Minecraft Review

Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition:
I’m a jealous of gamers who are getting their first hit of the gaming-crack that is Minecraft. Those who download this diamond will be rewarded with a totally unique and wonderful gaming experience. 4J, the developer of the 360 version of Minecraft, have done an amazing job translating Mojang’s PC and Mac game over to the 360, but it’s not an exact translation. New gameplay elements and trappings have been added for consoles, but a lot has been taken away as well. Minecraft remains a once-in-a-lifetime game, but the 360 version suffers more for what’s missing than it gains from its additions.

The basics of Minecraft are represented well on the 360. The low-tech-looking sandbox gameplay is in place, as is the self-directed search for survival and material goods. You punch trees, collect ingredients from a blocky, 3D world, craft increasingly complex tools, delve deep into endless, dangerous caverns, and create a space that’s safe from the inexplicably terrifying 8-Bit skeletons, spiders, zombies and creepers that spawn at night. Once you’ve got basic survival locked (a huge accomplishment), you can move on to creating a beautiful home, a 1-to-1 scale re-creation of The Defiant from Deep Space Nine or anything else you can imagine… Or you could just walk around in the woods and shoot arrows at skeletons. In other words: If you’re the right kind of person, this barely guided, creative experience will become more like a way-of-life than a video game, for a time, anyway. Eventually, most 360 gamers will run across the boundaries of Minecraft, both physically and conceptually, long before PC players will.
Let’s start with the positives: The 360 version of Minecraft adds two much-needed and appreciated elements designed to make Minecraft more user-friendly: Tutorials and a map.

Building Blocks Of Minecraft Learning
The original Minecraft lacks any in-game documentation, leaving you at the mercy of your own ability (and online wikis) to figure out how a relatively complicated game works. The 360 version of Minecraft, gives you a tutorial level that walks you through the basics of how to get wood (heh, heh), mine rocks and build basic shelter to keep from being eaten alive when night falls and the monsters come out. It also includes a little village and an impressive castle to give you something to aspire to in your Minecraft-ing.

The learnin’ continues into the game-proper, with context sensitive menus to identify any new items you find. Crafting has been streamlined, and trial-and-error has been eliminated. No great loss, as almost every PC Minecraft player uses a wiki anyway. All of this will be very helpful to beginners, but it’s not so exhaustive that it takes away from the discovery elements of Minecraft or feels like school.

Along with the docs and hints, the 360 version of Minecraft gives players a map at the start of each game, for free. Getting something for nothing in Minecraft is almost sacrilege, but it’s much appreciated here. Maps are craftable in the PC version, but not until you’ve found some redstone deep in the earth and crafted iron to built a compass, which means you have to figure out how mining and smelting works before you’ve ever figured out where you are.

Sitting next to loved ones (or tolerated ones, anyway) and playing a game is an often overlooked source of fun in the age of online multiplayer, and in an open-world game like Minecraft, it’s like bringing your friend to a massive playground, except with more zombies.

Even with a four-player split screen going and other players in your server, navigating through Minecraft’s complicated menus is quickly mastered, if your television is big and HD enough. The menu system is about as serviceable as you could realistically expect from a 360, which is not to say it’s good or anything. Consoles just aren’t suited to complicated menus–a mouse and keyboard is the much preferable input solution.

“I Played Minecraft Before It Was Cool.”
So that’s all the good, but here comes the bad: Overall, console-Minecraft is based on an early version of the game. The PC version of Minecraft has evolved through updates to contain a whole lot more stuff than the 360 version, as well as noticeably improved lighting and graphics. A partial list of content that’s missing: Modding. The hunger mechanic that drives the PC version. The ability to raise animals from babies. Jungle cats. The jungle biomeme. Ruins in mines. NPC characters and villages. The enchanting system. The alchemy system. The End World, Ender Men, and the Ender Dragon final boss. And more. While some of these “later” additions aren’t all that great, and none are necessary for having a good time, on the whole, the PC Minecraft experience provides greater diversity and much deeper gaming, especially for more seasoned players. While 4J has said it’s interested in frequently updating Minecraft-360, those updates are not available at the time of this review. Let’s hope they’ll come soon.

It’s A Small World After All
The list of Minecraft features missing from the 360 is long, but the most egregious omission is the sheer scope of the PC version of Minecraft. While computer Minecraft’s procedurally generated geography is limited only by the amount of memory your PC has, the 360 version takes place on a 1024 by 1024 block level. That’s pretty big in terms of many games, but tiny in terms of Minecraft. It’s dispiriting to get to the edge of the map with so little effort, especially when the boundary has been so shoddily defined. A wall of lava or an un-climbable peak would have been preferable to Minecraft’s lazy invisible barrier. The absence of endless open spaces means that you can essentially never get really lost, and it also limits the amount of sheer raw materials in the world, potentially scuttling hugely ambitious building plans.

