Mountains remain one of the most popular places for players to set up their homes. There’s plenty of high ground safety and the view is simply gorgeous. However, rather than building on top of a mountain, the new trend seems to be the build a home within the mount
For absolutely massive builds, the biggest challenge is to get enough material and to actually make them work. Builds like this are probably the hardest feat to accomplish in Minecraft Guide , but it’s also the most rewarding feeling ever to finally be able to look at a finished creat
The expansive nature of Minecraft ’s world is also what contributes to this fully realized sandbox vision. The worlds are virtually infinite (on PC) and provide ample opportunity to adapt and explore multiple biomes and topography. There’s no real reason to go to one area over the other, but players are frequently compelled to do so. It’s an embrace of wanderlust, one that has influenced many other games like the upcoming No Man’s Sky . You have no objective beyond the horizon and there might be seriously dangerous monsters out there. You might not be well-equipped or even supposed to go there at the current equipped state. But you keep going, just to see. Just to explore.
Many other gamers in my age group were hooked during the Super Nintendo/Sega Genesis era, while the older crowd are likely to have the original NES in their hearts. Some might even cite the original Atari 2600 as their first step into the world of gaming, with their reverence for the medium enduring even the colossal gaming crash of the 1980’s. On the other side of things, we have younger gamers who are being raised on Playstation consoles as new as the Playstation 4 and even Microsoft’s Xbox line, which didn’t appear until the new millennium. We also mustn’t forget those of us who played PC games during our childhood, even the consistently ridiculed edutainment games like Oregon Trail II . We’re all given so much history and so many options to choose from as fans within this medium, but those of us who call ourselves gamers find something truly fascinating with games as a whole.
The episode doesn’t stop there, because once you’ve returned from either of those two paths, you head off as a group with whichever other character you picked up in the first episode (Lukas for me) to find the last member of the Order of the Stone, Soren the Architect. This path also follows a relatively fast-paced action sequence, but falls a little short with its sub-par cliffhanger. It’s only episode two, but the weird events surrounding the Order of the Stone and exactly what they’re going to do to stop this crazy Wither Storm seems as though it will never be resolved.
The action from the first episode hasn’t left at all and if anything, managed to speed itself enough where you practically have to do a second playthrough just to catch it again. There are plenty of moments that could have been explained more and it’s upsetting that they weren’t in the short time it took to finish the episode. Things like Olivia’s disappointment in finally meeting her hero and Lukas’ role in Jessie’s group of friends could have been touched upon a little bit more but the fact that they weren’t makes me fear for future episodes. It leaves you with a, “oh, that was it?” feeling that should never be felt while playing any game, especially right when you begin getting into the action and quickness of it all. Hopefully, the third episode will capitalize on a few more important moments within the main character’s development and slow down a little in order to give everyone the attention that they deserve.
Let me begin by saying that this episode is particularly short, like a little over an hour short. I guess that’s what happens when the first two episodes are only separated by a few weeks, but the fact that to get the entire experience you have to play through it twice sort of pans out well because it then makes the episode about two hours long. Still, a much longer playthrough for the sequel was expected considering the complication of the events taking place. That being said, the episode covers the areas following either Elligaard or Magnus and each path allows you to follow and understand more of the world of Minecraft. There are a few inconsistencies that don’t make sense and some new events that don’t necessarily pertain to Jessie or his/her friends, but that doesn’t label the episode as terrible. By inconsistencies, I mean there were points in the game where I thought, “why can’t they just do this/that in order to progress?” One moment that comes to mind is when a character falls into a hole and can’t seem to get out when they could have built their way out as they were able to in the first episode. The rest of the episode is littered with little things like that that make you scratch your head and ask those questions.
Looking back at my own experiences, my situation isn’t too much different than a lot of the experiences seen in the younger crowd who are being introduced to Minecraft or Wii Sports today. It might seem silly at first, but the appeal of these games is so vast and varied that it’s difficult to be scared away from gaming that badly. It’s an age where what defines a game is so ambiguous and diverse that it’s near impossible to be turned off by absolutely every title on the market. This is why games are such a fantastic medium today; there’s just so much to play. New niches are being formed and filled as we speak and even the most jaded, cynical technophobe would have to find some aspect of a video game that’s worth a considerable look. It’s hard to explain what exactly makes games so magical, since we all have our own little moments of fascination with games, ones that kept us playing throughout the entire story and into the sequel.
