Minecraft

Standing in the sunrise on a high place and looking over everything I have built and knowing that it continues much longer than it is possible to see is like a gaming experience beyond every builder/strategy game I have ever played. Or that feeling when you are digging around and suddenly drops down into hole and there is complete darkness and then hear the presence of a spider and zombie. So many similar moments in this game that are something beyond you usual gaming experience. Overall one of the games that makes most use of the dynamics between light and dark, like those moments when you encounter a lava lake in the night and the warmth of that glow. Fucking beautiful game.

If you're looking for a good sandbox game to play with friends this is it. My minecraft experience was extraordinary. From the first time I played this I felt great even if I was five and scared of mobs. I still enjoyed the game, the vast environment and the creativity in it. Minecraft may not interest everyone but it does have its variety of play styles. In my experience I mostly was a builder. Was I good? No but I had fun and grew from that and got better at it. Minecraft most definitely taught me something which was patience. It sounds dumb but I was pretty impatient when I was younger. Minecraft taught me patience and things take time.


A problem with minecraft I have is well it got a bit boring after a while. I mean as you grow older you will grow out of things but outgrowing minecraft? That just didn't feel right. I tried to find some way to enjoy the game more again but I really couldn't until I started messing around with redstone and that opened huge doors for me to new stuff to enjoy. I really thought minecraft would be boring once again after i've done a lot but they started updating mostly consistently and the game expanded on what it was a couple years back. I feel like if minecraft wants to become a hundred year game I think they could do that just maybe with more consistency. I've enjoyed Minecraft for a long time and I would hope to see it up there with other games lasting till I've had kids.

If you ever want nostalgia for minecraft listen to this
Moog City

I have many bones to pick with Microsoft and Mojang in how they've handled this game.
Mind you, the actual additions they've given us are more than excellent. The game as it existed in 2011 was clearly a one-man labor of love and nothing resembling the multi-faceted sandbox it is now - ugly textures, a limitation of block placements and palettes, and an overall janky gameplay which I remember all too well from when I started playing. And yet, despite all that, it became a major success the world over due to its versatility. Nowadays, it's become infinitely better, and the best and brightest members of the community have used that added capability to create some truly impressive things.

However, there are still some weaknesses which exist in modern versions of Minecraft, some of them are directly related to the expansion of the game. A main one is inventory management: the increase in the number of blocks available to the player should have implied a growth in the size of the inventory, but it remains the same as it was in Beta. Personally, I think that having a permanent upgrade available to the inventory is long overdue. It could be a beacon effect or an enchantment, but ultimately those are late-game solutions, when I have these issues even in the early resource-gathering stage. Had the bundles been included in 1.19, they would've been a great help.

This ties into the other major problem with the game as-is: a push for large updates from Microsoft leads to high expectations from fans, which in turn leads to a cycle of chronic disappointment when Mojang inevitably comes short of them. I have to mention that none of the post-1.13 updates have been anywhere near disappointing.

There seemed to be this phenomena happening at one point where everyone just started feeling very sentimental and nostalgic towards this game.

If you don't know what I mean, go search up "minecraft nostalgia" or something similar and you'll find a bunch of videos where people are feeling all sentimental about some game they played years ago and show us how much they miss those "good old times".

I've played this game many years ago and yet, I don't feel any nostalgia for it. I haven't picked up the game in years, mind you, but it leaves me to question myself. Have I yet to "grow up"? Am I a manchild or a monster because I'm not crying in front of people about how much things have changed over the years and how it's just not the same anymore? Or maybe I have "grown up" or grown out of it and I've accepted that all my memories for this game are something I should put in the past and move on from?

Perhaps, Minecraft has a similar situation to the older CODs. If you were playing a COD game past it's two year service, you will be informed by many people that "you had to be there" and you are not having as fun as you could have if you played on launch date. You can blame Activision for the smart idea of segmenting the multiplayer community by constantly releasing and abandoning games on a yearly basis.

So for Minecraft's case, you probably had to engage with the community, talk to friends about it, go on forums, watch all these youtubers, download these mods, etc, etc, if you wanted to "be there". If you didn't engage with the community at the time, you will never will, as the community overtime has transformed into something else entirely.

I never worshipped or was otherwise obsessed over any youtubers, I never touched the modscene, I never went to any forums, I was only a bystander, watching all of that shit fly by. All I did was play the game with my friends and family. As a result, I guess I "wasn't there" and people will tell me "I had to be there".

Maybe some pseudointellectual, postmodernist video essayist can post a video and convince me enough to cry about this videogame I played years ago.



Regardless It's a good game :)

I fully understand and acknowledge that calling a sandbox game "unfocused" or "boring" is foolish. But I really don't know what else to say, the vanilla gameplay loop is great for a short amount of time, but rather easy to get bored of (especially with the lack of direction!) - yet mods simultaneously feel extremely overwhelming.

Its a game I'd pick up every few years or so to play on a friends' server (vanilla or mods), play heavily for a few weeks, get my fill and quit. Rinse and repeat.

Perhaps I'll be able to work out and articulate why Minecraft doesn't click, because I've certainly enjoyed similar sandbox-y games, however I'll just chalk it down to it being a me problem. (spectacular soundtrack though!)