Minecraft

(Note: Ignoring the use of mods in this review as the near unlimited potential they bring would result in this review being a tome of impossible proportions. Go get the mods yourself and test them you lazy gits)

Cast your mind back up to 100 years ago, maybe a little bit longer and recall if you can of an innocent time, a time of putting brightly coloured bricks together on top of each other and seeing your imagined construct in the worst possible combination of bricks and pieces and claiming "it's a gun" when it looks more like the mutual union of a cow and pig, in the same way that cars crashing together at 100mph can be considered a "union" of cars. That was Lego, you made most of it and your imagination took the rest of it to higher levels of realisation for you, just you, and certainly not anyone else that saw what you'd made.

Minecraft is effectively, a 3D world of Lego with some extras tacked on such as having to go out and dig up your Lego bricks, combining different bricks together to make more things and killing things to get their bricks and such. Though I'm really underselling this one on an overly tortured metaphor that should have been put to rest after the first sentence, instead of trailing on for another 2 paragraphs.

For a definition of the game, try "Wide Open Sandbox Game" with the words "Wide Open" being wider and open than the legs of the Whore of Babylon. This game is huge, potentially. You're given the basic tour of duty in a tutorial (if you want it) before a world is generated around your starting point (or a specific amount of world on platforms where the memory size of the game is a limitation. From here you're expected to begin a life of collection blocks from various biomes (grass, mushroom, desert etc) and combine them in inventive ways to be able to go on and develop better blocks, weapons, tools and engineering machinery to be able to continue living in the world that generates while you move around.

The game's scope is enormous, reaching in size to be whatever the available hard disk is on PCs and in some cases has been calculated to be 5-6 times bigger than the Earth, you'll never be running short on the basic blocks. Where in you can find and locate all manner of blocks from wood to earth, rocks and stone to lava, rare metals and precious stones all of which lead to the crafting and manufacturing of swords, armour, picks, shovels, explosives, hoes, ladders, rail tracks, cakes, and a whole plethora of other things involved in ways that most people will likely ignore. But that's all depending upon how the player wishes to play.

You could be the intrepid explorer digging through caves and valleys, seeking underground lost civilisations and looting them (Whether It Belongs In A Museum or not) you could become a farmer of crops or livestock, managing your various animals and breeding them together to farm them for meat, leather, wool and so on. Create huge monuments for yourself (Most people go for a castle since it involves a lot of rocks and not much else, but then again the giant erupting golden breast mountain with lava sounds appealing, next to another one of the same size just to REALLY make other players sit up and take notice). Create monorails of train tracks with functional switching stations using the railroad blocks and plenty more.

You could also just run around killing monsters and get to the point of killing the "Boss" known as the Enderdragon and "beating" the game before returning to the world to continue being whatever it was you were being in the first place.

This huge scope is also the game's downfall depending upon the player. You NEED to set yourself a goal and make your own way towards it, you cannot rely on the game for it as it's about as open a world you can imagine in that YOU and YOUR actions are the ONLY guiding forces in the game (Until some prick joins the game and blows up your pixel-art of Custer's Last Stand, pervert), so the limit of the game aside from the various obstacles in the way, are your own imagination and understanding.

You could even build electrical circuits using Binary Logic for gates and from there (in theory at least, I've not seen it myself) build far more complicated structures up to basic rudimentary computer processors. Taking a look around other games and maps, it's possible to see some people making reproductions of famous land marks, spaceships from sci-fi films and shows in full detail, faithful reproductions of various vehicles made from plans and schematics. Some people even go so far as to build "Adventures" for others to engage in that sets up some of the more hazardous problems in the game for players to navigate, much akin to the Raiders of the Lost Ark introduction sequence.

It's entirely down to the player to decide what their objective is, how they wish to go about it and what they intend to do once they've done it. For your standard player that's hooked on FPS where you absolutely must run from A to B, stare at some special effects and then beat the level, this game is not likely to appeal to that player. This game is definitely one for those that like to be more creative, for those that enjoy seeing something tested and performed and then ultimately, succeed, before using it in a more creative fashion (fully functional drawbridges, pumping stations that generate blocks etc) budding construction artists or those seeking the idea of doing something nobody else has done before.

