on release. Mojang could’ve released a driving simulator! And we’d have to be cool with that.

1.8 for me was a particularly negative turning point in Minecraft’s development for me.

The clue as to what Minecraft is all about was in the title. Mining and Crafting. Once upon a time this was true. These days, not so. EnchantFarm would make more sense as a working title now.

Making farming (or atleast the requirement to eat) a necessity took away the one thing Minecraft offered me as a gamer. Complete freedom. I could go mining for hours and be excited about all the cool new things I’d find. Who can forget the first bit of lava they came across. Or diamonds! GLORIOUS diamonds! Nowadays unless your packing a lunchbox that Rosie O’Donnell would have trouble seeing the end of you’ll be starved to death before the end of an ingame day. Add with that the manner in which food recovers lost HP and even the complete re-working of the combat system and you’ve pretty much altered some of the more solid elements of the game.

Gaming history has proven that sometimes simplicity is the key. Adding a literal new dimension to the Sonic series for example pretty much signed the blue, spiked ones death warrant. So why would the tried and testing method of ‘ingest this = heal this’ need to be revamped in Minecraft?

I’ve had countless friends write off Minecraft because of it’s simple, outdated looks. But this is really the biggest juxtaposition ever! Minecraft isn’t simple. At least, not anymore.

I know full well that there are fan boys and girls out there incapable of diverting from the sheep mentality and actually critiquing Minecraft (and even critiquing Mojang / Notch for that matter – but I will come to that in a moment), but why does liking a game make you stupid? How can you defend the choice of having to spend time chomping on a piece of bread, to recover 3 hearts, which will then go down a few moments later, that you first had to create a wheat farm for in order to even acquire the wheat, that you then made the bread out of, over: kill the pig, eat the bacon, profit… Honestly, how?

Then there’s the addition of enchanting and potion crafting that left me thinking that Minecraft has gone quite schizophrenic. We’ve pretty much started with Lego and ended up with D&D.

More effort has been put into the implementation of updates and extras like these, then fixing outstanding bugs, issues, errors and necessities in the game.

Ingame server lists? Sprinting potion!

Wooden slabs act like stone? Have a ‘creepy’ new mob!

That light emitting from those staircases wrong? Enchanted pickaxe!

It’s as though something will be added to appease us all and hopeful make us forget these outstanding problems instead of doing the possibly more difficult task or turning out a complete, bug free game.

Mojang is a now a multi million pound company thanks to the Minecraft community. I personally would like to see this fortune (derived from Minecraft) spent on the completion of Minecraft.

How many of you have purchased a boxed game, from a store, took it home and then bitched, whined and moaned about how the game is broken because of one or two glitches? Glitches which really aren’t the be all and end all of the game. It’s just aggravating that we’ve spent our money on a released game that isn’t yet finished.

And then there’s Minecraft.

There’s currently one guy working on Minecraft at the moment. And since the official release date we’ve had one update which has caused as much joy as dismay.

I know people look to the Mojang staff as being super god like humans. But in my opinion. They ain’t. They’re ordinary people. People capable of doing their job well and doing their job poorly (MineCon-gate). At the moment we’ve given them all a free pass for far too long. Minecraft has been a game created with the community at the forefront so why now are we getting done over?

The endermen was a mob taken from Reddit suggestions.

The piston update was derived from a user mod.

Near on all great updates have been from the minds of people outside of Mojang Studios.

Minecraft’s success owes us more than this. It owes us more then a game which in my opinion will never feel truly complete. Not atleast until the core elements of the game are grounded, it’s errors and bugs fixed and its key focus (mining and crafting) once again highlighted and improved on.

I mean fuck it. Everyone loves suggestions for the game. How about this:

Have EXP for things other than killing mobs. Why not have mining or digging EXP. The more you mine the higher the stat. The higher the stat the better the items usable or the durability or efficiency of an item. This would offer an alternative to mindless mob EXP grinding and enchanting.

THAT as an implemented update would be welcomed across the board and I know it. It’s a nod to the original direction of the game and it will offer, as I said, an alternative to enchanting etc.

Minecraft has so much potential. I just don’t like feeling that we’ve been used. Tonnes of money has been made from this game and yet it seems to have been forgotten the second it was officially released.

Have we been screwed over here? Or am I just thinking too much into something I shouldn’t be.

tl;dr

Fix the problems before making new ones.
Skill based EXP (mining, digging etc) as well as enchanting.
I have an opinion that might not match yours.

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Celebrity and the wrath of unfunny comedians

In the past few years celebrity has exploded. Thanks to reality tv we have hundreds of useless idiots clinging onto former fame (Kerry ‘mum of the year’ Katona) or arseholes from the street still gripping to their 5 minutes of fame offered to them by X-Factor or Britains Got Talent. With thanks to this, true celebrities are finding it harder and harder to get a break or the fame they deserve. So much so, once their star has started to fade or fallen from grace, they themselves must whore themselves out to the celebrity reality tv shows. So the cycle continues…

Thankfully the world has trends. Trends which as consumers we just can’t get enough of. I’m not talking (or more realistically, writing) about trends such as fashion or doing the locomotion. I’m on about trends of celebrity. A year ago we had chat show fever. Any tosspot who could read a script and has at least one person who knows them as ‘that person from [insert show here]‘ would have a contract waggled in their face. It was quite funny though how their guests would themselves have a chat show of sorts. You’d have this interview circle. I go to your show, you go to mine. Finding new things to talk about however, that was the tough part. There’s only so many autobiographies titled ‘My Story’ you can churn out.

