Minecraft Monday - December 13

Since last week I just gave a text run down of my house I thought I'd go ahead and use some pictures to get an idea of what I'm doing as well as give myself something permanent to look back on. By the way, if you're playing Minecraft and can't figure out how to take screenshots you just need to press F1 to take away your HUD and then hit F2 to actually take the screenshot. Then just go look under the "screenshot" folder and voila, you can keep a visual record of your world. Anyways let's get this thing started.

This first shot is the outside of my house. You can see the beginnings of an obsidian chimney there on the left hand side of it. Also you can see my papyrus farm in the foreground...more on that later.

As promised here's a picture of my papyrus farm. It's not too huge, but it gives me almost a full inventory of papyrus when I go to collect. It's also not really that nice looking, but it's just there to serve a purpose. I might tidy it up a bit later, but for now I have bigger things to attend to.

Here's three pictures of the three main rooms inside my house. The first is my main hall/dance room, complete with smiling pumpkins and a jukebox/CD holder combo. The next is my treasure room, it's pretty basic, but something every Minecraft player needs. The more boxes you have the more you can sort out your junk.The final picture is my furnace room. I haven't counted up how many are exactly in there, but it's over 100...some might call it excess I call it just right.

This one is a little hard to see, but it's the walkway over to my smallest mine shaft. It doesn't really serve a purpose, but I just think it looks kind of cool. As a side note, that cobblestone you see is a monster room that was exposed and only a few feet away from my spawn point. Needless to say I died almost instantly upon first entering the world.

This is a series of pictures of Mine Station Number 1. The first shows off my Pyramid Sky Light, my own version of the X-Light 9000 from the popular X's adventure series. The next is a view from the top of the shaft that shows off my hard work and my river of obsidian that my chimney will come from. The final picture is an area I dug up to the left of the shaft with lave water falls. I've been digging out at the bottom of my shaft in hopes of finding Diamond. So far I've only hit 4 nodes, but I'm hoping digging 6 blocks up from the bottom in all ways will greatly enhance my Diamond stores.

Here's my final picture. This is the beginning of my personal library. The structure is 55 X 55 blocks, which means that it takes about 3,025 blocks to fill up the middle. Just this first foundation took me an entire Saturday. With the holiday coming on I'm hoping to get it finished soon.


Well, that's all for my world for this week. I'll keep updating my progress every Monday so check back to see how far I went. I'd also like to mention that Notch will taking the game to Beta on December 20th, so if you want to buy you have to do it now if you want to get it on the cheap and get every update from here on out for free. I'd strongly recommend doing this because even if you don't know if you love this game yet, an update he puts out might hook you on it and if you don't buy it now you'll have to pay extra for that update. Just something to think about. That's all for today. See ya some time, same place.

Saturday's VGAs (My 5 Biggest Observations) - December 11

(Note: I just want to point out that when I first typed the title in I accidentally typed Saturday's VAGs.)

1) I can't wait for Mass Effect 3- We basically didn't get anything too big from the teaser trailer, but teased I was. The thought of bringing the campaign to Earth is interesting, but seems a little Haloish. That said, if what I've heard about it being the new multi-player mode that makes it a little depressing. Let's be real Bioware, Mass Effect doesn't need a multi-player mode. I mean this is a game that's all about it's story and the combat is secondary. Leave the multi-player to the likes of COD and Halo; games with terrible stories that rely on their expert combat gameplay. Even if they do bring that into the new game it doesn't make me want it less. I would honestly pay the 60 bucks for this game just to see what happens to three or four characters (those being Ashley Williams, Grunt, Thane, and Wrex...my personal favorites), so they've basically got me into it no matter what the product looks like.

2) Blizzard gets robbed fro Best Studio- As you can see from my previous bullet point, I do love me some Bioware games, but nobody is better than Blizzard right now. Starcraft 2 took the best RTS of all-time and improved upon it in every way, thus making the new king of RTSs. That alone should've won them the award, but they also just put out an enormous expansion to the biggest game in the world, World of Warcraft. Blizzard put out two of the biggest games in the history of gaming in one year is amazing and should've given the award running away. I mean Congrats to Bioware, but they have no chance against the juggernaut that is Blizzard.

