All My Base

If you've ever been on the internet you've heard of Minecraft. Much like an oversized vibrator there is a rather large buzz. And much like this oversized vibrator that everyone is telling you is the great, eventually you'll become tempted to try it out yourself and see if it fits.

Wait, what?

Anyway, point is I found a Minecraft demo. And since every other page on stumble seems to be about Minecraft I figured I'd have a look and see if I could work out how to play it. I'd looked briefly at the Classic mode thing they had on the website, but never really got into it. I mean, whats the point in building a house out of TNT if you can't set it off? So, having finally found a demo, the opportunity to get a look at the actual game play was most welcome.


The first thing to note is that despite having seemingly basic looking graphics Minecraft isn't actually the simplest game to run. First time I tried to load it up it killed the shit out of my machine. After restarting I turned the various options down and all was good. Although I still don't seem to have any sound. Still, you can't have everything.

As demos go, this actually pretty good. It does what a demo really should do, which is give you a good taste of the game. There's a time limit on it, which gives you enough time to play around and a get an idea of everything works, but will inevitably end just when you're really getting into things. For a demo this is the perfect time, since it makes you want to go buy the game so you can continue. That's another advantage this demo has, that it states you can save and continue once you've bought the game. This is something that I think more games should do, since their demos inevitably consist of the first level. But that's another rant for another time. What of the actual game?

If there's one glaring problem with Minecraft it's the entry barrier. You start in your world with nothing and must go from there. That's fair enough. The problem is there's nothing to point you in the right direction. You run around punching stuff and collecting random blocks or whatever, and then night falls and the monsters kill you. A trip to the wiki reveals that to start off with you need to punch trees to get wood which you then make into planks which you then make into a crafting table which you then use to make a pickaxe which you then use to mine stone which you then use to make a kiln which you then use to make charcoal which you then use to make torches so you can see what you're doing as you cower in a hole until the sun comes up.

As you can see there is a fair amount of depth here, if only you can get to it. The terrible Irony is that the demo does give you some tips, but only at the start of each day. So you only get the crafting hint at the dawn of day 2, by which time you've probably either figured it out or been shanked.

Personally I've always been of the opinion that any information you NEED to play a game should be contained IN THE GAME. You can visit the wiki for tips and secrets and optimum strategies or specific stuff, but you shouldn't have to visit the wiki just to do the basics. The crafting system seems like it'd be a lot of fun to play around with, once you've got an idea how it works. It's just that there's certain things you really need to do during the first day, and nothing that indicates what they might be, or even that they exist. This is all easily fixed of course. You could, for example, get a recipe book to start with containing a couple of basic crafting recipes to show the player how it works. If you could then fill such a book out as you discover more recipes then that would be even better.

So, once you've tooled up and worked out how to survive, what do you do next? Well... whatever you feel like really. That's the thing. It's not like there's any set point or goal. You can explore the surface, gather resources, dig tunnels and mine for stuff, and then take all the crap you've gathered and try to craft new stuff to help you do whatever. And of course you can BUILD. You've all seen those screenshots on line of vast, mind boggling construction projects. Cyclopean follies of grand architectural hubris. Or maybe just a giant Mario, whatever you fancy really. Now, this all really appeals to me. If there's one thing I like it's building bases. And Minecraft is basically a game of building the best base you can until you get bored of it. This is the cunning part of the demo, the time limit is set to expire just after you start to think that you could probably build a lighthouse or a fortress shaped like the Companion Cube or a 1:1 scale replica of an Ewok village, but before you have a chance to really get stuck into the logistics and then either give up because you can't quite work it out or spend the next five months staring intently at graph paper.

I can see how dangerous this game is. Once you get into it you start to see possibilities. All kinds of stuff you could do. It's fun to play, it's simple and relatively intuitive. And the weirdest part is that the game ISN'T EVEN FINISHED YET. That's what really gets me. All the hype and billions of man hours invested in building 8-bit recreations of the Death Star, and the game is still in beta. I think that goes a long way to showing that this is pretty special. There really isn't anything else like it.

The real question is would I actually buy it? Would I recommend anyone else does? And the answer isn't really all that straight forward. Do I want it? Yes. Would I play the shit out of it if I had it? Again, yes. But I'm still weaning myself off a crippling Guild Wars binge. Can I really afford to launch straight into another time sink?

I'm not sure. I'd like to play it more, certainly. Maybe once I've got my free time figured out a bit better I'll take the plunge. Maybe I'll get bored on weekend and just get it anyway. Only time will tell.