My Minecraft Experience

Minecraft, I'll bet you've all heard your fair share of that on the internet recently haven't you? If not, then let me fill you right in. Minecraft is a first person adventure sandbox game to quote it's WIkipedia article, and it basically involved Mining (that is to say, digging up materials from the earth, amongst other places), crafting (that is to say, making items from materials you've mined), building (that is to say, making structures using the mined and crafted materials), and exploring (which is to say.....exploring).

To start off, you create a world, this requires next to no effort beyond clicking one of the empty world buttons, basically like creating a save data. And then your world is constructed from randomly generated terrain, and it can literally go on for as long as you can be bothered to walk, which I'll get back to later.

So you start off in your world, and you've been plonked into a randomly generated area, for me it was hilly and forest-y. Looking at my inventory I found it to be utterly devoid of anything useful, the only action I could perform besides walking was punching stuff, so I punched a tree trunk and it dropped a little miniature icon of itself on the floor, I understood that to mean I could collect it, which was right, so I now had one ore, I repeated that a few times on the rest of the tree until I had around 10 blocks of wood, having the Minecraft Wiki open, I crafted a crafting table, and with the crafting table I crafted a wooden axe, more tree choppage later I had enough wood to create myself a wooden pickaxe and a Hoe (gardening tool that resembles, and probably is a synonym of, a Scythe).

Eventually, I came across some cobblestone beneath the dirt I was standing on and crafted stone tools instead, which I understood to be longer lasting than my wooden ones. At this point, not wanting to leave my crafting table in a random area, I moved it to the top of a nearby hill, intending to make it my workspace. Before I knew it, I had built four wooden walls around it.

Fast forward a few weeks, and my wooden shed is now a two story building, complete with swimming pool on the second floor, a staircase in it's own room and a joining basement connecting to a series of tunnels beneath the earth, as well as a staircase concealed within the cliff face that I later noticed my cliff face stood upon, and a chimney to light up my house during the night time. At no point in the past 12 or so hours of gameplay had I been prompted to build any of these things, I had to figure it all out for myself (except for the crafting, I had to look up how to create certain complex items for that.). At some point, I intend to replace the wooden walls with a layer of bricks I've managed to create from clay I found lying in the dirt.

The story behind how I came across the clay is an entire few paragraphs unto itself. Deciding I needed to create bricks, I ventured beyond my comfort zone of the acre of land that my house and mine was contained in, and searched out any sandy areas I could find, after roughly an hour of searching, I found a small goldmine of clay and mined it all, with my new problem being that I was completely and utterly lost, I searched around for about two to three hours, trying to find my house, but to no avail.

I knew i'd travelled further than was necessary, because it appeared to me I'd walked so far north that the ocean was freezing over, as well as the mountaintops being further from sea level than the clouds, after what I'd estimate was weeks of in game day/night cycles, I thought to myself "Sod it." and simply downloaded a Mod-type program that allowed me to view the entire map in my 'World One', much to my bemusement, it turned out that I'd walked further away from my house than necessary, because my house and current location were nowhere near each other, to give you perspective on how big the map had grown, it was roughly akin to the Great Sea from Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, which in itself was a big world map for a game, and that was just what I'd traversed across. After a further hour or so following the map, I eventually found my way to my house, the feeling was a bit like coming home from holiday if I'm honest. :D

The sheer size of the in game world in Minecraft is rather mind blowing, because as I discovered, the game can theoretically have a bigger map than that of the Earth in real life, to give a bit more perspective, of course it would take a tremendous amount of man hours and processing power to achieve that.

So that's my Minecraft experience so far, if I had to sum it all up, I'd say that the game is a remarkable creation for one one man, and was immensley fun to play, I'd definitely recommend it to anybody with patience, a creative streak and enjoyed playing with lego as a wee child, because that's exactly what this game is, it's like playing with an infinite amount of Lego blocks half your size.

Let Me In.

Well well well, what do we have here then? A film that was actually worth watching? What an honest surprise.

The source of my surprise, as it happens, is a recently released film known as 'Let Me In', it's a horror type film, rated roughly 15 (requiring me to flash my Student ID to get in, because apparently I look under 15), and don't worry, I'd never heard of this film until recently either. and, as the plot synopsis is quick to spoil, is about a young boy who befriends a young girl who's also a vampire. The film was rather tense to watch, even if you knew, and indeed BECAUSE you knew what was going to happen next, and had a good twist at the end which I will give a sincere attempt to not reveal.

The last film I watched as of recent which was meant to be scary was another unheard of film called 'The Hole' which was rubbish because the 3D was comparable to paper cutouts, the characters were boring as anything, all the scares were fake out jump scares which never led to anything and the plot was just uninteresting. Let Me In on the other hand had interesting characters and an interesting plot which pretty much wrote itself around them. The main sources of scares in the film was by far the two main characters, who were both 12 years old, and creepy as hell.

The reason for the two protagonists being as creepy as hell is because pretty much everything about them is only implied, there is a painful silence in any scene in which either of the protagonists (named Owen and Abby...I think.) are on their own, because the atmosphere and the creepy children's stellar nonverbal acting skills pretty much speak for themselves. Let me give you an example that may contain spoilers, after Owen discovers that Abby is secretly a Vampire, he says few words of interest, and no words to measure his current emotional state, everything is only implied. Merely by watching the expression on his face the viewer can tell that he goes through feeling deathly afraid of her, to trying to attempt to understand her, to accepting her burden, all nonverbally.

In addition to the characters emotions, several other things are not specifically shown, for example, one thing I noticed, that I wasn't sure if it was initially intentional, is that lots of character's faces are never seen, even Owen's mother who shares several scenes with him, is never directly shown, as well as his father who only appears in one scene via phone.

Yet another implied thing is the character of Abby herself, who borders on implied and being a complete mystery, for instance, we ever never told why or how Abby was a vampire, or even her true age. Again, the only implied thing is that she is far older than she looks, as evidenced by her eventual line that she "Has been 12 for a while." A-la Twilight. As well as the exact nature of an extremely uncomfortable scene in which she is implied to strip naked and climb into bed with Owen, who was requested to not look at her. Which to me, in addition to being awkward to watch with other people, implies a sense of age.

In short, if you enjoy horror, vampires, and strong (in my opinion) characters, and child actors who look like they live in the Uncanny Valley, then I highly recommend Let Me In. And I advise myself to remember to put it on my list of DVDs to buy.