During the early 90’s, many of us were involved in, as coined by James Rolfe, the “bit wars,” the point where competing systems developed a brand loyalty with the consumers. It was a Genesis/SNES world and the market intended for you to pick a side. But those of us who were first exposed to video games during this time didn’t originally intend to side with either Sega or Nintendo. While there were certain characteristics of each console that we preferred, our focus was never on what games were better. The first big step for any future gamer is one devoid of partisanship in the gaming community; when you first enter the gaming world, you aren’t involved in the console wars. In fact, they did not exist to you back then. I personally chose Sonic the Hedgehog as my “gateway game” simply because I liked who he was as a character. I liked his cool blue color, his tough-guy stare, and the acrobatic nature of how he moved. Level design, physics, replay value, music, even the buzz term “blast processing” meant absolutely nothing to me. It was Sonic himself that captivated me to join the gaming world.
So what convinces us to play games in the first place? To answer that, you’d need to look at every game ever made, because that’s the solution. Because of everything games can, have, and will ever do.
Even people who passed on gaming in their youth are able to experience that same magic in their adulthood with more mainstream successes like Wii Sports . In fact, this demographic, a group who likely passed on the gaming world as kids, are now realizing a fresh new perspective. They get to see different elements of game design that they might have ignored back then, making the evolution of the medium and the broadening of the market a much more appealing prospect. Specifically, that big moment where a “virgin” gamer (regardless of age) is finally able to have fun when playing a game is a sense of purity and epiphany. It’s all about having fun. As we get more involved in the medium, we begin to take sides. We begin to favor consoles or developers. We begin to look at games with the minds of cynical and judgmental critics. Even as kids, we’d argue at the lunch table as to whether Sega or Nintendo is better, but if you rewind just a few years before that, you didn’t even care who made the console. Perhaps it was the catchy level themes that you remember the most or maybe it’s some iconic environmental hazard that sticks in your mind. Maybe it was similar to my case where it was just the character’s expressive personality that encouraged me to pick up a controller and actually control the character. The moments of realization and involvement vary for everyone, but as fresh faces in the gaming community, we’re never forced to pick a side. We are clean slates for series to enthrall and characters to enlist, and our focus was precisely on the game itself and those subtle moments of appeal.
Castles are always a safe choice for Minecraft Beginner guide players since they’ll often end up looking impressive and fantastical no matter the location or setting. Plus, the blocks and the aesthetics of the game are simply perfect for more medieval-style bui
While a steep departure from the main game, Minecraft Dungeons was a great success in its own right, with fans enjoying its cute graphics and enjoyable gameplay. While there are plenty of great dungeon crawler games out there, many of them are not suitable for younger audiences, which is one of the reasons that Minecraft Dungeons was so appeal
Its graphics are certainly nothing to write home about, but what it lacks in visual fidelity, it more than makes up for elsewhere. The game features a slew of old-school RPG mechanics and combines them with some of the more recent survival game concepts to great effect. Choices feel meaningful and gameplay is fluid which together leads to a wonderful experience whether playing on one’s own or together with a fri
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.
The game shares quite a few similarities with No Man’s Sky in terms of its core mechanics, but where the latter chooses to focus on providing an endless sandbox for players to explore, Space Engineers instead devotes itself to giving its players a first-class multiplayer experience. Whether or not it truly succeeds in this regard is debatable, but it’s hard to argue that what it does provide isn’t both unique and enjoyab