3) Neil Patrick Harris for Best Male?- I'm not saying NPH didn't do a good job as Spider-man, but this was a joke. As host he shouldn't of even been up for the award, let alone the winner. This just felt like a political thing that they gave out to give NPH more geek creed. On that note, even though I don't like Olivia Munn and think she probably fakes her way through geekdom; she has so much more geek creed than Harris and should've been this year's host.

4) No Minecraft for independents?- This was just crazy. There has never been a more popular independent game than Minecraft and it wasn't even nominated? The only reasons I can come up for this is that it's not a huge name brand among non-geeks and it's technically still in Alpha, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it was one of the biggest games of the year. If the VGAs wanted to help legitimize their awards shows they should've given this award to Minecraft and made all us geeks happy and get a deserving company some more publicity.

5) I'm going to be the blue guy in Portal 2- This one isn't really an observation, but just my opinion. Whenever I get to play some Portal 2 co-op I'm going to be playing as the blue guy...that orange guy looks like a total square.

I hope you enjoyed watching the show, I know I did. See ya later, some time, same place.

Minecraft Monday - December 6

With the arrival of my new desktop (which is amazing by the way and everything I ever dreamed of as an eighth grading playing Diablo 2 until the wee hours of the morning) my Minecraft playing time has hit an all time high. Since I had to start a new world I thought I'd just start doing a weekly post of what I was doing in the game (hopefully I'll be able to add a video version of this to Youtube, but that won't come until Christmas break when I have time to figure it out). Anyways here's the basic run down of my current housing complex in Minecraft.

When I spawned in the this new world I happened to spawn right on the coast of what I call "The Sand Desert". This is basically a huge area that's only sand with lots of cacti. Since I've already played this game quite a bit in other worlds I already had a general idea of what I wanted to do. I started out by making a little 6X6 mine shaft all the way down to bedrock, just to get some raw materials set up. That took me a few hours, but wasn't really that big of a project. Then I went out and chopped down trees until I had almost an entire inventory full of tree blocks to make into lumber. After that trying three or four days of game time I started building up my house. It only has two side rooms and one large entry hall, but each room is at least 10X10 blocks if not bigger. One of the rooms is my storage room that holds about 40 chests that are all categorized with signs. The other room is my furnace and at last count it holds right around 100 furnaces so that I can smelt cobble stone into solid stone in huge numbers. Also in that room are three chests that are completely full of coal for the smelting I do. I also built a glass walk way over to my small mine shaft. The cool thing about this is that you walk across the walkway and under you it goes all the way to bed rock. I've thinking about hollowing out the entire area under my house, just for fun. After I did that I went ahead and starting on my first major mine shaft. This one is a 20X20 mineshaft that is topped by a glass pyramid. The mine shaft isn't quite finished even after working on it for about a week and a half.

That's because I apparently dug into the biggest cave system I've ever seen. It seems like every new layer I dig down I found a new little nook that turns into a huge cave. This hasn't been bad of course because that just means that I've found tons of iron, gold, and diamond. I've been lucky in that regard because it makes my picks last longer. During this building I've also built a fairly large papyrus farm out next to my spawn point. I'm using this to get enough bookshelves to build my dream library. I'd say I have about half the blocks I need for this and should be able to finish it fairly soon. I also added a huge roof to the top of my house. It goes up above the mountain that sits next to my house and has an obsidian chimney that I hope to soon build up to the highest point of the map and make my large sign post for when I go out on adventures.

Other than that I've only done a couple of small things like making a deck by my house and things like that. I'm planning a few more projects to hopefully show on Youtube, but we'll see how that goes. Well, that's all for now. See ya next time, some time, same place.

