I do believe that title will piss off at least half the internet, but it doesn't stop it from being true. The echo chamber in gaming can be deafening sometimes. Dissenting opinions are often buried and good press has such a spotlight cast upon it that I'm worried it might melt.
Unfortunately, this isn't' going to be as pretty as some of my other reviews. I have no screenshots this time around, partially because I forgot to take them and mostly because they can not convey the points I will be making. I've spent the last week playing Minecraft (kind of) and as I was about to boot it up today, I came to this conclusion.
Minecraft is the poster child for horrifyingly bad development. Patches were oddly spaced, inconsistent, added very little and the whole, "beta for 3 years" thing lost it's charm about two weeks in. Major issues were overlooked and instead astroturfed over by new content that sometimes fit int the game as well as something fitting into something terribly, I can't have clever metaphors all the time. The end product is an unstable resource hungry beast with a plastered on facade of a "game" tacked onto it.
Vanilla Minecraft is beyond dull. It takes about two worlds and 30 hours of gameplay to get completely sick of the content. Mining quickly becomes a chore and there's very little payoff at the end. You build a house, a cave fortress, save up enough diamonds to build the tools the armor and the sword, level up so you can enchant them and then fight a tacked on boss and then you're done. That's it. There's not a story, there's not a conflict, you basically kill the dragon for the sake of killing the fucking dragon. However, I have lost this week of my life to Minecraft because of what it is actually good at, being a boilerplate.
The modding community of Minecraft snatched away a disappointment and turned it into essentially the game I've always wanted since I was 8. The mods are so good and make up for so many of the shortcomings of the game it's changes my opinion from "The reason not to donate to a non-finished product ever" to "Probably the best sandbox game that may ever exist." I've been playing Tekkit.
For the uninitiated, Tekkit is the most overtly complex, confusing and most amazing collection of mods that has ever blessed gaming kind. Tekkit takes Minecraft and takes it to the end that it should taken, complete mastery over the world. You start out just the same, with nothing, punching trees apart and you end up playing with quantum mechanics, building oil rigs, regulating nuclear reactors, automating mining operations and flying.
It's about the most addicting thing I've ever played. There's always something to do and it solves all of the really frustrating parts of Minecraft, you always wished you could just fix. Massive construction projects can be automated and done in 1/10 the time, furnaces no longer need to be baby sat to get the most out of your fuel, items can be automatically sorted and there's finally something to do with all that fucking cobblestone you have. It's just so damn enjoyable. The game manages not to hand you that much so everything you build makes you feel accomplished and by the end of everything, provided you ever get there, you're living in modern society, you have command over the world. Want to build a 64x64 underground base that extends all the way to bedrock then surround it with diamond block? Totally doable provided you've done the leg work. But you won't be digging it out yourself, you won't be tiling it yourself so you can focus on what style of comlumn best compliments your gaudy new underground lair.
Vanilla Minecraft, still terrible.
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