That’s right folks! Another episode of the Amazing Adventures of Steve & Terry! (working title) Actually, been getting some good responses about these two, so I guess I should make it a bit of an ongoing thing huh?
For those not in the know, the 3d guy is Steve from Minecraft and the 2d one is *Terry from Terraria (btw, terraria doesn’t have a mascot, so I just kinda made him up to fit). Since both games are somewhat similar, I figured they should be friends. >)
So yeah, about this comic… The thing I love about Terraria and hate about Minecraft is that in MC, you have such a limited selection of armor and weapons that the whole combat end just feels a bit lacking. I mean, a crafting game SHOULD have tons of things to, you know, craft; so having a just 4 reskins of the same blocky armor doesn’t yield much in the way of immersion. I know, Terraria had a larger team to work with and MC started as more of a building game than a combat one, but still, the direction it’s going now, it NEEDS to have a major overhaul of the system. What I’d like to see is some weapon slots on the inventory and make items persistent and hard to obtain… meaning, equipped armor/weapons do not disappear on death and there should be multiple tiers of crafting to make complex gear with specific abilities and improvements.
But ya know, I guess it goes back to the argument of “well, if ya don’t like it, use a mod”. And that’s a very fine point! Because MC is like mod city! I’ve just gotten into playing with a few (ok… I’ve got like two dozen going) mods and they definitely improve the gameplay! The only thing I don’t like is the lack of actual support for the mods… like an “official” centralized system for creation and installation. As it stands now, if 2 mods don’t like eachother, then everything breaks and the barrier to entry for installation is pretty high… or maybe I’m just a little special, but it’s seriously a pain to get them running correctly! If they could fix MC to cycle through mods as easy as it is to go through maps in Little Big Planet, then I could see the sales of this game just explode! Eh, that’s my theory anyways. Actually, I’m interested in making them now, so maybe I’ll tinker with some ideas in my spare time. Hmm… maybe after MC comes out of beta, I’ll put together a modpack with my favorite picks!
ALSO!
Did a little guest work over at Kuo Comics, so head out there and check it out!
I remember growing up and playing the original sims and my family finding that fansite that posted a bunch of skins for heads, cloths, and furniture.
On the plus side, all my sims had a pet Ninetails dog.
On the downside, people would post their own faces onto head skins in packs of stuff, and they looked so off. It my first experience with the uncanny valley.
On the plus side, some of the clothes looked AWESOME and the 10+ everything furniture was nice (even if it was all purple colored).
On the downside, it could be buggy as hell if not done right, and even potentially malicious.
heh, I guess that’s the great problem with mods… never know exactly what you’re going to get or what it’s going to do.
I guess I should differentiate it from “custom maps” too, cause I totally rocked out some custom ones back in the day with the old Delta Force games! oh man, if you all think I play too much wow, I dare not post my play time from DF! even set up a custom map server with my own stuff. it was epic! >D
(if you don’t know, Delta Force was like Modern Warfare but like 10 years earlier and some very, uh, special graphics… I swear they looked sweet back in the day!)
Rarely. I like to beat the game as it is so every mod is a potential spoiler. Morrowind with an additional house - great! Removing the xp limit? Count me in! Super duper weapons that steal the joy of fighting? Meh..
I remember back in the day when I was all about the cheat codes! remember those? they even had whole magazine sections dedicated to the latest uber codes and gameshark mods! they were like special little easter eggs. but I guess I grew out of them or they seemed less important as I got older and now try to beat stuff on the hard difficulties (rocked Halo Reach on legend! booya!) without any artificial help.
then again, the mods I’ve been looking into with MC are either functional or fun. nothing that gives too much of an advantage. some do give you a godmode, but I like the ones that make you work for your epics. ok, like one is the IndustrialCraft mod, which lets you do all kinds of construction, but the cost to make all the things is sooo high that you gotta work for it! once you get the nuclear reactor up and running, you should’ve put quite a few hours into it. so no freebies there. or the diving helmet mod… cause it’s just practice.
Chetcodes.. I remember not wanting to play without them (THAT SCORPIOBIRD’S COMING! QUICK SHOOOT SHOOOOOOOOT!!). Good ol’ days when I was actually afraid of the game foes and the ambience — I shed a tear for that one whenever I get bored with a super-duper artsy-fartsy hype we call future gaming..
