Train Rider's Blag

For those of you who don’t like to constantly google things like some sort of neurotic book worm: Jumping the Shark is a term that is used to describe a series that is past it’s prime. *the more you know*

Now that that’s over: Minecraft has jumped the Shark for me.

Well, really it jumped the shark back in 1.8. But before the 5 or 8 of you who manage to find my blog while looking for 8-bit renditions of a shark going aireal, let me explain.

For me, Minecraft was about two things: Being alone and scared in a hostile environment, and carving a spot for yourself out in the world.

The first one was ruined when SMP came out and suddenly you had a buddy to cuddle with when giant green shrubbery was looking out through your door. But it still held strong in most private servers and single player games. You still had to fight off legions of the undead at night or hide with no other option. But then Beds and wolves came out. Wolves… meh. They’re cool, don’t get me wrong, but they get in the way and aren’t that helpful except when night comes and you need to something to protect you. But it’ll never be night BECAUSE YOU CAN SLEEP IN A BED. Darkness gave a feeling that you must prepare for what was to come, but beds changed that. Minecraft had lost something that made it… well… scary. Not in a grotesque sense or a helpless sense but a sense that if you don’t do something you will die. If you don’t hide you will die. If you don’t build you will die. And if you die, you’ll lose all your stuff. But now, you can just sleep in a bed and BING BANG BO it’s morning and all the deadly guys are on fire!

The second one is still in the game today. My only complaint is that THERE IS SO MUCH ARBITRARY BULLSHIT THAT ADDS NOTHING TO this FEATURE OF THE GAME. Minecraft gave the player a world that he (or she) could manipulate to their own accord. It didn’t hand you an unlimited supply of material, it said “What? You want to build a house? Here’s an axe, go crazy Mr. Lumberjack.” And this lead to the player creating their own adventures. Remember your first night and you sat in a hole listing to the xylophone of skeletons and hissing of spiders? Remember creeping into a cave you just found, placing a touch that revealed a creeper in the darkness? Remember running back to get your only supply of torches after that Creeper blew up in your face? Remember that wonderful rush when you found diamond on a new world? Ironically, the “Adventure Update” didn’t expand on creating your own adventure, but gave us per-defined adventures to follow.

1.8 was an update that added alot to minecraft, and I feel like alot of it was just arbitrary and some of it was fan service. Hunger doesn’t make the game difficult in a good way it just adds another meter to keep full, which isn’t that hard to with bonemeal + wheat. And Melons. Melons are just something that’s absurdly OP once you get them. And they’re only rare in Single Player, in SMP I have melons out the butt: Once one person finds them and plants them just go knock on their door and nick some slices before running off. A simple growing time Nerf would even help them be less OP, but the whole idea of more food sources seams unnecessary. Why should cows and Chickens drop meat? What purpose do pigs have now other then being cute? Speaking of animal drops: why the hell did you stop Zombies from dropping feathers!? I liked the ablity to farm feathers with a mob trap, it was an explot that enhanced the game, not hinder it.

Animal breeding also hindered the creativity of the player, no longer could animal traps be a goal now, one has to breed the mobs if they want to farm. I think animal breeding was cool but mob traps were cooler and were wicked when they were completed.

Enchantments and Potions are alright I guess, but I feel like the affects for potions could have been in different types of food instead. Like: Eat a melon; get camouflage. Or, eat a cookie get super speed. Or eat mushrooms get sick. you know, stuff like that! And neither fortress are bad-ass and make the neither even better.

Don’t get me wrong, I still like Minecraft and it’s still a joy to play with friends. But I feel like it’s fallowing the same path that TF2 has followed: Once great, but now boggled down with so much crap that you can barely see the genius between the hats.

I’ve always wondered how those silly blog posts that involve people destroying one another reputation come about. Surely people could think of a better resource for their time rather then mocking somebody with random sputtering bits of text into an environment made of bits of text. It never made sense.

Recently, my friend invited me to a game of some sort. I declined, merely because I was doing something else. Unfortunately for me the mood was ruined to I went back to him with an attitude of “Sure, why not”.

He invited me to a Skype conversation and I was immediately bombarded by his other friends with a link to a silly military training game that was actually quite fun. But after a while I noticed that the game was a four player game, and that there were 4 other people in the conversation.

I wasn’t there to partake in an evening of gaming but I was a mere pawn to be used to allow his friends to get access to this game. I was probably one of many people that could have been asked to join but I was the only one to paddle back. Which wasn’t insulting by itself. What was insulting was how my friend wasn’t open with the fact that I was just there to even out the match.

At the end of it I muted my mic and let them have their fun. I listened to their laughing for 10 minute before getting tired of the little shits braying like mules at every odd interval, and leaving wishing I had that small piece of my life back.

And here I am: Finishing the path of hatred like so many before me. Leaving a blog post sputtering bits of text into an environment made of bits of text.

Maybe this’ll make it all seam worth it.