Minecrack
So, as I may or may not have made it clear earlier in my blogging, I have been picking up and playing various video games to keep myself distracted during the stressful application and graduation process. This allows my mind to slip into a sort of mindless puzzle building or really anything that does not require I think. In the process of playing these mindless distractions I had the strange inspiration to share them all with the various internet users who… lets say frequent this site/blog/rant thing. The following set of pictures are from a game called Minecraft, which I talked about in my previous post.
Project Fort or something
I just wanted to do a quick little video, because screenshots don’t really capture the essence of what I was up to (That’s bullshit for “Fraps is easy to use, edit, and put on youtube”)
For more about the construction you can visit the gallery of screenshots I was taking as I slowly created the structure here
That’s really all there is to it. I could go into some amount of detail about the various stuff I had to do in order to get the hill to cooperate. This included unloading a virtual metric fuckton of dirt in order to fill up the various nooks and crannies which composed the hill prior th my arrival.
Once I was done filling the entire area in with dirt, I began to work on the first level of the outer wall which you can see in some of the early shots from the gallery. I didn’t really think to document my work as I worked on the 3 & 4th floors, but those are pretty useless anyway, so really nothing of value was lost.
I do have some future plans to not only extend the tower that has started at the top-level and extend it to the maximum build limit, but that could take some time and a lot of ladders. The second interest of course would be filling in the bottom layer with a prison of sorts. The idea here being to dig all the way to the bedrock level and create some sort of maximum security prison using Iron doors.
The other project has been working slowly on Fable 2
Don't be fooled
Now, for those of you who may not be familiar with the fable series, it was a game released by Microsoft to give the Xbox a decent RPG for the oh so causal gamer. The real appeal of the game was the notion that you truly did control the destiny of your hero [IE the tracks all lead to the same place, but you get to choose which mountainside you drive thought]. There was also the added element that the game was simple enough that just about anyone could pick it up and be mildly proficient at the process.
Being the type to love easy games and time sinks, Fable 2 seemed like the perfect kind of thing to take my mind of accomplishing any real life goals. So, if you’re not familiar with the Fable series, I’ll give you a quick rundown. You get the ability to use Ranged, Melee, and Magic at relatively easy access on the control panel. You go through the game either becoming good or evil determined by the various quest that you embark on.
Well, it turns out, in addition to being able to choose between giving gifts to all the small children and the pointless and demeaning manslaughter of all their parents you can also go into the real estate business. As a World of Warcraft player, the very notion of collecting arbitrary numbers for the sole purpose of collecting more arbitrary numbers was essentially an RPG boner. As such, I made it my goal to try to own every single piece of property in the game. This is pretty easy once you realize the game offers you the ability to make beers and charge close to 300 gold / beer. When you realize the most expensive item in the game is only about 1,000,000 gold and you can make about 10 beers in the average minute it becomes a quick and simple game of grinding and collecting.
So now I sit after god knows how many hours of going through the game with only the Million dollar mark to reach with all other property having been bought. At this point, if I take a 24 hour break from the game and log back in I’ve already collected 1/8th of that value anyway.
I also wanted to try my look at getting every legendary weapon in the game, but I have found out that I can’t actually use the aim feature on the guns all that well, and thus getting the game’s “Red Dragon” pistol has proven incredibly difficult. In addition to that, apparently there is some nonsense about certain weapons requiring an evil alignment, and such a thing just drives down my fake profit.
The game itself is terribly easy, with the only real thought process required being to cast time stop, throw some fireballs, maybe swing your sword for a bit, and then collect all the fancy orbs on the ground. Any steps above and beyond that are honestly just working too much on the thing. And don’t even worry about dying, as long as you stockpile on the incredibly cheap and body slimming foods, you will never find yourself in a situation where the possibility of dying in-game is even a remote possibility.
I suspect this was to keep the game appealing to the common and lazy man (eg me), but it does come off as very disheartening when the most climatic thing you ever had to do in the game was trying to get enough targets on an imaginary shooting range. It’s worth about one play through because the game makes it incessantly clear what the good and evil actions are, and other than cosmetics there are honestly no real consequences for even paying attention to the actions you take. I could kill 12,000 villagers, but if I just let the +30 Good Morale from the temple I bought and paid for in addition to the rent I under charge them for, I’d be the most beloved hero they had seen in only an hour’s time.
In conclusion, don’t buy Fable 2, it comes off a lot like blue balls. You really think you’re going to get something out of it only to discover it was a waste of your time and likely someone else’s.
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