PixlBit

Today I brought my copy of Namco Museum Virtual Arcade to my friend's place so I could play some 1984 arcade classics. Then it was back to Minecraft. The day looked kinda similar to yesterday really. 

First up was The Tower of Druaga, one of the earliest action RPGs. You play as armored Gil (Gilgamesh) and have to find a key to open a door in a 2D maze of walls within a time limit. The quicker you do it, the more points you score. I never had the time run out, but once I got close and a fireball appeared on the map just before I left the level. Possibly it chases you down when the timer gets close to zero.

The game randomly spawns the map, key, door, and monster locations, so sometimes you get lucky and the key and door are close to each other. I got my high score of 49k when this happened on the first two floors. 

Sometimes a chest will appear on the map containing a pick axe or potion. I was never sure how to use them, or what the potion did, but I jabbed the "Y" button because, in the controls menu, it has a question mark next to it. The pick axe obviously breaks through a wall. 

Basic gameplay is with a sword and shield. You press "A" to take out the sword, and then run into enemies to kill them. Let go of the "A" button, and Gil puts his sword away. On floor 4, wizards appear, and for a while there, I couldn't figure out how to avoid them. They teleport all over the place and shoot some kind of spell at you. Eventually, I discovered that all I had to do to not get killed was face them and not have my sword out; thus the shield protects you. On floor 5 though, there are many more wizards, and they sometimes get you from both sides at once. I didn't get past floor five. 

Then I saw that Grobda, in the same collection, was a 1984 game too, and played that a bit. This is the sequel to Xevious but it's not a vertically scrolling shooter. "What?!" Yea, that's what I said. It's a tank battle game on a fixed screen, and feels a lot like a twin-stick shooter like Robotron 2084 even though you don't use the right stick to shoot (maybe it's the many laser blasts you shoot while aiming/moving with the left stick that made me think of Robotron). You also have a shield on the "B" button. You just spray the field with laser blasts and try not to get shot or caught in the giant explosions of your enemy. I played through a few screens of this before moving on. It's not my thing. 

That being done, it was back to Minecraft. Where we left off yesterday was with the idea of digging a pool at the bottom of a shaft dug all the way to bedrock, and jumping down to speed up at least one direction into the mine. Well, I dug a 2x1 shaft, one side with the ladder, and the other side empty but with a pool of water at the bottom. With only a one stone-deep pool, we were able to jump the entire 60 plus stones without getting hurt. It was really funny watching each other jump the distance from the bottom. 

Then I got to digging more 12x12x3 rooms each connected by passageways 12 stones long. I dug so many that I reached the edge of the map where you can't dig anymore. Then I decided to dig straight up to see where I was and to see if I could dig a 1x1 shaft up from the bedrock. It was tricky, but I did it, laying ladder as I dug upwards. Eventually I broke into water and it came down the shaft a little ways but not all the way like I thought it would. I climbed right to the edge of the water and I could see sky way off in the distance through the water. I thought, "Cool! I'll swim to the surface from here". I did and came out in the ocean a little ways off from shore. I swam to an ice flow and marked the spot. I was going to swim back down to the entrance below, but I'm not Aquaman, and it was pretty deep there. I realized from the surface, as I walked back to the main entrance shaft, that all the rooms I dug out below were deep below the bottom of the sea and an inlet that went almost to the main entrance shaft. Any room I would dig up from would probably hit water. 

So then I started following Mark around to see what he was doing. He was going out every night and hunting Creepers for their gunpowder and building TNT, which he then used for mining. I thought this was cool and starting hunting too. You end up fighting all sorts of monsters at night. 

Then I decided to see how fast I could build up into the sky, since I'd already mastered downward digging. I started a spiral staircase and figured out various ways to build up faster and then to build structures up high. Basically you can build straight up by jumping and laying stone below you. It's fun. 

And that was about it. I'm not sure what to do next in the game, but that's part of the fun. You come up with ideas and then try them out. I'm thinking this TNT way of mining is the way to go. It's just a matter of getting a lot of gunpowder together quickly. I may work on that next time.