Reviews VideoGame / Minecraft

Legos, Firecrackers and Creepers

Being a sandbox game and in alpha state, Minecraft is a hard to explain game, not having any story and just letting the player figure things out in his own. The player is welcomed usually by the ocean, standing on the beach or a sand patch. Having no tools, no weapons and no instructions is up to the player in what to do. Easily they will start hitting everything around, collecting sand, dirt, wood and start to figure out their first wood tools to quickly pass to stone and look for the precious coal needed to make torches and make night safe. Later looking for iron and other ores once a home is created and made safe. The whole world is generated which each new save letting awesome-looking places that hardly give the feeling that they are made from cubes of around 1m. Once with tools, the player has it easy to plow down a mountain and create large and deep mines in look for useful resources to build incredible projects. The game has a little number of NP Cs, with the Creepers, this one are totally original from this game, a failed pig, in Notch's word, a green, tall,four legged, and not necessary an animal, enemy. Totally silent and deadly, creepers don't make any sound when they walk, the only sound is a "SSSSSSSSSS" before they explode with the force of a dynamite charge blasting everything in a small radius, destroying, usually, the player's house. This infamous creatures are an icon for the game, and even if destructive, the community has grown to love them, and have a desire to hug them. The forum of the community, even if "lovely", provides with a lot of good material, from ideas to useful mods and texture packs, able to change the form and quality the world looks like. The original texture of the game is a simple grid of 16X16 pixels squares, but the program can actually support files bigger, the only drawback was a little bug corrupting some of the textures in how they looked in game, after a fix from part of the forums, now bigger texture packs are available, letting people play with, sometimes, better looking packs. But since the game updates frequently the community presses against Notch to make the code more open-friendly and don't make programmers in the forum have to redo every mod after the updates.