Here’s a video I captured of my last moments trying to contain animals in a field. They drove me mad, it took me about an hour in total…well it made me laugh at least:

Minecraft is a beautiful thing, I’m not talking about the endless variety of wonderful multiplayer mods or user generated creations that boggle the mind. I’m simply talking about the core, single player experience. It’s wonderful. If you’re an every day player and know all this already, or if you’re bored of the game – this article isn’t for you, this is for the player who hasn’t turned it on in a while, or even for someone who’s always been on the fence about it.

I’ve jumped in and out of Minecraft several times over the last few years, it always grabs me and forces me to obsess over it for hours on end. The obsession over time fades away as the challenge of survival is met with ease and the excitement of exploration is dulled. It has been about a year since I played it last and oh my, has it changed. If you’re in the same position I was in and have left it a while since your last played, I urge you to download it again and just play the living crap out of it.

I contracted a blasted cold this weekend and found myself for no particular reason downloading Minecraft, I honestly can’t remember why I did it but it seemed to be the only thing I could play for hours on end while I waited for my cold to subside. The game ticks over at your own pace, you use the reliability of the quickly flowing day / night cycle to dictate what tasks you should be doing. The game is pure user emergence, all tasks and missions you end up performing are your own, you decide what to do and the time of day decides when. You’re not going to go out and chop down wood in the middle of the night for example. The game has a creativity it impresses on a player in a very invisible and unimposing way. The new Portal 2 level designer for example, while impressive and beautifully designed- I feel like I don’t have the time or energy to dedicate into learning and developing with it. I’ve never felt that way with Minecraft even though a huge chunk of my time spent playing it is spent designing buildings, terraforming landscapes and creating artificial landmarks. I think this is because the creative side of the game is bred out of a eagernesses to survive and progress. If you want to advance in the game you have to be creative.

The idea of advancing or completing Minecraft is an idea I have never previously entertained, that was up until I discovered and abandoned mine. This changed everything for me, it was so unexpected (yes I know I’ve been out of the loop for a while!) and so exciting – and scary. I found my first monster spawner, followed the cave system into vastly deep caverns, discovered new creatures and huge quantities of rare materials I had never had before. I wonder how many of these ‘dungeons’ there are out there, it was like jumping into the Mines of Moria or something, as if the previous inhabitants of this mine (complete with rails and wooden support beams) had just dug too deep. Hours I spent in that cave system, hours – ferrying materials up to my house which was fortunately close by. The underground as ever is a dangerous place, many times I lost my life to uncontrollable streams of lava or unsuspecting mob spawns.

Back on the surface I was entertaining myself with farming, I was growing wheat which I would then feed to chickens which would then produce eggs which I would use to produce more chickens, which I’d use to collect feathers and meat.I was also growing cane for sugar and paper, I herded cows with wheat across fields into my pen so I can source milk and leather from them, I grew mushrooms in a dark, dank cellar beneath my house and I even grew pumpkins which I used to create friendly golums to defend it all at night. It’s an incredible and surprisingly logical eco-system – I do admit to having the Wiki up on my trusty iPad helping me out from time to time, discovering how to do this and that but I tried to avoid spiralling too far into it as I want some surprises to be discovered naturally. There’s still so much more to it, I read the words ‘potions’ and ‘enchantments’ – what the fuck do they do and how do I make them?!

Bio-domes is also something I had not experienced before, this also came hand in hand with maps. As soon as I discovered paper I instantly remembered the buzz about maps in previous coverage on the net, I looked up the recipe and found out about the compass that way too. I made it my mission to chart the immediate world around me. When you craft a map the centre position is from where you crafted it, so that means you always have a frame of reference to where you are in relation to where you made it. Setting off from my typically green flat-land I soon discovered completely different regions; snowy hills, rolling deserts, dense jungles, dank swamps and impossibly high cliffs. It’s fantastic, a constantly shifting, tightly packed series of landscapes to explore – each one offering unique resources like mushrooms, snowballs and various different types of tree and fauna.