I’d say it totally depends on the game. I use skins, and addons in almost all games that supports it (addons that doesn’t change the game mechanics, such as those in e.g. wow). If the game doesn’t allow the user to change skin and the game looks horrible, I may mod the game to support such features. However, I try to avoid mods that changes how one play the game with exception to games where the game experience goes from bad/mediocre to really good due to the adding of mods (such as fallout 3). One example why I try to avoid to change the mechanics is due to games such as Minecraft - all the mods that adds elevators, track boosters and such makes it impossible to share maps if the receiving player doesn’t have the same mods (although I do admit, I used a booster mod before the official ones came out). And yes, the maps itself is still shareable, it’s just that it’s rather boring to not be able to get even to the second level of a sky scraper just because the creator only installed an elevator and were to lazy to build stairs…
btw… you can get yourself a little coffinshaker skin for minecrafts! >D it’s totally cute!
ya know, I used to use lots of wowcraft mods, but after that whole account stealing business (and finding out that some mods were leaking personal info) I just did away with the whole lot of em. and my god, that whole “healer mod” or whatever it was called drove me crazy! I mean, healing already is standing in the corner and clicking low health bars… but that mod (the one that EVERYONE said you MUST have to raid) just filled my screen like a checkerboard and ended up being like some sort of “wack-a-mole” health game. just awful! I was probably using it wrong though, lol!
that’s the one thing I find troubling about MC’s mod base. it should make it much more integrated so that you just coded it, drop it in a folder, fire up a server, and if the player doesn’t have that mod, it would download all necessary items to a temp folder on the client side. there’s no reason why all this should be so difficult to run and use.
They added enchanting to minecraft now…
yeah, it’s kinda neat, but I’m not a fan of how random the enchants are. though there’s an awesome mod called an “xp bank” where you can store xp so if you die, you can go back and get it (well, what you’ve deposited anyway)… cause grinding 50 lvls of xp to get an enchant that’s probably not what you want… not fun.
I used to use “mods” but I am talking over a decade ago when the mod was basically an entirely different game. Quake 2 really brought the mod scene around with things like Rocket Arena, CTF, Action Quake, etc. Better known might be something along the lines of Counterstrike. They were “mods” of the original game, but basically an entire new game themselves. The regular games were almost nothing like the mods, so it was pretty much free new games based on the engine of a game you already had. Good times!
As far as the little mods for things these days, like “this will let you hold more items” or “have this super duper weapon (like Draco said)” seem more like cheat codes then real mods to me, and thats no fun. Unless you are talking about old games that only super humans could beat. Contra is a pretty famous example.
Old games, like Pac Man or Donkey Kong or any of the old arcade games were about getting a high score, often times you couldn’t (or weren’t supposed to) beat them. These days you can finish most any game if you try, and using mods seems like a crutch for lazyness to me. Heck, I hardly even use any add-ons in wow (and I do fine), and I constantly hear people shocked by that. I have to chuckle when patch day comes around and all their addons break and they can’t even manage to figure out to play.
Also, like you said Shawn, alot of mods and such seem to be more trouble then they are worth. Look them up, download, patch, make sure they are compatible, fix other mods that broke because of the new one, repeat next game patch, etc. I suppose I am a purist, or maybe I am just getting too old to want to bother with them. You kids and your mods get off my lawn! :)
Beaten Contra with my bros. T’was great game and soon was trying each boss separately, but yeah, whenever a highscore’s involved, the game is not about enjoying it, but trying to kill the player asap (thus spending tons of quarters on ‘CONTINUE?’). Good ol’ days.. I miss hard games ;D
man, I’ve seen some AMAZING things people have done with StarCraft mods! talk about completely new games! someone even made the Tron racers! crazy! Blizz needs to hire some of this talent!
ha! didn’t pacman not even have an end? like it just kept going forever or something? ingenious little quarter eating machines!
yeah, it seems like about 50% of the MC mods I’ve tried just don’t work at all… or you have to install something else… and that something else needs something else… and so on. it gets frustrating. especially multiplayer… which I still have yet to get working correctly with just 1 mod.
minecraft is evil. Evilly awesome that is. I know there are limited weapons and armor to craft, but the digging and building where the only limit is your imagination (unless you want to make something curcved of course) just sucks me in. I’ll play and play and play it. then i’ll leave it for a week or so. But it always drags me back :)
yeah, it’s pretty addicting! very simple premise with a wide variety of play styles… the perfect recipe for an instantly classic game!
though there’s a mod where you can cut blocks into different pieces, so you can “kinda” make curves? sorta? just wait for the “round block” mod, lol!
Well not sure about rounded blocks, but hell, if i could build triangular ones i would be perfectly happy :) no more four square towers, i could make a hexagon!
or something…
check out this Slopes Mod for 1.8.1!!! haven’t tried it out yet, but it looks pretty nifty!
I think that Terraria has it’s own “mascot”, The Guide.
I don’t trust him… for a guy you have to go into the depths of hell for a rare item just to kill… makes ya think just a little… >)
actually, the design was somewhat loosely based on the default character.
Clippy from Microsoft still kick ass, though.
heh… WATCH THIS!