Review: Minecraft: Story Mode — Episode 1: The Order of the Stone
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.
From the same people that brought us Game of Thrones and Tales From the Borderlands comes their newest decision based game, Minecraft: Story Mode. Telltale Games is notorious for their rigorous storytelling and memorable characters and this time is no different. You play as Jesse, regardless of which gender you choose at the beginning, who is on a mission to create the greatest build at EnderCon, (Enderman Convention if you didn’t catch Mcversehub`s statement on its official blog). The winner gets to meet the great Gabriel of the Order of the Stone, a group of people who slayed the Ender Dragon years ago but have disbanded since. Of course, the episode would be nothing without some kind of story of revenge that spirals the characters into an adventure that they would have never seen themselves in. Someone sets out to create a Wither, a huge monster that sets out to consume everything, leaving you and your friends to seek out the Order of the Stone. You are accompanied by your friends Olivia, confidant and trusty, Axel, large and loyal, and Reuben, a pig. Telltale hit the nail on the head this time with a different, family-friendly take on one of their main installments. No prior knowledge of the original building game is needed, but it would help if you had some basic terminology.
Giving life to a game that is notorious for not having any real plot or development within the story, Telltale did an incredible job capturing the world of Minecraft . They gave insight into the inhabitants of whatever world Minecraft takes place in and what they do when they aren’t building or crafting. Inhabitants don’t go around killing every zombie and spider in sight and in fact aren’t actually set on mining for the greatest minerals to build the biggest buildings and the greatest weapons, which makes sense. With the decision-based mechanics of the episode, you give Jesse the opportunity to make his,(or her) own decisions that will essentially shape his personality as well as the way that others perceive him. Though a good majority of the decisions only result in “She/He will remember that,” some are detrimental decisions that can make or break your situation. Regardless of how you play the episode, it offers a lot more than just being a TV show that you play and allows players the chance to create the story that they couldn’t play before. For being only the first episode in this five episode series, the series gets off to an incredible start.
In early access, Dyson Sphere Program is a strategy factory sim that has been generally well received by the Steam populace. Players are put in charge of crafting an energy source that can fuel humanity’s existence , which is largely confined to virtual reality. The process involves carrying out research, acquiring resources, and gradually expanding productivity, an endeavor that typically requires heading to other plan
(boisterous laughter) We haven’t tried this or see anyone do that but we want to know what happens when you try it. This is a title that is designed to be family friendly but the freedom to play that way is definitely there. There are many online videos posted in Japan of people playing in that style where they do bad things to the NPCs. We have not seen any that do that specifically, but behaving in a sadistic way toward the NPCs is apparently very popular.
Minecraft is the brainchild of Markus “Notch” Persson, an independent game developer from Sweden. Persson’s interest in the building elements of games like Infiniminer led him to expand upon the construction pitch of the game and add in expansive exploratory and dungeon-crawling features as well. In 2009, Persson released an alpha version of Minecraft , with an overwhelmingly avid public flocking to see the game. Persson continued to develop the game into beta, with users being frequently updated with new modes, mods and abilities as it developed. Before the game even went gold in March 2012, Minecraft earned over 4 million purchases. It is currently the sixth bets selling PC game of all time with over 33 million copies sold across all platforms (over 12 million of those being on PC alone).
Having been introduced to the world of Dragon Quest when Nintendo Power included the NES copy of Dragon Warrior with a subscription, it should surprise no one that one of the upcoming games I am anticipating is Dragon Quest Builders. Taking gameplay elements from Minecraft and mixing them with story driven adventure led to the creation of a unique experience within the world of Dragon Quest. After spending some time playing the demo, I sat down with producer Noriyoshi Fujimoto to discuss the upcoming game. In addition to learning about Dragon Quest Builders, I also learned that Mr. Fujimoto and I share a common love of inflicting unspeakable horrors unto The Sims.