The fact that every element of the game feeds back into itself in a seemingly endless loop of possibilities is something I’ve always found remarkable about Minecraft. Now however, it’s the new found thrill of exploration – I haven’t even wandered into an NPC town yet after a good 20 hours of play-time! I’ve no idea what’s going on there still. The fact that there’s these towns and dungeons, different dimensions, achievements and all this game-stuff in there on top of the endless free-form creative game-play suddenly transforms the single player experience (for me) into something more than just building giant penis statues.

Love it (still) 10 /10

I don’t usually post little news bits like this but I just want to help spread the word of the incredibly beautiful adventure game ‘The Dream Machine’ – it’s a wonderfully imaginative game with a fantastic, mature and soulful script, wildly surreal story and setting with deeply sinister undertones.

It’s an artistic marvel as every game asset and animation has been captured in stop motion through a real camera. It’s brilliantly ambitious and looks just gorgeous. You can pick up chapters 1 – 2 on the Steam store for £3.19 or all 5 chapters for £9.59. Go get!

So yes, like some sort of infection of its own, I have become completely obsessed with Day Z. Every time I log-on the game feels brand new, the emergent scenarios are constantly shifting in this weird, inter-dimensional persistent world. This evening I took my first venture into night time survival and boy, the experience is starkly different to day time. My first realization was about the use of flairs, they are your best friend in the dense, moonlit night; flairs burn long and bright but they are also used as communication devices. Get high up on a building and look closely at the horizon and you will likely see flickers of light darting through fields and emanating out of towns – it’s a good chance people are close to those spots, dare you go investigate?

Below is a 6min edited video of my first night in Day Z, it was an eventful hour full of terror, companionship, violence and cold blooded murder…

Am I behind the times here? I don’t know but if you’ve not heard about the new and extremely popular DayZ mod for Arma 2 then let me introduce it to you.

DayZ is a 50 player, persistent, PvP / Coop, survival horror simulator. Essentially the entire 200 sq km map of Chernarus from Arma 2 has been infested with Zombies and its your job to simply survive. This is not so easy considering it’s perma-death. That’s right, if you die after 6 hours then that character is dead forever, all of your equipment, food and weapons you may have salvaged along the way will remain on your dead body. Your character is persistent across servers meaning everything you acquire and your current stats such as blood loss, hunger and thirst etc maintains itself across multiple servers.

I’ve just had my first 5 hour session with it, it’s a slow-burn that’s for sure but it’s clearly unlike anything else. Your vulnerability adds such a tension and atmosphere to the world, you move cautiously trying not to make any noise or give away your position. Navigating through the world presents you with an endless stream of emergent situations, if you see a house you can either ignore it or walk up to it in hope of finding supplies, each route comes with its own dangers and rewards. One thing I’ve quickly learnt however is that the biggest danger in this world isn’t the zombies, it’s other players. There are no teams in this game, everyone is on the same ‘side’ but how individuals or groups decide to behave within this format is completely unrestricted. People can be more likely to shoot you in the back and loot your body rather than take a risk and team up with you.

The whole experience to me feels like a short-form Fallout or Stalker MMO, it has that dessolate vibe and you as the player are regularly interacting with new characters friendly or hostile, the difference being that these characters are real people. I have just spent 4 hours stalking the out-skirts of a city looking for scraps of supplies with a complete stranger, a bond was formed and it was clear we were both on the side of collaboration. I trusted him to the extent of leaving my PC and going to make a tea, while he waited he could have easily stabbed me and taken all of my useful gear but he didn’t, he just waited for me. This meant that when he was shot in the leg by a concealed sniper hiding somewhere from inside the town, I felt compelled to sacrifice my bandages and water in order to heal him.

I’m sure we would have carried on for hours more but alas, the server crashed. The mod is still in alpha at the moment so there are bugs – but this is being regularly updated. It’s easily the most exciting thing to come out of the Arma modding scene in years, there’s already talk about porting it over to Arma 3, this just makes me all the more excited.

