Fun Cubed!

It has been awhile since my last post - you will have to forgive the absence of comments on your blogs, my year has been off to a rough start amidst a wall of constant but vague placations (read: "probably lies") from people I should be able to rely on but can't, and the loss of a family member to whom I was extremely close, I have not felt much like socializing in any form.

However, as things return to normal, so too does my usual habit of getting all angrified at common human stupidity and dreams of punching the perpetrators of said stupidity in the face… hard. It has been difficult to keep my mind off of all the things that are bothering me right now, and my aggravation has been magnified many times over under the circumstances, I haven't even WANTED to play games - but I do have a saving grace:

Minecraft.

I heard about this game through a Zero Punctuation review a couple weeks ago and was immediately intrigued. I found the main website, read through some of the forums and discovered a veritable wealth of 'Let's Play" videos on YouTube. Some of which are mesmerizing for reasons I can't explain. The simplicity of the game, if you can call it that, to me is incredibly gratifying. There is absolutely no point to it. It is PURE sandbox. There are no achievements, there's no plot; all you do is survive in the world while you carve out, explore, build, create and destroy things all around you, finding a cavern with rare minerals always evokes a girly "squeeee!" from me and I can't wait to throw up some torches and mine every little bit so I can add them to my ever expanding cave/house thing I've built – all the while avoiding and/or killing zombies, skeletons, and those ****ing Creepers. Seriously, screw those **ck shaped bastards. Of course, being a sandbox game, you can set the mode to 'peaceful' and be completely without baddies, but I prefer the additional element and occasional jump scares. It's quite an engrossing game despite its simplicity.

For me, this all harkens back to the old days when I was a little kid – I didn't always care about getting through the story, I just liked playing around in the game world. I remember one game specifically on the NES when I was maybe 8 years old at most - and I got "Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland" as a random present from my mom. I played the game, and found many of the levels to be frustratingly hard for my 8 year old self, but the mechanic of feeding candy to the different creatures and taking their abilities for a short time I found to be a great deal of fun. I loved flying around as the bee, and burrowing through the sand as the mole, digging out a little home for myself or whatever. I always did this sort of thing with my games when I was little. Minecraft and its purposely pixel based retro graphics puts me right back in the mindset, and on top of that, encourages it. It's quite addictive, even in its current beta form and while I haven't tried any of them, there is a wide selection of mods from a very active community.

Granted – this is definitely not for everyone. As I said, there is no real point to it, it's a time waster, perhaps more in the vein of one of those Facebook games, (which I loathe, by the way) – but only in the sense of being relatively pointless, even those games assign specific goals to be accomplished, thus giving direction and drive. You have to quite literally make your own way, and your own entertainment in this game. I'm sure the multiplayer part of this game is even more so, since you can be either robbed blind or given a helping hand at any time by another player, and setting up mutual goals within a group of people online is a challenge in and of itself without the game backing up the rules.

This game relies heavily on your own imagination – and If that is not something you can or care to deal with, then don't waste your time or money on this game.

I am well aware that there are those among you who prefer a gun bobbing in front of you instead of a blocky hand or a pixilated pickaxe and will no doubt point and laugh at me and my silly collection of cubes – and that is perfectly fine. It keeps my mind busy and yet blank – and that little bit of peace however temporary it may be - is what gaming is to me.