…the adventure continues.
Oh cruel block-based world, what kind of monster have you made of me? I’ve done so little yet spent so much time playing this game. A simple “Oh, I’ll just move this over here” turns into 90 minutes of gathering, mining, placing and cursing. Menial tasks become danger-ridden adventures as me and my double-act of fellow journeyman visit pastures new, all in the hope of colonizing the entire world and surviving another fearsome night. In this, the second volume of a five part series, I meet my demise at the hands of an unlikely foe, we venture into the depths beneath our home and we also recreate a boat-battle sequence several hundred times more entertaining than the film ‘Battleships’. Chop Chop, Dig Dig.
I – Flawed Eggsecution
Our humble home was becoming increasingly different each day. What was formerly a wooden box in the dirt had quickly become so much more, now that we had added a kitchen, observatory and several storage facilities. ‘Tabernacle Tower’ was most certainly, on the rise.
Sorting through our belongings one day, I noticed that we had been storing an abundance of eggs. Without the other ingredients necessary for making some sweet, sweet cake, I decided that the only course of action would be breaking each and every one of them. The Egg-fight was on. After splitting our cache of eggs between Steve and me, we engaged in unholy war the likes of which Tabernacle Tower had never seen. Egg shells were shattering across the interior of our home as we expended our shell-encased ammunition in mere minutes. Skeletons were hiding, Zombies running scared and Creepers exploding out of pure fear as myself and Steve demonstrated an incredulous use of our power. Eventually, our ammunition was spent, and with the unavoidable ceasefire soon came the overwhelming cloud of regret as we surveyed our battlefield in the wake of our egg-based combat. Chickens.
Chickens fucking everywhere. In the kitchen, in the bedroom, in the pantry, under the stairs and even on the ceiling. In our haste to engage in what would become known as the first annual ‘E.G.G War Games’, we failed to notice that with every single shell thrown, there was a fifty percent chance that a live chicken would rise from its gooey prison. We had to take action lest the poultry horde overwhelm and dethrone us.
The arrival of the sun next morn saw the commencement of the day-long operation of removing all poultry from our home. Steve ushered them with occasional punches, whilst Tux was shepherding them towards to the door using a wood plank pen. Pretty soon, the outside of our house looked like a Bernard-Matthews farm as we released all but one of the chickens into the glorious world that they had always dreamed of being a part of. I’m sure that there’s an underlying message to be had here, but this situation sounds like the complete opposite of not counting my chickens before they hatched.
Later in the day, as the memory of the great chicken purge nestled into the back of our minds, each of us returned from our individual gathering expedition. Wood, Sand and Coal were the necessary requirements of our venture, so it came as a fair surprise when Steve returned with fewer materials, and a new friend. ‘Barksemus’ was his name.
Barksemus was a wolf whom Steve had found over the hills away from our home. I took an immediate dislike to him. There was just something off about that dog. From the hollow blackness of his eyes to the uncomfortable bristliness of his tail, I didn’t feel at ease with Barksemus in our house. I resolved to fix the issue by finding and taming a wolf of my own. I spent the next night hunkered down in a hastily constructed wood-hut in the middle of nowhere keeping my eyes peeled for my new best friend to come into view. As morning broke, a pack appeared in the distance. With all of the grace and poise as a hunchback wearing shackles, I pounced on the nearest wolf, taming it with a ‘tough love’ approach that I had honed after watching a Dr.Phil marathon on Living +1.
Returning home, I and my new cohort ‘Rutteger’ were immediately greeted by Barksemus and Steve. Then, as if a spark went off inside his mind, as if he was flooded with flashbacks of the horrors he witnessed in the Vietnam war, Barksemus snapped. First, he lunged for Rutteger, catching him on the throat with a vicious bite. It wasn’t long before Rutteger was overwhelmed, as he perished at the blood-stained paws of Barksemus. But, the furry murderer wasn’t done yet, as he too homed in on me, leaving both me and my dog dead in his wake. To this day, Barksemus remains alive. He will die, though. One day, Steve will wonder why his dog is missing and ask me to help find him, and I will whisper “No…I killed him with my pick-axe LOL”.
II – Cyclone 3
With animals now firmly out of the way, it was time to do some actual work. Steve and I soon began construction on a mine-shaft which would be instantly accessible from our home, meaning that the journey to and from the shaft would become non-existent. After a day of planking that would have made groups of attention-whoring teenagers proud, we now had a direct line to the underbelly of our home, a mine that would become known as ‘Tabernacle Deep’.
Pretty soon I, Steve and Tux had reached the core of this ever-widening chasm. After setting up a temporary base in range of all locations we had yet to strip of materials, we added a mine-cart track which would be used for taking us to and from the mine with ease. The mine cart track was a little, strange, though. Physics went out the window when you went on this thing as 90 degree turns did nothing but propel you onwards with no fear of ever being derailed. What has science done?
As the days passed, we procedurally pillaged every last valuable from the walls of the mine. One by one we made our way back and forth as we rode down to the mine in the organ-shattering mine cart, chose a path to follow down into the underbelly, tackled the monsters that lied within, stripped the walls of all precious ores and fought our way back up the mine to the mine cart relay, before again risking a collapsed lung at the hands of ‘Cyclone 3’, our fatally wounding mine cart track. The ’3′ in ‘Cyclone 3′ is to denote the number of aneurysms on average received per journey. As for ‘Cyclone’, well, it just sounds fucking cool.
We would be dining on gold-lined pork and drinking from diamond goblets for the foreseeable future. Truth is, we needed everything we found, especially the coal, to enhance our home even further. You can’t fuel a furnace on dreams. Or so I’ve been told.
III – Bonfire of the Tabernacles
With great success comes an indisputable desire for more. We had done so well from pillaging our mine that we were left wanting. With this, we each agreed that taking to the seas on poorly made wooden boats in the dead of night would be the best thing to cure our sense of over-indulgence. Each of us deployed into squid infested waters and without hesitation forcibly began trying to hit each other off course by guiding our boats like bumper cars. If you have seen the film ‘Battleship’ we were basically re-enacting the final scene of the film. Our boat-based combat didn’t need any SFX or a multi-million dollar budget however, all we needed were some sticks, a few wood planks, the high seas and the cumulative attention span of a six-year old who has eaten too many Chewits. Fuck your conventional Minecraft, too. No more mining for us, the seas were where we permanently belonged.
Inevitably, our enthusiastic boat-battle led us back to our home-shore, which was laden with the entirety of monsters that the game had to offer. “To Battle!” we softly uttered as we Steve-walked head first into the fray. One errant use of a Flint & Steel later, and Tabernacle Tower was set ablaze in the night. As our creation burned around us, we continued to battle with all we had to our name. Sticks, Cobblestone Blocks and raw Diamond were used as weaponry as we repelled the nightly invaders as best as we could.
The Alamo, Zulu Dawn and Noble 6’s standoff at the end of Halo Reach were all barely comparable, as we essentially held of a burning building by throwing raw materials at the enemies in front of us. It worked, though. The might of the enemy horde was no match for our wood plank barrage. In the morning, regret. Steve quickly reloaded the game, and it was as if the fiery purge of Tabernacle Tower had never happened. A warning perhaps, that despite our relative success at this game, we still hadn’t reached a point where we can go for a midnight boat ride without setting everything on fire. “Perhaps we should try to find a way to get to the Nether-realm?” suggested Steve. “Ha, I just pick-axed your fucking dog” I replied.
June 10, 2012
The Journal