Happy Minecraft Guide: Bricks

Bricks look nice.

Sadly they’re a bit rare in the survival mode of Minecraft, so it’s necessary to do a little expedition to gather up the materials.

First thing you’ll need is a boat. Make a few by putting wooden planks in a ‘U’ shape.

Boats are a bit fragile and will break if you hit the shore too hard, so be a bit careful with them.

Now make a couple of dozen torches, a few shovels and bring along a sword or bow, and some food as well. It might take a little while to find some good deposits, depending on how the map you started on spawned.

Bricks come from clay. Clay tends to spawn in sandy areas next to the ocean and looks fairly similar to stone.

Clay is a little bit rare and you may have to go quite far from home in order to get a decent amount of the stuff. Typically a clay deposit will yield somewhere between 15 to 40 blocks and it’ll take a few minutes of exploration to find each deposit.

The best way to search for clay is to ride your boat around the coast and nearby islands, keeping an eye out for any deposits and marking your way back home with a few torches.

Make sure to keep putting those torches down. Getting lost and losing your precious cargo really wouldn’t be fun.

Once you’re all done, head right back home and bake all the clay into bricks, then combine them up into blocks ready for construction.

The bricks go in a 4 by 4 pattern in order to make the blocks themselves.

Now you can make a lovely brick villa.

Super Happy Minecraft Guide: The First Night

The First Night:

The basic aim for the first day is to get a shelter up and running before nightfall, when all the zombies, spiders, skeletons and creepers pop out from the shadows to try and murder you.

First of all, go go up to the nearest available tree trunk and hold down the left mouse button. Your character will start punching it so hard that a block will pop out and land in your inventory.

Keep punching all the way up the tree until you’ve collected all the wood blocks. Then do the same to another two or three nearby trees.

Press ‘i’.

You should see your high definition rendered character and about 15 -30 wood blocks in your inventory.

So what to do with those blocks? Well, they’re pretty much useless outside of decoration right now, so plonk the whole lot down into the crafting box.

Opposite the arrow you should see some planks.

Right click on those planks repeatedly til you run out of wood, or reach 64 of them.

Now pop them back into your main inventory.

Take those planks and place them back in the crafting section. Then right click, and place two rows of plants facing vertically.

Some sticks should appear. 12 sticks should do just fine for now. You can put the sticks into your inventory by left clicking in any empty slot of your inventory.

Now plant those planks in all four slots of the crafting box. On the opposite side you should see a workbench available for collection. Collect it.

Place the workbench in slot 1. Then place it down wherever you like in the world and right click on it.

You’ll find that your inventory has a 9 slot crafting box, instead of 4. This lets you create all kinds of awesome things like tools, furniture, fences, signs, minecarts and so on.

The first thing you’ll need to do with the workbench is to use it to a pick, which will allow you to mine coal and stone.

Place two sticks vertical to each other, then three planks horizontally above the sticks, like so;

Now you have a pick.

Place the pick in slot 1 and get ready to go surveying for coal. Depending on the map it may take a little while. The easiest and safest place to find some is usually on mountains.

Coal is generally found near deposits of stone and looks like this;

Keep searching around til you find some, then use the pick to gather up a good amount of it, as well as dozen or so blocks of stone.

Now place a piece of coal directly above a stick in the crating box to create some torches. A dozen torches should be plenty for now.

Now, find the nearest hill or mountainside and begin digging into it. After you’ve cleared yourself a neat little cave, place a couple of blocks to wall off the entrance and put some torches all about to make it nice and safe. You may need to completely wall off the entrance to protect yourself from arrows and spiders.

Congratulations, you have made a safe little hidey hole in which to survive the first night of minecraft.

Place your workbench down and make a couple of stone tools, maybe dig out the cave a touch more and read up on some crafting recipes. Once morning comes you’re free to build whatever you please.

TaluxB: Unnecessary Levels

Extra content isn’t necessarily a good thing. Seeing ’90 hours of gameplay’ written on the back of a box is almost a negative to me. 90 hours of what, exactly. How do you even fill up a game with so many hours of interesting content?

Four-fifths of this room should have been deleted.

A longer game isn’t abetter game by definition. It’s a strange kind of money-to-time rational economic logic that games have. Movies don’t need to run for three hours to give a great experience. Books don’t need to be a thousand pages to tell an engrossing story. Yet reviewers will frequently fault a game for being less than fifteen hours long.

I can think of a lot of awesome games that were relatively short. Resident Evil 2, Call of Duty 4 (single player), Metal Gear Solid, the first three Silent Hill games, Half Life 2 and Portal are some of my favorite games. Most of those only lasted for five hours or so.  The levels in Mario 3 were tiny in comparison to any modern platformer, but in my opinion it’s still the best game in the genre – perhaps because the levels were so quick, varied and interesting. Those first couple of Sonic games were also pretty compact. The original Fallout could be completed in just a couple of hours.

The main argument I have against a lot of longer games is that they force developers to put in artificial barriers and obnoxious challenges. Respawning enemies, grinding, finding the pointless red key, mazes, excessively difficult sections, hordes of weak monsters or ridiculous amounts of backtracking are all things that make gaming a chore.

