But there are still those who "cannot get into video games." Maybe the person is intimidated by a controller with 25 buttons and three joysticks. Maybe the subject matter of a 2D platformer just appears juvenile or an FPS appears too violent. These failures to get involved push some people away from gaming, but as stated earlier, gaming is no longer a single formula. We’re seeing so many ways to approach game design, narrative and control in this day and age; I’m of the mind that, with such a buffet of choice, anyone can find at least one game that can hook them into gaming. Maybe it’s not in the "hardcore" form where they’ll stand outside at a midnight launch, but in a way that they can have a favorite game that they can revisit over the years, while still enjoying it.
Looking back at my own experiences, my situation isn’t too much different than a lot of the experiences seen in the younger crowd who are being introduced to Minecraft or Wii Sports today. It might seem silly at first, but the appeal of these games is so vast and varied that it’s difficult to be scared away from gaming that badly. It’s an age where what defines a game is so ambiguous and diverse that it’s near impossible to be turned off by absolutely every title on the market. This is why games are such a fantastic medium today; there’s just so much to play. New niches are being formed and filled as we speak and even the most jaded, cynical technophobe would have to find some aspect of a video game that’s worth a considerable look. It’s hard to explain what exactly makes games so magical, since we all have our own little moments of fascination with games, ones that kept us playing throughout the entire story and into the sequel.
[N. Fujimoto] Dragon Quest Builders is an open world sandbox game where item and town construction is a major component so that similarity to Minecraft Creative Builds does exist. Beyond that it is a story driven adventure game with many RPG elements, so even though there is some common ground, it is a very different game.
It is not necessary, but it is a fun little way to use the various workstations in the game and a great starting point for gamers looking to get into Redstone. enbentz games on YouTube have a simple, but effective, tutorial for creating a Block Swapper in Minecra
(thinks for a few seconds) If I suck at sandbox and building games, would I still be able to play this? Like traditional Dragon Quest games, anyone can pick up and play this. Dragon Quest Builders includes blue prints that will instruct the player on how to build certain structures. You are of course free to deviate from them as much as you want but for people who want to quickly build a structure we included them to facilitate faster gameplay and progress if someone wants to use them. (Here I am shown some screenshots from a phone that include a ridiculously huge and impressive kingdom, the amusement park, a giant gold slime, and even a replica of a screen shot of the battle with Gilgamesh from Final Fantasy V) All of these are screenshots from Dragon Quest builders. If you can imagine it, you can build it. There are some people in Japan who have spent excess of fifty days constructing magnificent kingdoms strictly from their own imagination. Even people who are not fans of traditional Dragon Quest games can enjoy this so I hope a lot of people give it a shot when it comes out next month.
Many other gamers in my age group were hooked during the Super Nintendo/Sega Genesis era, while the older crowd are likely to have the original NES in their hearts. Some might even cite the original Atari 2600 as their first step into the world of gaming, with their reverence for the medium enduring even the colossal gaming crash of the 1980’s. On the other side of things, we have younger gamers who are being raised on Playstation consoles as new as the Playstation 4 and even Microsoft’s Xbox line, which didn’t appear until the new millennium. We also mustn’t forget those of us who played PC games during our childhood, even the consistently ridiculed edutainment games like Oregon Trail II . We’re all given so much history and so many options to choose from as fans within this medium, but those of us who call ourselves gamers find something truly fascinating with games as a whole.
The lack of plot means the action needs to carry the game, which Minecraft Dungeons nicely pulls off. It's a fairly stripped-down entry in the genre, with no character classes or specializations, but instead focuses on character customization through loot. At the start you choose a character skin, none of which have any advantage or disadvantage over another, and then through the course of the adventure find gear to fit your play style. There are six slots to fill, three of which are for action accessories assigned to the controller face buttons and the others being the equipment of weapon, armor and ranged, and while it's tempting to go for straight power over anything else, it's better to find things that suit your play style.
