My Minecraft Experience

Minecraft, I'll bet you've all heard your fair share of that on the internet recently haven't you? If not, then let me fill you right in. Minecraft is a first person adventure sandbox game to quote it's WIkipedia article, and it basically involved Mining (that is to say, digging up materials from the earth, amongst other places), crafting (that is to say, making items from materials you've mined), building (that is to say, making structures using the mined and crafted materials), and exploring (which is to say.....exploring).

To start off, you create a world, this requires next to no effort beyond clicking one of the empty world buttons, basically like creating a save data. And then your world is constructed from randomly generated terrain, and it can literally go on for as long as you can be bothered to walk, which I'll get back to later.

So you start off in your world, and you've been plonked into a randomly generated area, for me it was hilly and forest-y. Looking at my inventory I found it to be utterly devoid of anything useful, the only action I could perform besides walking was punching stuff, so I punched a tree trunk and it dropped a little miniature icon of itself on the floor, I understood that to mean I could collect it, which was right, so I now had one ore, I repeated that a few times on the rest of the tree until I had around 10 blocks of wood, having the Minecraft Wiki open, I crafted a crafting table, and with the crafting table I crafted a wooden axe, more tree choppage later I had enough wood to create myself a wooden pickaxe and a Hoe (gardening tool that resembles, and probably is a synonym of, a Scythe).

Eventually, I came across some cobblestone beneath the dirt I was standing on and crafted stone tools instead, which I understood to be longer lasting than my wooden ones. At this point, not wanting to leave my crafting table in a random area, I moved it to the top of a nearby hill, intending to make it my workspace. Before I knew it, I had built four wooden walls around it.

Fast forward a few weeks, and my wooden shed is now a two story building, complete with swimming pool on the second floor, a staircase in it's own room and a joining basement connecting to a series of tunnels beneath the earth, as well as a staircase concealed within the cliff face that I later noticed my cliff face stood upon, and a chimney to light up my house during the night time. At no point in the past 12 or so hours of gameplay had I been prompted to build any of these things, I had to figure it all out for myself (except for the crafting, I had to look up how to create certain complex items for that.). At some point, I intend to replace the wooden walls with a layer of bricks I've managed to create from clay I found lying in the dirt.

The story behind how I came across the clay is an entire few paragraphs unto itself. Deciding I needed to create bricks, I ventured beyond my comfort zone of the acre of land that my house and mine was contained in, and searched out any sandy areas I could find, after roughly an hour of searching, I found a small goldmine of clay and mined it all, with my new problem being that I was completely and utterly lost, I searched around for about two to three hours, trying to find my house, but to no avail.

I knew i'd travelled further than was necessary, because it appeared to me I'd walked so far north that the ocean was freezing over, as well as the mountaintops being further from sea level than the clouds, after what I'd estimate was weeks of in game day/night cycles, I thought to myself "Sod it." and simply downloaded a Mod-type program that allowed me to view the entire map in my 'World One', much to my bemusement, it turned out that I'd walked further away from my house than necessary, because my house and current location were nowhere near each other, to give you perspective on how big the map had grown, it was roughly akin to the Great Sea from Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, which in itself was a big world map for a game, and that was just what I'd traversed across. After a further hour or so following the map, I eventually found my way to my house, the feeling was a bit like coming home from holiday if I'm honest. :D

The sheer size of the in game world in Minecraft is rather mind blowing, because as I discovered, the game can theoretically have a bigger map than that of the Earth in real life, to give a bit more perspective, of course it would take a tremendous amount of man hours and processing power to achieve that.

So that's my Minecraft experience so far, if I had to sum it all up, I'd say that the game is a remarkable creation for one one man, and was immensley fun to play, I'd definitely recommend it to anybody with patience, a creative streak and enjoyed playing with lego as a wee child, because that's exactly what this game is, it's like playing with an infinite amount of Lego blocks half your size.

Let Me In.

Well well well, what do we have here then? A film that was actually worth watching? What an honest surprise.

The source of my surprise, as it happens, is a recently released film known as 'Let Me In', it's a horror type film, rated roughly 15 (requiring me to flash my Student ID to get in, because apparently I look under 15), and don't worry, I'd never heard of this film until recently either. and, as the plot synopsis is quick to spoil, is about a young boy who befriends a young girl who's also a vampire. The film was rather tense to watch, even if you knew, and indeed BECAUSE you knew what was going to happen next, and had a good twist at the end which I will give a sincere attempt to not reveal.

