GDC- Minecraft and Amnesia Win Big

Yesterday, Frictional Games' Amnesia and Mojang Specifications' Minecraft dominated at the Independent Games Festival Awards.

Amnesia slaps you in the face with a whole new level of brick-shitting scare tactics

In Amnesia, you play a man in a broken down castle, trying to regain his memories. All while being chased by netherworldy creatures. Did I mention you can't fight them at all? That's right. All you can do is run and hide from these hell-beasts trying to kill you. Oh, and darkness makes you go insane after a while.
Basically, you're boned in every possible direction. Can't fight, so have to hide. But if you hide, you lose your mind. Fun stuff.


Amnesia won awards in Excellence in Audio, Technical Excellence, and the $10,000 Direct2Drive Vision award. Frictional Co-founder Thomas Grip, as he accepted an oversized $10,000 check, said "I think that we need to buy another bag or get more luggage. After three years of thinking we're not going to make games anymore and hating everything and living on noodles... it's totally getting done... and getting awards for it, that seems like too much.”

 Minecraft  won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, as well as the night's Audience Choice award, recieving over 5,000 e-mail-verified votes on IGF's website.

Both are fantastic games, but they weren't that night's only winners. Gamasutra has the full list of the 2011 IGF Award winners:

Best Student Game:
Fract by Richard E Flanagan

Excellence in Design:
Desktop Dungeons by QCF Design

Technical Excellence:
Amnesia: The Dark Descent by Frictional Games

Best Mobile Game:
Helsing's Fire by Ratloop

Excellence in Visual Art:
Bit.Trip Runner by Gaijin Games

Excellence in Audio:
Amnesia: The Dark Descent by Frictional Games

Direct2Drive Vision Award:
Amnesia: The Dark Descent by Frictional Games

Audience Award:
Minecraft by Mojang

IGF Nuovo Award
Nidhogg by Messhof

Seumas McNally Grand Prize:
Minecraft by Mojang

 [via  Gamasutra]

Time to Mine

Tuesday marked a fairly large update for Minecraft to Beta 1.3. Some of the larger features added a few half blocks added in, a complete user interface makeover, and now you can quietly sleep through the night with creepers tapping on your windows, singing you a sweet lullaby. Okay, maybe not a lullaby, but beds have been implemented.

LET ME SSSSSSSSSSING YOU A SSSSSSSSSSSONG

Here's the full list, taken from Notch's blog, The Word of Notch.

* Implemented a new lighting engine with the help of MrMessiahs (can be turned off)
* Changed the options around, added a new “Graphics options” button
* Added beds. If all players in a map sleeps in a bed during night, the game immediately skips until morning
* Added three new half-size blocks
* Added Delay/Repeater redstone dust blocks
* Added whitelisting to the server. To use, enter “whitelist <cmd>” where cmd is “on”, “off”, “add <player>”, “remove <player>”, “list” or “reload”
* New save file format, old maps need to be converted (that might take a while..)
* It’s now possible to have more than five save slots, and to rename saves
* Scrollbars in both the texture pack list, and in the map selection screen
* Replaced the Mojang splash image to reflect the new logo colors
* .. and a bunch of bug fixes and tweaks!

Talkin' Bout Minecraft.

In case you are behind the times in the realm of PC Gaming, Minecraft is an extremely successful indie sandbox game released by Markus Persson, a programmer who goes by the alias "Notch" online, and run by his company Mojang Specifications. Oh, did I mention the game has since surpassed one million sales?

Minecraft is a sandbox game where you design whatever you want to, with whatever you gather. Wood? Check. Forest? Check. One (not so) giant wooden cock and balls in the middle of a forest?

Check.

 
To put it simply; generate a world, break blocks, place blocks creatively and usefully. Essentially it's Legos. Except if those legos were half the size of a person. And you never stepped on them barefoot then proceeded to weep in pain for several agonizing moments.

Safety legos!

 I avoided this game like the plague for the first few weeks I had known about it.

This game, which seemed so simple and uneventful, annoyed me. That is, before I actually played it.

My friends raved about it endlessly in the few moments I would see them between their day long binges of excavating new caves they found in their world.

It's like a gateway drug. Except it's just a gateway.

Eventually, I caved (pun). There had to be something to this blocky game with a retro feel.

Oh how much there is to it.

Punch trees to get wood. Make Planks out of wood. Make sticks out of planks. Make a workbench. Make an axe out of sticks and planks, using the workbench. Eventually make picks, get stone, make stone picks.

It just keeps going.

This game has many layers to it, many many more layers than I thought at first glance. Kind of like a cake. Except you can't eat it.

The Cake: Not a lie?

Even though it is an inedible delicacy, it is a sweet game that I highly recommend to anyone who has free time and about $20 USD to drop on it at the official Minecraft website here.