I’ve been wanting to write more blog posts, but every time I sit down to write about Minecraft, I end up playing Minecraft, and then it’s suddenly midnight.
If you’ve managed to avoid all the Minecraft hype over the past few weeks, I hope it’s warm and cozy under your rock. The basic premise is, you’re plopped with nothing into the middle of a world that is fully moldable and destructible. At night, The Monsters Come. You must first build some sort of shelter and hide before the sun goes down.
Your only tools are your imagination and the world around you. Lots of other blog posts and guides exist to get you started, so I won’t get into the rules of survival in Minecraft. Instead, I just want to tell just how much this game scratches my Explorer itch. Not since EVE Online, and before that, EverQuest, has a game really been designed around the Explorer, rather than the Killer or Achiever, gaming personalities.
It comes down to this. If you love exploring, Minecraft is your game. If you love leveling up and being rewarded by games for accomplishing pre-determined goals, you won’t.
Wiith the Breen arc ended and the Devidian arc not expected for a few weeks, Cryptic has offered us a new ship (and a lot of smaller updates) to keep us interested. On offer soon is the Nebula-class science ship, a cousin to the famous Galaxy cruiser. I only spent a short time with it on the test realm, but I like the looks of it. Given that, though, I can’t see it replacing my Intrepid refit with the ablative armor. I end up using that armor a lot – especially after setting off a few area effect weapons.
Still, I’ve been cruising the stars in my Galaxy X dreadnought lately, and I imagine I’ll be able to find a spot for its cousin in my hangar. It really depends on the final number of bridge positions open – if I can get a higher rank science officer in, that would make my mind up. Higher rank bridge officer positions are golden.
Bandai Namco’s social RPG Treasure Abyss got an update a couple of days ago. There’s now a fifth dungeon, a dungeon filled with seven floors of undead meant for characters level 30 and up. The experience is good, but the loot is bad – there’s only one spot in the dungeon, on the bottom floor, where the rare component for the new wizard, thief and warrior weapons can be found. That would be the slot machine in the corner – 7s gets you the Hex Stone (thief, wizard), cherries gets you Stainless Steel (warrior), and bells gets you a 50% health potion.
The new wizard staff takes a vast number of hex stones, so I haven’t gotten those yet. The new thief and warrior weapons are above. The increased damage for both weapons over the alternative make them must-haves for those two classes, though thieves pay for their increased ranking on the MVP scale with more aggro. I imagine the wizard staff will be the long-rumored AE staff, which should put wizards high on the meaningless death list once used.
I have a lot of stuff to write about, this is just a quick update. If I can just put Minecraft down for a few minutes, maybe I’ll be able to get to those.