The last film I watched as of recent which was meant to be scary was another unheard of film called 'The Hole' which was rubbish because the 3D was comparable to paper cutouts, the characters were boring as anything, all the scares were fake out jump scares which never led to anything and the plot was just uninteresting. Let Me In on the other hand had interesting characters and an interesting plot which pretty much wrote itself around them. The main sources of scares in the film was by far the two main characters, who were both 12 years old, and creepy as hell.

The reason for the two protagonists being as creepy as hell is because pretty much everything about them is only implied, there is a painful silence in any scene in which either of the protagonists (named Owen and Abby...I think.) are on their own, because the atmosphere and the creepy children's stellar nonverbal acting skills pretty much speak for themselves. Let me give you an example that may contain spoilers, after Owen discovers that Abby is secretly a Vampire, he says few words of interest, and no words to measure his current emotional state, everything is only implied. Merely by watching the expression on his face the viewer can tell that he goes through feeling deathly afraid of her, to trying to attempt to understand her, to accepting her burden, all nonverbally.

In addition to the characters emotions, several other things are not specifically shown, for example, one thing I noticed, that I wasn't sure if it was initially intentional, is that lots of character's faces are never seen, even Owen's mother who shares several scenes with him, is never directly shown, as well as his father who only appears in one scene via phone.

Yet another implied thing is the character of Abby herself, who borders on implied and being a complete mystery, for instance, we ever never told why or how Abby was a vampire, or even her true age. Again, the only implied thing is that she is far older than she looks, as evidenced by her eventual line that she "Has been 12 for a while." A-la Twilight. As well as the exact nature of an extremely uncomfortable scene in which she is implied to strip naked and climb into bed with Owen, who was requested to not look at her. Which to me, in addition to being awkward to watch with other people, implies a sense of age.

In short, if you enjoy horror, vampires, and strong (in my opinion) characters, and child actors who look like they live in the Uncanny Valley, then I highly recommend Let Me In. And I advise myself to remember to put it on my list of DVDs to buy.

Doctor Who Adventure Games 1-3

Hello there and welcome to my Blog, I expect nobody to see this but I may as well throw my opinion out like a message in a bottle. As mentioned in the title, I'll be talking about the first three Doctor Who Adventure games starring Matt Smith and Karen Gillan as The Doctor and Amy, they're the only three of the games out at the time of writing which I've all played and have a decent enough opinion on. I hear there'll be different games for the Wii as well, I'll probably try and get my hands on those too against my better judgement (Mostly because of the Sonic Screwdriver WiiMote, which sounds made of win to the part of my Brain that controls fanboyishness.).

Before I start on the games, I'm going on record as saying that I love the Doctor Who series and having watched every episode of the new series I can safely say I know my way around the franchise sufficiently enough. Even Series 5 starring Matt Smith was though roughly enjoyable despite what the unpleasable Doctor Who fanbase might say, and well I didn't enjoy it as much as the other new series I've watched, that's still like being the softest part of a Diamond.

Right then, blind praise over with, let's dig into City of the Daleks, Blood of the Cybermen and TARDIS. The games are all developed by Sumo Digital, and their Wikipedia page tells me that they developed Sega Superstars Tennis, Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing, and a couple of other games I haven't heard of, and having no playing experience of their past work I didn't know what to expect, all I know is that the two I mentioned seem to have averaged 80% scores from what I've read. I mention this because as far as I know, Point and click Adventure games are an unfamiliar territory for them, and it really rather shows.

This is the part where the reviewer mentions what genre the game is in more detail, the Doctor Who games take the form of point and click Adventure type games, which on paper sounds like the best way to represent Doctor Who in video game form (Which the makers of the videogame version of the Doctor Who Top Trumps game seemingly didn't care about.), and if you looks at the trailers the game seems like it understands what a Video Game Doctor Who should be.

And then...

Once starting them up, I noticed several things, firstly the fact that the controls are not up to scratch, secondly, the graphics are godawful, and thirdly it's extremely slow paced. The controls consist of looking around and interacting with the environment with the mouse, and using the W,A,S,D buttons for moving, which sounds fairly standard until you notice the camera has a hard time behaving itself and secondly The Doctor and Amy move very awkwardly and often get caught behind centimetre high protrusions from the floor. The mouse controlled mini-games, which is just one mini-game repeated to the point of annoyance, is dragging a circular object through an electric maze with strange hit detection and slug-paced mouse speed when dragging it.