Anyway. Because we have these trends there are more ways for a guy or gal to find their star and keep it there. We’re now currently on the comedian trend. Be it standup, sitcom, sketch show, panel show, whatever, you can’t go an evening on tv without seeing at least one of these type of shows or an advert for some comedian you’ve never heard of’s DVD.

Now before I really sink my teeth into this, I want to say that there are indeed some amazing new shows and artists emerging from this craze. Mitchell and Webb of Peep Show fame (as just one example) are incredible. Their writing is sharp and deliverance even better, with even their ad-lib going down better than a starving hooker on a chocolate covered dick.

But there is some real, REAL shit stuff out their. Whoever thought of taking the two leading men from Gavin and Stacey (Horne and Corden) and giving them a sketch show should be slapped. Whoever thought of giving them a movie!?!? Well you can just fuck off. Oh, and guess what? James Corden has a world cup chat show now.

Dara Ó Briain. He’s pointless. His standup doesn’t deliver at all. I think you’d get a bigger laugh if he just got on stage and said “I’m fat and Irish and that’s all you’re gonna get!”. As a presenter on Mock the Week it’s excruciating. He’s just not funny. You’ll get a legitimate funny-man make a joke which gets a few laughs. Another will develop the joke further prompting more laughs. Then Dara will ‘try’ and develop it further. And by develop I mean latch onto to it as if to say I’m funny too! Ultimately he kills the joke and they move onto their next scripted ad-lib moment.

The real genius here with Dara Ó Briain is that he knows he’s not funny either! He attempts to crack a joke and straight after goes “Errrrrrgh…” as if prompting the audience to laugh. There’s even a Facebook group dedicated to it! (http://www.facebook.com/pages/the-noise-Dara-OBriain-makes-after-every-joke/109054679138449) I guess it saves the producers money on one of those laughter/applause signs though.

There’s an aspect of transition really and how well you can go from sitcom actor to out and out comedian or panel show to standup etc. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Frankie Boyle was the reason people watched Mock the Week really. His quick fire responses and controversial views made for great watching. Go see his standup however and not only do you already know 75% of the material (like I said earlier, scripted ad-lib) but he just doesn’t seem right. Seemingly out of his depth. It’s a shame really. But oh well. His DVDs out. That was advertised the shit out of during Christmas.

Realistically this all comes down to taste. Taste in the sense that I have it and if you find these obviously shit comedians funny, you don’t!

My mind wonders now what the next big thing is going to be. What’s the next crutch for a little bit more fame than your average reality tv drop out. We’ve already seen the transformation of James Corden from actor to comedian to chat show host come football pundit. But what’s next? WAGs hosting a series on making money? “That’s right love. Get your tits out, get that footballer in you and you’re loaded!”. Or how about a reality tv show about the life of a twenty-something male who works as a chef but knows fame would work out pretty damn good for him. I mean. He could have made a few wiser decisions in life or maybe directed his career choices to the media or journalism. But it would still make for good tv! Watch this space…

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What’s the point?

There comes a point when you have to take a step back and really just look at your life. Look at where you’ve come from, where you’ve been and where you’re going. You can look at what you’ve achieved and what you haven’t. How you’ve handled a situation and what opportunities you’ve missed. You can spend a lifetime going over and over again your past mistakes and triumphs. But what’s the point? Why do it?

No-one can ever say they’ve had complete control in their life. The amount of things I regret in my life which I’d always blamed myself for is vast. In reality, the more I think about situations, it’s the third parties; the gossipers; the grapevine wankers who fuck things up.

Time after time I’m having a broken heart; a shattered dream; a blocked ambition because someone else is getting involved. Giving their two cents on a situation they have no right interfering in. I feel sorry for the people who try to help and fail, because I can see how they’ll take this rant personally. But rest assured. This is mainly related to malicious intent.

Sometimes people don’t know the whole damn story. Don’t understand the facts. Don’t realise that people can change. Yes. I shat my pants when I were younger. Does that mean I do it now? …Bad example. But you see what I’m getting at!

Living with regret isn’t living at all. And neither is living in the past. It’s stationary. You aren’t getting anywhere. And you never will. Life is about moving forward. Second chances. Knowing that things will get better if you want them to. The sooner people can start realising this, the sooner control can go back to the person who deserves it. The actual person living their life.

But again. What’s the point? Surely we should atleast feel free enough to live our life how we want. Making decisions based on our own experiences and judgement. Yada yada. Who knows? I just hope that I can start getting a firmer grip on these reins, steer the thing myself and get to where I want to be. ‘Cos what I want isn’t much. It’s just to be happy.

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