15 Years of Minecraft

Minecraft was celebrating its 15th anniversary this month, and made it a lot of fun.  There was a bit of a scavenger hunt across Tiktok and Discord to get some capes, and one free piece of character bling per day.  Those is not really my thing, but I am now wearing an axolotl cap on my head and some weird nether leggings.  This was a big showcase event for Bedrock edition, as most of these items wont work in Java until some future update, if ever.

The key item for me was their 15th Celebration map, which was a massive piece of eye candy at first, with hundreds of custom blocks and custom paintings I wish we could get for our own builds.  (Then I realized they are probably available in Bedrock add-ons or will be soon.)  But after exploring, it just went on and on, with a delightful central cake room surrounded by tables where every major creature and character in the game had a carefully scripted cake-eating routine.  Some of those were comedy classic.  My top pick would be the wandering trader and his llamas doing and almost Abbott & Costello routine.  So well scripted.

There was a sticker book, and you could find stickers along the way with various hints and activities.  I figured there might be 6 or 10 sticketrs, but it just kept going.  There were portals to themed museums, all of them gorgeous and filled with activities.  There were at least 10 mini games that did things I didn't know you could do in MC.  The most elaborate was the one where you can toggle back and forth between the current version and an old retro version to complete a path where one dimension had an obstacle and you had to shift to the other dimension to get around it.  That was brilliant.

At another location there was a gorgeous beehive about 15 blocks high and wide, and after exploring the whole bee area, it turns out that you have to jump down into the hive and navigate the world of honey blocks to get to a mini game where you navigate a bee from flower to flower picking up pollen to bring back to your hive.

There was a mini game where you play a frog and shoot out your tongue to catch slimes.  In another game, you jump form one gian mushroom to another trying to tag mooshrooms with a lightning rod.

Mini games and gags and sights were everywhere.  I'm not sure I have ever seen such a detailed map designed for just having fun.  The studio that built that map showed off so many features and game functions I didn't know were possible.  It was a blast.


I have been playing Minecraft since the Alpha days.  I still think it has been the best value I ever got in gaming: I paid $15 way back then, and have had 15 years of free updates and have tested about 500 mods.  I did have to buy another copy when Microsoft took over the Mojang accounts and my old email was unreachable, but let's not think about that one incident.  ;-)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Idle Planet Miner: Selling Your Galaxy

Image
Back in Idle Planet Miner, production was starting to bog down, with crafts taking an hour apiece, and sometimes needing hundreds of items to unlock new research.  So, I figured it would be a good time to test out their "Sell Your Planet" feature, which has so many people online asking questions. These idle games can't level up through an infinite many items, so they all have this same kind of game reset mechanism.  In Idle Planet Miner, the Sell Galaxy button shows you the value of your galaxy and how many credits you will get for it.  These credits are a kind of meta currency, letting you buy new rooms for your ships, with each new room offering a different game boost.  Clicking the Sell button will show you exactly what you will lose: all planets, cash, ores, alloys, items, research.  Which sounds terrible.  But you get to keep your dark matter, your managers, your beacon buffs (though you will have to research the Beacon again to get it back on screen),...
Read more

Ancient Games Book

Image
I had a former coworker contact me to say her mom had a weird book of old games, so we met up, and it turned out to be the classic Irving Finkel "Ancient Board Games" produced by the British Museum.  Dr. Finkel is a leading expert on ancient board games, and the book covers four classics: Senet, Mehen, Hounds an Jackals and the Royal Game of Ur.  The Royal Game of Ur is one of our favorites from this era, and was one of the first games I covered in this blog series.  I was familiar with the others, but never had a decent board to play on. The book comes with a little plastic tray with four throwing sticks and 8 playing pieces for each of two colors.  In each set, one piece is larger than the others, being the "lion" in the Mehen game. After dabbling with these games for about 45 minutes, we kept having problems picking up the perfectly smooth throwing sticks, and there was no clear distinction between the flat side and rounded side, aside from the subtle shape. ...
Read more

Hounds and Jackals

Image
Continuing with the book of ancient board games, the Hounds and Jackal board is gorgeous.  Every painted crack or chip in the supposedly wooden surface added character.  The original artifacts had holes in the board, and the pieces were little carvings of hounds and jackals on pegs.  Moving chips around the board was good enough to get the feel of it.  It's a simple race game, trying to get your pieces to the top of tree and off the board first.  There were no tricky rules for the throwing sticks.  You roll, you move. Since there were a few spaces with "slides", it's hard to not feel like you're playing a scaled down Snakes & Ladders game.  Some of these game ideas really do span most of human history.  There are also a few spaces with a little cross on them, where you roll again if you land there. The game was simple, and only took about 10 minutes.  This one had the most interesting set of variations discussed on the back page, since di...
Read more