Speaking of resources, the PC version of Minecraft contains a creative mode where you have access to everything the game has to offer. It’s perfect if you prefer building with an infinite Lego set and don’t feel like being ravaged by skeletons. The 360 game offers only the survival mode. Big points off for that. And big points off for not allowing gamers to change difficulty in the middle of games, too.
On the whole, any Minecraft is better than no Minecraft, and the 360 version is a full, satisfying game, when not judged against the PC version -- even in slightly-gimped form, Minecraft is better than most games on earth.



Source : http://www.g4tv.com

Read This Book: Ready Player One

Ready Player One is geek crack, a novel that reads like a cross between Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Tron, with a healthy dose of Avatar, The Matrix, The Last Starfighter and The Hunger Games thrown in for good measure.

It combines sci-fi, romance, action and drama, while referencing all manner of 1980s pop culture brilliance, from Ghostbusters and The Goonies to Dungeons & Dragons and Dungeons of Daggorath. The Ladyhawke soundtrack plays a big part in the narrative and Pac-Man makes his presence felt throughout, while Wil Wheaton reads the real-world audio book, and it doesn’t get any geekier than that.

Story-wise, it’s a futuristic spin on the kind of quest adventure that authors have been chronicling for centuries. Proceedings are set in 2044, when The Great Recession has brought the planet to its knees. To escape the misery, the majority of humans spend their every waking hour in the OASIS, a massive multiplayer online simulation where the sky, and pretty much anything beyond, is the limit.

The OASIS was created by Gregarious Simulation Systems chiefs James Halliday and Ogden Morrow, but when Halliday mysteriously dies, he throws the OASIS into chaos with the video and book he leaves behind.

They explain - Willy Wonka-style - that whoever manages to collect three keys and pass through three gates hidden within the OASIS will receive his fortune and a controlling stake in GSS.

The bulk of the novel takes place five years after this announcement, and follows the efforts of Wade Watts to hunt down the keys and win the contest. A lonely Oklahoman teen, Wade goes by the name of Parzival in the OASIS, and he’s a likeable central character with a quick wit and a passion for all things ‘80s, from Galaga to Rush to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.

His journey spans the length and breadth of the OASIS, taking the reader on a magical mystery tour to distant planets that are influenced by everything from Blade Runner to Back to the Future. Along the way he finds friendship, love, and the ultimate enemy in the shape of Innovative Online Industries, a powerful corporation who will stop at nothing to win the contest and turn the OASIS into a purely commercial destination.

It’s hugely derivative stuff - a grab bag of pop culture citations and allusions - but there’s a charm to the way in which Ready Player One wears its influences on its sleeve, and part of the fun is trying to pick out the multitude of references peppered throughout.

Indeed, so detailed is the 1980s knowledge that one wonders if author Ernest Cline has a time machine (housed in a DeLorean) facilitating his fact collecting and checking.

Yet as well as being geek central for overgrown children of a certain age, the book is also quite simply a gripping adventure that unfolds at a breathless pace and builds to a grandstanding conclusion.

So whether you know your Voight-Kampff from your Kobayashi Maru or not, Ready Player One is quite simply a must-read, an epic adventure crafted from the ground up for nostalgia junkies who love the movies, games and music of the 1980s, and those who simply like a rip-roaring story.

Chris Tilly is the Entertainment Editor for IGN in the UK and although he was born in the 1970s, he considers himself a child of the '80s. Chris can be found going on and on about Back to the Future on both Twitter and MyIGN.

Source : http://www.ign.com

AU: Crack the Code and Win with Xbox!

IGN AU and Xbox Australia have teamed up to bring you the latest clue in the epic Xbox Crack the Code competition! 'The Code' is a combination of 16 digits, made up of the X,Y, A or B buttons on an Xbox 360 controller. Crack the Code first and win a year’s supply of Xbox 360 games. There are billions of possible combinations, so you’ll need to find the clues scattered across the web and decide whether to work with the community, or against it, in your pursuit of glory. Here's your clue:

‘‘The first half is split evenly between the two ends of the alphabet’’

If you think you've figured it out, head to xbox.com.au/crackthecode and give it a crack!

Source : http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/05/21/au-crack-the-code-and-win-with-xbox