Before you realise it, or if you watch someone else and particularly the younger players at that, they'll be setting up rudimentary scaffolding around the structure they're creating because if they fall off whatever they're building at the time, they'll pancake on the ground, so now they're thinking along multiple lines of whether or not to build something, how to stay alive while building and the last challenge, how to get back down again without biting the big one. (Assuming of course they're not in creative mode and just fly back down again).

It's fun, it's huge, it's not going to appeal to everyone and there'll be a clear divide between the two that will play this and those that vehemently refuse to do so.

Blood

Sometimes, you just want to blow everything up. Sometimes you want to play the hero and save the world, beat the bad guys and just be all that is "awesome". Sometimes, you just want to cause as much misery and suffering on everything standing in your way through physical, electrical, magical and incendiary manifestations and as many of those combined as possible.

Welcome to Blood, please wipe your ichor-stained feet.

Built using the same engine as Duke Nukem 3D, with a few bonus features in the engine such as seeing through sector teleporters, Blood offers 4 episodes of chaotically filled levels with enemies, weapons, power ups, gore, keys and horror references. Yep it's one of those games. If Duke Nukem took the hero genre through sexist tones of adrenaline and muscles in gaming, Blood takes the horror genre through guts, gore and some of the blackest humour to grace a computer game.

It's hard to tell where the references stop and where the originality begins at times, even the enemies pay homage to zombies everywhere, evil dead films with the dismembered hands running around trying to choke you, cultists in garbs firing shotguns and tommyguns at you while tossing dynamite back and forth, gargoyles of various ilks from basic to boss standards, fire breathing dogs, spiders, rats, fish creatures, mimes, innocents (unarmed idiots), malevolent spirits and more await to be dealt with in many, many guises.

The plot and premise of the game is very simple. You're a former badass bastard in a Demon-God's army; you get thrown out along with your 3 pals and killed. Sometime later you awaken and go on a revenge spree against the creatures that took your place in the army and the God/Demon of the cult you had previously signed up to, while not realising the severance plan was rather harsh. Starting off by quoting straight from Army of Darkness with "I live, again", before running outside to stab a zombie to death with a pitchfork. There's no messing about here, if you down it, it will likely get back up again and attack, which if you're not expecting this, can be a killer. It's a quick and fast lesson on the subject of "Watch out, this game might be slightly more than you're expecting".

Blood does boast quite the assortment of ass-kicking and pain inducing weapons one could expect to find in a game. Pitch forks for the melee stabbings, flare pistol to light up enemies and have them running around screaming in various guises from pseudo arabic-latin to the hilarious "it burns it burns", shotguns and tommyguns for the bullet and pellet crowds, Napalm Launcher for the rocket fans, dynamite bundles for grenade fans, prox mines and remote mines for the wankers in multiplayer, aerosol can and lighter for a flame thrower or explosion of fire, Tesla cannon for the electric fans, the life leech which takes health off enemies or yourself if you've no ammo for it and the Voodoo doll while hits enemies when you stab or can kill them outright with obscure effects. There some extra items in there for scuba gear, health packs, reflective shields and so on though some of these cause a game to crash depending on the patch you have in the software.

The potential for causing mayhem and pain is nothing short of over kill. Blow enemies up and watch their flesh get ripped from their bodies, set them on fire and have them running around, use magic to disintegrate them in ways that the Nazi’s from Raiders of the Lost Ark would be proud of. Though the real interest comes when you're up against enemies that are outright immune to specific attacks or just very resilient to them. The Cerberus dogs and boss is a fire breathing monster group, so flame and explosions aren't going to be useful against them. While the Stone Gargoyle is rather resilient to bullets, and guess what you're only really going to be armed with the first time you fight one. (Though an alternative attack with the voodoo sorts the men from the boys on that one)

It still gives me a chuckle to have someone run out from cover, on fire, screaming.

The game's enemies also have a selection that not only cause damage but can mess your visuals up. Dismembered hands, if they get close to you, can choke you and turn the screen black; green spiders blind you with poisons while the red spiders make your view shake slowly back and forth. Sadly, that's it, which leaves you feeling there were some ideas and greater potential that just wasn't utilised to the fullest, even in the update/add-on pack where there's newer enemies but no newer effects.