The big hallway in Resident Evil 4 is a perfect example of unnecessary filler. Leon, the main character, finds himself battling through an old castle filled with undead, parasitic monks who are led by a 3 foot tall guy wearing a Napoleon hat. The castle itself has a bunch of really cool stuff in it, like a giant mechanical statue Napoleon guy running after you, semi-invisible acid spewing insect things in the sewers, an optional shooting gallery mini-game, a predator-like monster that you kill by freezing it with nitroglycerine, insanely fun cutscenes, and self-destructing sunglasses. It has  so many great moments and yet, for some reason, there’s a big hallway filled with horrible numbers of boring, respawning enemies. Why? Why, other than gluing a half hour on to the game, would you bother putting in the hallway at all? There’s already tonnes of awesome content in that part of the game. It’s almost like there’s a sign on the door saying ‘you must endure half an hour of crap before getting to the fun part.’ It ends up making an otherwise fun section into one that just feels mediocre.

I can only wish that room had just a couple of enemies, perhaps a suspenseful moment and a note or two to read. Then it would have been cool or creepy instead of just boring.

I’d love to see more games where the experience is shorter but more exciting. A game can always have replay value through the use of challenges or bonus stages. An FPS like Call of Duty 4 can have a multiplayer segment that makes up for the short single player mode. Reducing the immersion and excitement of a game just to put a few more hours in seems like a bit of a crime.

Foreign Legion: Buckets of Blood

Let’s face it – this game is not too awesome. Not like ‘terribly terribly bad‘, not also ‘so bad that’s just epic bad‘ – but certainly nothing extremely exciting, at least in my book.

They're coming to get you, Barbara.

Advertising blurbs present ‘Foreign Legion: Buckets of Blood‘ , developed by Sakari Indie, as a cartoon third-person shooter. Personally, I’d toss it into the ‘tower defense’ basket as well, with a town hall in the role of a ‘tower’ in here. The plot surely doesn’t avert the player’s simple mind with any unnecessary and unpredicted complexity.

The Town Hall, where civilians gather. You can't enter it, which is kinda lame.

Local villagers have barricaded themselves in the said town hall and our lonely hero, a Lego figure-like marine soldier is supposed to protect them, by shooting out his little arsenal at the incoming waves of other Lego figure-like creatures. Namely, partisans that are constantly and blindly storming the town hall, trying to kill the civilians at all costs. At all costs, meaning – they frigging run right into the barricade and blow themselves up to just slightly damage it, which makes me questions their tactical sense. Although it isn’t directly stated in the game, it is rather obvious the plot takes place in some Iraqi village – we have desert environment, petrol excavators in the background and faceless Arab-like enemies with dynamite sticks wrapped around their waist in an ole’ time classic way. The character can jog to the nearest radio station during the intervals between the waves and order some supplies, like ammo or repairing tools for the hall. He can also shoot innocent chickens, there is even a special achievement to collect for that. All that slaughter lasts ten minutes, until the rescue chopper arrives to collect the civilians…

Rescue 69, I see what you did here.

… and the game is over. Mission accomplished. Done. Finito. There are no other missions you could try. Oh wait, you can finish the whole round again on a higher level. But that’s about it. 10 minutes of gameplay for about 10 dollars. … sure, for about ten minutes, there is total mayhem, with lots of KILLING and tons of BLOOD. Hence the exciting title, BUCKETS OF BLOOD! It is all just bloody awesome, right?

They really look like Lego figures

… right?!

He was shooting me, for like, 9 minutes straight, before the chopper arrived. Chest of steel. The chicken is pretty indifferent about all that.

..well…

The game is fun to play at some point, before it becomes slightly boring. Partisans attack in waves so the game starts to get pretty repetitive – even though it is extremely short, as I already mentioned With the A.I. intelligence rather low, enemies are set only on either shooting the character or rushing at the hall’s gates. Actually, it is extremely easy to finish the game on lower levels thanks to some kind of a glitch. You just have to kill all partisans but one shooter – and just let him shoot the character for almost 9 minutes straight, blocking his way to the town hall, till the chopper comes. Yeah, your marine is just that invulnerable.

3-D rendered graphics is so-so, with the Lego style being slightly ridiculous – although I have to admit, it looks pretty good in general, especially background, definitely nothing eye-sore to pick on. There are apparently 10 achievements to collect on Steam, which makes the game misleadingly sound like a longer one, but majority of them can be collected within one round only.

Note where the plane with supplies and the dropped supplies are situated in the air

Truth to be told, ‘Foreign Legion: Buckets of Blood’ would work pretty decently as a free flash game, because it’s fun for a while. However, for a PC game costing 7-10 dollars, it performed much below my expectations – mostly due to its longevity. I heard producers work on extra free DLC, I presume that’s good news, since adding a few more missions would definitely help this game. But we will see how the situation unfolds in the future.

Little Wheel

Hello all, name’s Mino, I’m taluxb’s friend and i decided to join him in the hard task of writing a gaming blog. Let’s hope I don’t suck too much, since English is not my first language. On that occasion, I decided to start with something court yet nifty.

Little Wheel, first "chamber"

‘Little Wheel’ is a very short flash adventure game. It’s rather easy (up  to 10 minutes to finish), telling the story of a little robot reviving the city of robots, after an accidental power shortage that has shut the city down for the mere 10 ,000 years. Nothing terribly difficult in here, especially with all the interaction points  marked with big circles. What won my heart here was the elegance. The game is incredibly stylish, reminding me a bit of those 1920s movies I watched in high school. I dig that nice jazzy music in the background, warm sepia-like coloring and old sci-fi flicks design.

It’s like a delicious cupcake after your main course. Devouring is a rather quick process, but you’re definitely enjoying the aftertaste for a longer while.

Play This Game