I expect a lot from Arma mods, but I never expect to experience anything quite so unique – there is nothing like this anywhere else. I can tell you with full confidence that no AAA game studio would ever take the risk to make something like this and there’s also no other game engine in the world which would be able to support it quite in the way that this one does. This is an experience that many people have dreamed about, a brutal game about survival which is exclusively multiplayer. It’s a game experience where relationships, roles, objectives and ambitions are invented by the players, almost improvisationally. It’s playful, scary and deadly – the feeling you get when slowly approaching a lone stranger on the highway is complex and questions instantly race through your head; friendly or hostile? Should I run? Should I speak to him? Should I kill him first?

It’s great, great, great, great, great.

Below is a short, unedited clip of me attempting to stealth past a zombie infested town on my own:

And below is another one where two strangers saved my life:

Check out this video below, it’s two guys playing DCS A-10C, a balls to the wall combat flight simulator. This game is so complex I’m only 200 pages into its 500 page manual and I still have no bloody idea what I’m doing. The game demands so much but as this video shows, the rewards (especially if you have a like-minded gamer buddy or two)  look like some of the most satisfying gaming achievable. This is far up there with Arma when it’s working as it should.

There’s a new 19sq km island announced for the upcoming military sim Arma 3, it looks a bit like Arma 2. This island is in addition to the 900sq km island of  Limnos, quite why Bohemia feels they need this extra island is beyond me when they allready have such a large land-mass to play with. My guess is that it’s a tutorial island similar to Útes from Arma 2. I’m giddy with excitement for Arma 3, especially after recently purchasing a Track IR 5 (review inbound soon). Yes I’m a mega-geek and I’m proud of it.

Trailer of the new island below:

Looks nice doesn’t it? I’m not sure about those gun sounds though or especially the music. I expect the worst but I really hope that Bohemia puts some resources towards their audio as it has always been the ugliest feature of their games. Especially with voice acting, see video below for an example, and yes that is in-game music!

Fancy playing a new Bohemia Interactive game? Yeah me too. Well this one is a remake of the old Carrier Command, it’s looking a bit like Planetside 2 which also makes me excited. I’m lazy so I’m just copy / pasting this from the press release:

Playable in the P&C Beta is a considerable slice of the Strategic Campaign. At the start of this mode, players will have to set a few starting parameters, like the number of islands (up to 9 in the P&C Beta – 30+ in the full game), the ratio of captured islands and enemy strength. Then, by conquering and establishing a network of bases for manufacturing, mining and defense, the campaign is pushed forward, with the ultimate goal being to destroy the opposing enemy carrier. Overall, the gameplay experience in the Strategic Campaign is very similar to the main, story-driven, Gaea Mission campaign, which will be present in the full and final game. However, it does not include the first-person shooter missions, cinematic cutscenes and tutorials. Therefore, to help participants with finding their way into game, a brief and basic manual is supplied together with the beta.

I’m really excited to give this a go, there’s a trailer which is pretty epic, epic in an unfortunate ‘choirs + metal’ sort of way:

I’ll be playing the proverbial shit out of the game this weekend so I’ll report back on how I find it.

Oh, the Beta costs money unfortunately, I’m still not sure I think about these paid-for betas but I guess if it keeps studios alive then it’s for the best. Sign up here https://store.bistudio.com/

I can’t review Wrecked right now - unfortunately the game is not in a state I would consider it to be at its best. I will say I’ve had lots of fun with it so far but there are some problems which Supersonic Software are working on which I’m going to wait for before reviewing the game propper.

For now though I was lucky to get a great interview with studio founder Peter Williamson!

[CP] Supersonic has been making racing games for years, I’ve played most of them; Supersonic Racers, Circuit Breakers, the various Micro Machines titles and of course Mashed which Wrecked is clearly inhabits the spirit of, why did you as a team want to revisit this?