As I mentioned, the pace of the games is extremely slow, a huge contrast to proper Doctor Who stories where the plot moves very fast due to The Doctor's extreme skill and intelligence, which is something the designrs noticed the average player lacks and adjusts the puzzle difficulty accordingly. In the TV based episodes, The Doctor might discover an alien threat and defeat it in the time it takes to do several extremely minor tasks in the game versions like rerouting electricity or building something to stop Amy from being erased from time (Spoiler Alert). The reason The Doctor has human companions in the series is to provide a point of view character who is just as immediately unsure of what's going on as you are, so it's rather jarring to see The Doctor taking several minutes to do an extremely mundane task like MacGyver together a useful device which would take a few seconds for him normally, and this is why I reckon the game would be more interesting if you played as Amy all the time, since you learn things along with her rather than The Doctor who does all the explaining.

For example, at the end of the third episode 'TARDIS', you have to pilot the TARDIS, which while being every fanboy's dream, is very difficult to do for multiple reasons. First of all, despite vaguely seeing him work his magic in the episodes, you don't know how the TARDIS works, secondly, before you start doing this, you have to memorize the names of the numerous components with no mentioning that it'll be important, thirdly, you're timed by a minute and have to start from the beginning for seemingly no reason. And since you play as The Doctor whilst doing this, very much annoyed me since you as the player could act in no way like The Doctor, which is the primary reason for implementing a TARDIS flying sequence in the first place.

Another problem with the episode TARDIS, is that, the setting is that you're inside the TARDIS and you have to solve problems in there. To fans, this means "Holy Poo, we can finally explore the TARDIS!", to the makers, this thought "Let's only let the players explore one room beyond the control room that we see all the time and give them a kick up the bum and send them back to the start if they dare to explore anywhere else.". This makes the game extremely boring because it goes against all your expectations and is basically the first two games minus big enviroments and Stealth, it really shows how lazy the Game designers are when there are precisely two rooms in the whole game.

Another instance of design laziness is Amy's outfit. Yes, I know girls in miniskirts are apparently nice to look at but she wears the same outfit every single game, even when it doesn't make sense such as in Blood of the Cybermen when she's wearing a miniskirt IN THE ARCTIC, this is explained away by The Doctor in a single line saying the TARDIS is keeping her warm, something it definitely could not do before. And is very obviously the designers not bothering to make a little variation from game to game.

And being a Doctor Who fanboy, I should also mention how much I loathe the implementation of the Sonic Screwdriver, in that its use is limited to unlocking maybe three doors in the entire games and being useless in all other occaisions, even in instances where it doesn't make sense to not work such as when it fails to open a simple 20th century padlock and you have to slowly push a car slowly through the gate instead. Sure it'd be boring if everything was solved using the Screwdriver but I expected to use it at least in the smallest way possible, but no, you hardly ever use it at all, which was a massive disappointment for me.

Being episodic based, the games are all extremely short, in fact I completed TARDIS in one sitting, and the first two in maybe two or three sittings, I would've easily done those in one sitting if not for the fact that Cybermen and Daleks patrol almost every corridor and will shoot on sight if you get caught in their field of vision, and sometimes even if you clearly don't. And when you're navigating past guards, Amy and The Doctor will crouch and walk head-deskingly slowly, giving them ample time to walk back to your location and spot you, though mercifully you're suddenly allowed to run if you're spotted, not that this helps because they can and will shoot you from across the room unless you're behind something solid, then their dopey guard mentality will set in and they'll instantly forget about you once you're gone. This is a bad implementation of Stealth in a non-stealth game and annoyed me immensely.

As mentioned, if it wasn't obvious from the trailers and in-game screenshots, the graphics are extremely bad, the characters move very unlike their TV counterparts despite being motion captured by their actors, their faces barely change expression and give a noticeable Uncanny Valley look, and the graphics are...just plain bad. My guess is that they were trying to make the game playable to everyday Doctor Who fans who don't have colossal Super Computers that can render Devastator from Transformers. But come on, I have Gamecube games with better graphics than this. I would've much preferred it if they used say, exaggerated, cartoony and maybe even cel-shaded graphics, all of which would've operated normally on a standard computer I imagine.

Overall, I was immensely disappointed with games, despite the vast possibilities readily available, all they made was a boring Adventure game with barely any adventure at all. We had hopes of using the Sonic Screwdriver, battling The Doctor's arch enemies and travelling through time, we got several poorly used concepts. And then of course there was the poor design and controls, which were extremely glitchy and poor.

So that's my opinions on the Doctor Who games so far, as I said at the start, I'll probably get the other games against my better judgement, especially since the PC and Mac versions have been free in the UK, and no self respecting fan passes up the opportunity for free merchandise, despite how rubbish it is.