So I’ve been playing a fair bit of Minecraft recently, it seems it has ‘clicked’ for me and whatever makes it work for others is working for me too. However, after spending a few days building my little settlement, an underwater tunnel, and a big lighthouse, I spawned a ton of TNT and blew it all to kingdom come.
And it got me to thinking. I love management and builder games. I’ve put more hours into Sim City than you can imagine. When I was a kid I played so much Theme Park that I saw sprites from the game every time I closed my eyes. When I play an RTS, I am the turtler par excellence, I consolidate, husband, prepare carefully, build an impressive defense, and only then do I launch attacks (Which isn’t really the best way to fight a war but what are you going to do).
Yet at the same time I am delighted by destroying it all. I giggled gleefully as I watched my Minecraft stuff get destroyed; I click the natural disasters like a monomaniacal Bond villain in SimCity; I have been known to use superweapons on my OWN BASES if I’m not impressed by the size of the enemy’s and don’t feel nuking them would cause enough destruction. I don’t really understand where this comes from, but I have a suspicion it’s a major reason I love strategy games so much, as they tend to encompass both building and destroying. I am deeply satisfied by a construction job well done, a base laid out just so, a city which looks both believable and functional. And I’m equally satisfied by watching it all get blown to pieces. Even better, watching it get put back together afterwards! I love how countries can collapse and rebuild over decades in games like Europa Universalis III.
It does lead me to believe that the best game I could ever play would let you build a city like SimCity, then go down to street level like GTA and level the place with Red Faction: Guerrilla’s GeoMod 2.0 whilst calling in superweapons from the C&C series.
I would buy this game in a heartbeat. Like, 10 copies or so.
Pike, I’m convinced you need to make YOUR OWN GAME!
I LOVE your art work, it’s perfect. Seriously, get to it, baby steps.
You know you can do it all on KDE/Gnome/Linux with SDL, nano (such purty colors) or kate, and command line g++ and gdb, using a short perl script (like 3 lines short) to compile, if you want to be “low tech/old skool”.
This in addition to your graphic novel and animated film!
Amdue
facebook: amdue.torres
twitter: afrocuban
@ Amdue – I am terrible at programming, though! Other than the silly choose-your-own-adventure games I used to sneak onto graphing calculators at school.
@ Mister Adequate’s post – I like blowing things up that are not mine. I am, however, somewhat more cautious about blowing up my own creations… call me a wuss, I guess!
Did you try C:\Users\youusername\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\screenshots ?
I’m rather indiscriminate when it comes to blowing things up, I usually spawn infinite tnt blocks and set up a mile long tnt trail destroying landscape and buildings alike :D
Did neither of you get a shot at Total Annihilation? Cause, seriously, no amount of blowing things up compares to superfuturistic superweapons. You can probably snag both it and the expansion for like five bucks, since it was released in 1997. Disclaimer: It doesn’t like talking with operating systems that aren’t, y’know, Windows 95 with a pentium 133 and 16 megs of RAM (the strategy guide I have includes an interview with the developers where they’re excited by the idea of potentially making maps that use a whopping 64 MB RAM and having gigantic multiplayer battles – I love it).
@Orange: Yup, looked everywhere I could think of, that was the first stop. My new screenshot’s from today’s work all went where they went to!
@Armond: I played a bit of TA but it never quite grabbed me. Which is not anything against the game, I recognize how great it is, just didn’t quite do it for me personally. Might give it another look though!
@Mr. A: I recommend picking it up and playing it vanilla for a while, and then trying out all the mods. A lot of the game’s awesome (especially compared to the other games that have come out in the past fourteen years) comes from what people have done to turn a good game into an excellent game.
It does lead me to believe that the best game I could ever play would let you build a city like SimCity, then go down to street level like GTA and level the place with Red Faction: Guerrilla’s GeoMod 2.0 whilst calling in superweapons from the C&C series.
yes. This would be amazing. Why has nobody made a game like this?