Minecraft: The Best Example of Games As Art
While you don’t get to explore the world, you are given the chance to look around in order to find clues that lead to the next event. The episode doesn’t stray at all from the original and even gives you the opportunity to fight zombies and craft items to make you feel more at home, feeling a little bit like a tribute. As stated before, you don’t have to have prior knowledge of the game in order to enjoy this but some you should have some prior knowledge to understand the terminology and some of the jokes. ‘Ender Dragon’ and ‘Wither’ are not really words that everyone has in their everyday vocabulary but knowing about them will give you better understanding of why they’re bad and why the situation that Jesse and his friends are in is bad.
The big semi-mystery of Minecraft Dungeons, though, is what this has to do with Minecraft. It’s a fun, light action-RPG, sure, and the world needs more games parents can play with their kids, but Minecraft is a skin draped over the action rather than having any real effect on the game’s design. Everything looks right but that’s as far as it goes. Not a single block in the game is breakable and there’s nothing to build. This could just as easily have been My First Diablo as anything else, and the Minecraft license ends up feeling like a check box filled in on the marketing list.
Infamously garnering widespread criticism at launch, No Man’s Sky ‘s redemption story is nothing short of remarkable . Hello Games deserves all the praise in the world for sticking by its project and releasing years’ worth of substantial updates, resulting in an experience that is now among the most complete and diverse in the sandbox genre. No Man’s Sky is an easy recommendation for people who enjoy slow-paced open-world proje
Sometimes, though, developers go the extra mile and build a vertical slice to demonstrate their game. This is a lot of work – even re-using assets from the game, you’re looking at many hours of scripting and scenario design – but the payoff speaks for itself. Bravely Default’s demo is essentially its own mini-RPG, with three dungeons to conquer, five bosses to fight, and a whole bunch of enjoyable grinding to do in the interim. It has condensed versions of the streetpass and job mechanics from the main game that allow you to familiarize yourself and get to the fun quickly. The demo may take all of its assets from the main game, but it uses them to craft an experience entirely distinct from it. In doing so, it gets straight to the essence of what makes the full game fun. What’s more, if you master the demo, you get rewards to help you out in the early game, as well as a head start on streetpasses.
Think about when you were a youngster and you went to the sandbox at the park. You weren’t told “build a sand castle” by your parents. You had your shovel, bucket and action figures and you did what you wanted. Fundamentally, you had no real goal; the end result was completely secondary to what you were doing to reach it. That’s the idea of a “sandbox” game: you aren’t being told what to do and you can feel free to express yourself creatively. You can break the status quo and go to places that you couldn’t otherwise. It’s not based around how much is given for you to do; it’s based around giving you tools and letting you discover what to do yourself.
Now, Minecraft and No Man’s Sky ‘s core gameplay are not especially similar, and they largely focus on different things. The former is defined by its creative crafting; conversely, the latter focuses more on exploration, although crafting is still a major part of the overall package. Still, fans of one game are likely to get a kick out of the ot
Thankfully, the incredibly accessible nature of the game, and the way it so generously doles out moments of instant gratification, make the shared pursuit of the perfect run not a frustrating proposition that only yields its rewards upon completion, but a journey filled with a series of those little moments that define any great multiplayer experience. Monaco may not look like the multiplayer heist game we always envisioned, but it certainly feels like it.
What do I mean by that? In game development terms, a “vertical slice,” is a gameplay segment of finished or near-finished quality that showcases all the planned features of a game to potential investors. At the start of a project, these are a massive sink for time and effort, since they essentially involve doing all the hard parts of finishing a game to complete one 10-minute section. Generally, they’re seen as a bad practice. However, toward the end of development, it’s a lot easier to pull assets together for a vertical slice. Of course, if you’re shopping your game around to publishers at that stage, you’re probably in a lot of trouble, but a standalone “vertical slice” can also serve as a strong alternative to a traditional demo.
Clocking in at roughly two hours, this episode is one of the longer Telltale episodes right behind the first episode of Tales from the Borderlands. Even though it’s generally long for an episode, it doesn’t mean that time was wasted. With every passing second, new lore is learned about this rendition of the minecraft parkour world and how characters perceive the strange world around them. Who knew that people were pretty used to the idea of killing a dragon from another dimension and hosting a convention in honor of the heroes who slew it?