Fallout: New Vegas Review December 3rd

I've been wanting to start writing some reviews of newer games that I've been playing, but haven't been able to find the time to 1) complete a game that merited a review and 2) take time out of an increasingly busy schedule to write up a review. I've finally been able to do both those things and have just finished Fallout: New Vegas. I know it's old as of now, but since Fallout 3 was one of my favorite games ever I felt like this was a good place to start. I'm going to give my review in five parts: story, design, game play, presentation, and overall. So, without further adieu let's get down to my first video game review.

Story: Fallout 3 and it's predecessors made up an amazing world for a player to live in and provided us with a great story that fit the world. New Vegas' main story line isn't as good as Fallout 3's, but the world as a whole has a much deeper, fleshed out story to tell. While playing through the game I found myself refusing to do the main story quests just because I wanted to see what was happening out in the Mojave and do all of the side quests. The best of these were the companion quests, which might be the best in the game. Without spoiling anything for anyone, Veronica's quest that involved the Brotherhood of Steel was one the longest, but most enjoyable quests I've ever done. It had me going from secret bunkers under a sand storm to irradiated vaults that I could barely even walk through. Another quest that I must recommend is Arcade Gannon's companion quest, which doesn't really  take a lot to do, but has a great pay-off, that I won't spoil, in the final mission. My final must see experience is anything involving the Super Mutant's of the area. You simply must go see best friend Tabitha and her friend Ronda. As I said the main quest didn't draw me as much as Fallout 3's did, but it's still very good and worth at least one play through to see the Legion and NCR's final conflict.

Design: The major new design element in New Vegas is the introduction of factions into the game. These kind of act as a better representation of Fallout 3's good/bad scale. Basically what happens is depending on your choices and actions in the game you will gain or lose the trust of different factions. Doing something for one faction might lose trust with another faction even if you might not think it does right away. This makes the game feel much more real and dynamic. This design is evident from the onset of the game as I found myself being attacked by a faction right after I left the first town because I had saved that town from the faction that attacked me. This faction scale sometimes was frustrating because it sometimes closes off some quests for you if you're not friendly with a certain group. In the end though, that gives the game an ever-changing world that feels much more real than many games that simply provide you with a good/evil scale.

Gameplay: In Fallout 3 it was usually necessary to use the game's V.A.T.S. targeting system in order to kill enemies because of how terrible the aiming was. New Vegas improved the gun combat a lot by adding iron sights to the game. I was surprised by the amount of time I started spending out of V.A.T.S. because it was easier to kill things just using my iron sights, which is something I would never do in Fallout 3. This change may of caused me to use more bullets because of the many times I just sprayed bullets at approaching enemies, but the better control over where those bullets were going was well worth it. The other major gameplay improvement was how well the companions controlled this time around. There were many times in which I didn't even notice an enemy on the screen before my companion had taken them out. Sometimes this almost felt like getting cheap experience, but overall it was very helpful in keeping my character alive. The gun play and companions drastically improve upon the last game's which make New Vegas very enjoyable.

Presentation: This is the biggest area that New Vegas fails to improve upon Fallout 3. I only encountered three or four game crashes that all came past the 40 hour mark. That said this game is littered with bugs all the way through. For a Fallout or RPG fanatic this wasn't really that big of a hang up, but it was a problem. The graphics engine didn't look that bad, but it didn't really perform as well as one would expect from this big of a release. A game that has this much in it is going to come with it's share of bugs, but this one was just ridiculous. That said, sometimes these bugs were hilarious and I actually found myself hoping I would get the glitch in the beginning of the game that finds a players head spinning like the girl from The Exorcist.

Overall: I mostly felt that this game was at best a little better than Fallout 3 and at worst just more of the same, which is never a bad thing with a game that good. New Vegas has to be down ranked a little because where it improves on the last game it just does a little bit. I would've liked to see some bigger improvements, but I can't complain about getting to play through even more Fallout. This game should probably be bought as it took me 70+ hours to complete and it would be hard to put in that much time with a single rental. Either way I'd encourage most people to at least check it out and if you're a Fallout fan, get ready for some great story and gameplay that only a Fallout game can provide.

Final Score: 8.75