[PW] As you say, we’ve made lots of these kinds of games.  I’d like to think it’s what we’re good at…  They look deceptively simple but have lots of finely tuned subtlety and I think that’s what our experience in this kind of game brings.

Mashed came out about 7 years ago and very unusually, the fan mail for it has been growing year on year.  We get more now than we did when it was first launched!

Having taken a few years off from those kind of games to do other things we were really keen to get that kind of game-play back and onto the current gen. of consoles.  We were refreshed and full of ideas on how we could maintain the core game-play and take it to another level.

In the past on occasion we’ve struggled a little commercially with these games.  I guess there can be a reluctance to pay £30-£40 for a boxed product of what people (completely wrongly!) assume to be a simple little driving game.

We thought that the opportunities of digital publishing would allow us to bring this kind of game to a core and wide spread audience at a much better price point.

[CP] The game at its core inspired by the design of Micro Machines, how do you think that public perception of this style of game has changed over the years?

[PW] It goes through phases.  Online multi-player has clearly been a huge trend in recent years, which is great but I think online multi-player lacks something that you can only experience when you’re physically in the same room as your opponents – the banter, ribbing and laughter that you only get with a group of friends.  Wrecked has this in spades.

I think and hope that an appreciation for this is on the way back.

[CP] Wrecked has quite a distinct and minimal graphical style, in such hectic and unpredictable environment this must have been difficult to achieve, what do you feel were the main contributing factors to achieving this?

[PW] Endless reworking!  The game today looks massively different to what it did in the early development.  We had the core layout of our first track 90% complete in a very short time, but it took us months and months to fine tune the layout and even more months to settle on a graphical style.  There is no magic wand – it’s just a case of putting the hours in and being prepared to scrap thing and start again if they’re not right.

[CP] What’s the studios philosophy behind audio for racing games? Is the audio presentation trying to emulate an old school arcade feel as with Mashed or is it different this time round?

[PW] Trying to get the balance where 4 cars all have engines, gearboxes, tyre noises, massive collisions, and can all fire off a huge array of weapons is difficult.  Again, implement, play, tweak is the only solution.  Our aim was unashamedly to bring an old school arcade feel to the game.

[CP] Are there plans for expansions to the game? 

It’s a ridiculous argument, Bioware should stick to their vision instead of changing the ending based on player feedback. Regardless of the quality of the ending if Bioware think that they did the ending right then nobody has any authority to demand them to change it.

I am scared of this issue because of the gaming community goes ape on singular issues like this en masse, if studios are peer-pressured to adjust what they think is final because of fan reaction then changing the ending because of this is dangerous. Blade Runner had a bad ending in it’s original release but changed it a few years later because of studio pressure, not fan reaction. In this example Scott changed the ending in favour of his vision not against it. It boils down to the artist – if Bioware are forced to change what they think is right then that would be unfortunate. If they change the ending to better reflect their vision then that’s fine.

I do not think this is entirely the fault of fan perception because Bioware have always made the player fully in control of every major event in the entire series. Because of this, dramatic moments that are out of the players hands feel like a painful contradiction to the norm. Within the context of the game I think it feels a bit silly that the universe revolves around your character, what’s the point of choices if you’re in total control of the repercussions?

I would rather a harsher version of ME3 – one where you don’t have infinite time and resources to achieve a ‘perfect’ ending. For example, if you dilly-dally too much while Palaven is under siege then the planet falls and you loose those resources permanently. It’d add more ‘reality’ to the situations, but would also enforce an acknowledgement that dramatic, game-changing things can happen that are out of the players control.

I think this whole issue is partly a fault of Bioware for not being particularly brave or as bold as they could be in the game but it’s also the fault of the players to demand that Bioware change their art to make it less offensive.

Quote from Bioware:

We’re working hard to maintain the right balance between the artistic integrity of the original story while addressing the fan feedback we’ve received….

See what I mean…it’s dangerous.