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 DLC‘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.
During the early 90’s, many of us were involved in, as coined by James Rolfe, the “bit wars,” the point where competing systems developed a brand loyalty with the consumers. It was a Genesis/SNES world and the market intended for you to pick a side. But those of us who were first exposed to video games during this time didn’t originally intend to side with either Sega or Nintendo. While there were certain characteristics of each console that we preferred, our focus was never on what games were better. The first big step for any future gamer is one devoid of partisanship in the gaming community; when you first enter the gaming world, you aren’t involved in the console wars. In fact, they did not exist to you back then. I personally chose Sonic the Hedgehog as my “gateway game” simply because I liked who he was as a character. I liked his cool blue color, his tough-guy stare, and the acrobatic nature of how he moved. Level design, physics, replay value, music, even the buzz term “blast processing” meant absolutely nothing to me. It was Sonic himself that captivated me to join the gaming world.
Enter the Gungeon is a dungeon crawler with a gun-theme, hence the name. The game follows four misfit characters as they battle through procedurally-generated dungeons while fighting enemies and obtaining new guns, with the end goal being to find the ultimate legendary treasure – the gun that can kill their p
Minecraft Dungeons and Torchlight do somewhat render Fate obsolete, in the sense that they are more modern action RPGs that scratch the same itch; however, the 2005 release and its sequels are nevertheless charming and worth seeking out. They are also quite cheap on Steam, so they do not require much of an investm
This has been gone over in many other articles, but the short version is that what the player sees in VR is strong enough to trigger an instinctual expectation of motion that, when the body doesn’t feel it, causes a nausea reaction. You’re seeing something that the brain knows is wrong based on physical feedback; the most likely cause based on data from the last several million years of evolution is some kind of ingested toxin, so systems get purged to remove the poisons from the body as fast as possible. Personally I just get a nasty headach and woozy feeling, but other people need an emergency bucket available. The cost/benefit ratio to FPS VR is completely off, no matter how cool it seems before the reaction kicks in. At this point I’ve learned the best thing to do with a VR FPS is to poke in for no more than two to three minutes to get a sense of the environment, and then switch back to the monitor and never use the headset for it again.
A lot of us remember our very first video game rather fondly. While I’m not going to explain my own life story, I will say that I was first hooked on video games through my older cousins’ Sega Genesis systems, specifically the Sonic the Hedgehog series. Much of my interest in gaming as a whole came from the Yuji Naka-created mascot. It wasn’t the only set of games on the Genesis available to me at the time, but it was without question the series that hooked me. It began my own journey humbly, but in retrospect, it’s actually quite difficult to articulate why it was so interesting to me. This is a situation that many of us recall, but rarely ever examine deeply. Think about your first video game, the one that convinced you to pick up a controller and keep playing till the end credits, the one that convinced you to try another game afterward. What exactly was it about that first game that hooked you and urged you to keep playing from then till today? In essence, what appealed to you about that game that made you “a gamer”?