Minecraft has been around so long that it’s easy to take it for granted. The decade of its existence has seen it explode from an indie project to financial juggernaut, but at the heart of all the licensing has been a game that’s never stopped growing its list of features. One of the biggest parts of Minecraft’s longevity has been its multiplayer options with endless servers available almost since the beginning. The reason for this is simple — it’s fun to build things with friends. Whether or not that means everyone works together on a massive project or people go off and do their own thing in a communal area doesn’t matter, so long as there’s something new to see. Working with a group where everyone’s online, working alone or just tooling around the world sightseeing, it’s all better when doing it in a shared world. The thing about Minecraft, though, is that it’s become so generic it’s easy to forget how entertaining it is. Over the years I’ve obsessed over Minecraft, walked away for extended periods of time, come back, then left again. I’ve explored single-player worlds and gotten involved in multiplayer servers, and the one constant is that each time I play there’s something new to do. There are endless worlds stretching on forever made of giant blocks that, despite their size, are still enough to suggest the shape of almost anything you want to create, and the nice thing about Minecraft Updates‘s ubiquitous nature is just about everyone is already familiar with it. Now may be the best time to dig out an old log-in and see what huge, inspiring, strange, ridiculous, epic creations you and a group of friends can come up with.
While that could serve as the intro to any number of creepy fan fiction tales, my thoughts were much more earnest, yet still slightly troubling. Specifically, they were about how the blue hedgehog and vertically gifted plumber were real oddballs as far as company mascots go, in that they weren’t really dreamed up by a PR team or advertising firm, but rather by the products themselves.
There’s a vast library of online entertainment for gamers to enjoy and we hope those practicing social distancing take advantage of it. Share some of your gaming suggestions here and please do your best to keep yourself and others safe.
Chivalry is a medieval combat game that, for the most part, perfectly recreates the experiences of playing with and against your friends in a Braveheart style battle. Like Monaco did with the heist genre, Chivalry showed us that those years of wishing to participate in large scale medieval battles in video game form were not unfounded, as there is a visceral pleasure that comes with charging the field of battle with a large axe and watching limbs fly around you like leaves in the Fall. The enhanced focus on face to face combat drastically alters deathmatch dynamics, and forces you to create strategies applicable in few other games.
For the most part though, the appeal here stems from getting together with your buddies and enjoying a satisfying brawler with a tightly designed combat system, and bar none some of the best level design of this generation. The multiplayer portion may only last you a couple of hours or less, but is worth revisiting several times for the simple pleasures it provides. Simply put, this is an example of old school beat em’ ups at their very best.
However, there is a big difference between making an old school game for the purposes of invoking nostalgia, and making one that actually recreates the feeling of playing that game back in its prime. Castle Crashers is an example of latter, as it rightfully focuses less on re-inventing the brawler wheel, and more on emphasizing what made it so much fun in the first place. Of course, the little unique touches such as mini-games and RPG-lite elements are certainly unique and well appreciated additions.
What? A game from the music genre is number one? Didn’t everybody stop caring about those years ago and only think of them when they stumble upon a plastic instrument somewhere in the back of their closet? Yes, that’s very true, but I find that as the years go on, I look at the music genre more and more fondly, and miss it’s contributions and capabilities.
The episode in itself offers a lot of promise for the rest of the announced episode, but it also cuts them short. The next slew of episodes will be adding new story arcs to the new Order of the Stone as they go on new adventures to build up their legacy. That being said, in the two hours it took to finish the episode to its completion, it made the entire premise feel very unimportant. SO much had happened and so much story and character development was involved that Telltale could have made the entire plot itself into a single season if they wanted to. The entirety of Sky City itself has so much more that could have been explored and so many more characters could have been introduced, but the story was limited to a couple of hours of gameplay. It creates a new kind of gameplay that forces you to pay attention and actually play the game rather than just putting your controller down and making a decision every once in a while.