Oddly for such a game, the music within it is rather fitting, suitably haunting within specific levels and even catchy to the point of becoming an ear-worm and having you humming along to the music while you set about murdering everything in sight.

The levels within Blood are a little disjointed in presentation. Some of the levels are rather generic and a few of them blend together too well in such a way that you can't help but feel "oh great, another fucking demon church" but the ones that stand out more are significantly more appealing to the player. From graveyards and churches, to churches and temples, to cathedrals (I'm not selling this well am I). Yes there's a gothic theme in the majority of levels but the variances can be rather vast. The most memorable levels are the Train, where falling off will get you killed; A theme park and secret level of a whole rollercoaster (yes you get to blow most of it up), frozen hotels that look like they're straight from the Shining (even has Jack frozen solid in a hedge maze at one point), War zone cityscapes, industrial complexes, maniacal genius' castles, a level of living flesh, and the final level... another fucking cathedral.

You cannot help but feel that there's something not quite heart-felt about the game when you're crawling through another frozen tundra, or another cave system. Yes, ok, plot wise the 4 big nasties aren't exactly holed up in cities and such but even so, why do the bosses reside in a mountain top cathedral, a cave, another cave and another cathedral? As you progress through the levels you start to realise at about level 7-8 that it's aiming towards the boss and it's getting SO very generic.

That said, the shopping mall level is hilarious with that muzak playing which later become elevator music in Blood 2. Given the music is so cheerful and upbeat, it somehow becomes more appropriate to the character and the game when butchering armies of zombies and cultists, watching them explode, burn and scream, to the sound of this piece of music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L928CmhAPQY#

It just happily fits the game, giving me the idea that Caleb, our hero-antagonist, is gleefully just butchering people left and right and it just so happens to coincide with defeating a greater evil. There's no real "good vs. bad" here, it's just "Which is more evil?" I suppose it could raise questions of what is the definition of "bad" and "evil", is it merely relative to the situation or circumstance and is someone automatically good if they oppose evil? But ultimately it doesn't do that, we could pretend it does but it's just a kill fest with a nutcase character butchering everything else in his path. You don't root for either side, but you sit back and just go mental on anything that sticks its head up for the purpose of being gunned down.

As with any good single player fight fest of guns, there are bosses and a final boss. (Halo 2... can I see you over here please for a moment). The culmination of level after level after level of conflict resulting in a one-to-one showdown with the big bad of that episode. The Stone Gargoyle (later just an annoying shit you can find in the first level of some episodes), A giant spider (spawning more little spiders, annoying now and later) A 2 headed fire breathing dog (incorrectly named Cerberus, which had 3 heads, come on people do your fucking research!) and the final boss being the demon god that started the whole cult, Tchernobog, which has the ever-so-lovely ability to just set you on fire as soon as look at you. While launching fireballs.

Of course with any boss battle, the higher the difficulty, the more health it has. In some cases having nearly 5x as much health from easy mode to insane mode, though with the same ammo available as there was in easy mode, players can find themselves running out of ammo, meaning you'll fight the boss with weapons that won't do any damage, or have to use the pitch fork, which is an instant death if you're against the final boss as it kills upon contact.

The game is certainly entertaining but it does have need for a little of what one might call, an acquired taste. Particular with the pop-cultural references to horror films, and while the game gets older, the references of course, become more obscure to the younger audience. But that's not a criticism of this game, but any game that uses pop-cultural references. In this case, the game becomes a sort of treasure trove of hidden snippets of referential material, a bonus for finding it and even more of one for understanding the origins.

But then, in the case of this game, take away the humour, the references and the aesthetics and you're left with a Duke Nukem mod. Yet in Blood's case, this is such a heavily adjusted game that it does stand up in its own right and actually plays and feels more like a different game than just being a Duke3D modification. It's rare given the high population of modifications being nothing more than a few tweaks and adjustments, but Blood stands proud as a game apart, a sick sense of humour, claret pissing from every crack and orifice with a huge grin on its face inviting people to come and take part in the insanity.

I'll be there every step of the way.