Xenominer: An interesting spin on Voxel Sandbox Gaming
Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 5:57 am
With the popularity, and more importantly the monetary success, of Minecraft, sandbox games of building and destroying exploded across many platforms. Early on, Xbox got Fortresscraft which was a poor substitute indeed.
More recently, we got Minecraft: Xbox360 Edition, which, although closer to what we wanted, was also a poor substitute as it went back to before any of the interesting bits of survival appeared, such as hunger and animal taming, but didn't give us creative mode to let us run around and do as we wished. But infinitely more important was one simple fact: The world size is arbitrarily set. You cannot change how big the world is and trying to leave the defined world runs you into an invisible wall.
Minecraft, with part of it's claim to fame being it's infinite world to explore, had instead become finite.
And besides, let's face facts, after the initial scare and learning to build your empire, vanilla Minecraft can be rather boring for the less artistically inclined of us.
With even Minecraft becoming finite due to the lack of processing power on the 360, I had essentially given up hope on finding something like MC is on the PC. And then I downloaded the Xenominer demo.
There are no enemies in Xenominer, nothing hunts you during the night and other than one anomalous structure there is no sign of life on the moon that the story places you on after your ship crash landed with you as the only survivor.
Accompanied by the occasional comment from DAI-SE, the disembodied voice of the ship's AI, you have to find oxygen and set up a base camp to survive and expand DAI-SE's processing power. Sounds like an easy ride, right? Wrong.
Unlike MC, where the night is dangerous due to the creatures that wander it, the moon of Xenominer is practically an enemy all on it's own. Despite the 'mineral-rich' description, you'll often find yourself hunting desperately for the one mineral that you have practically none of(copper in my case), whilst trying to juggle expanding DAI-SE's ability to produce better gear for you to use to hunt minerals with and expanding your storage space to cram all the crap you dig up into while you try to find a use for it.
And before you plan any long treks along the surface there's an important note you need to read: You're on a moon, which has no atmosphere. Besides a lack of oxygen, this also means that there's no real magnetosphere. And that means that you'll be doing vampire impersonations, because the radiation will kill you dead.
And all of this with an infinite world size.
Combining that all together has made Xenominer a rather fun thing to play around with and it's got a practically perfect price at 80 MSpoints. In other words, all that for only a buck.
Thoughts?
More recently, we got Minecraft: Xbox360 Edition, which, although closer to what we wanted, was also a poor substitute as it went back to before any of the interesting bits of survival appeared, such as hunger and animal taming, but didn't give us creative mode to let us run around and do as we wished. But infinitely more important was one simple fact: The world size is arbitrarily set. You cannot change how big the world is and trying to leave the defined world runs you into an invisible wall.
Minecraft, with part of it's claim to fame being it's infinite world to explore, had instead become finite.
And besides, let's face facts, after the initial scare and learning to build your empire, vanilla Minecraft can be rather boring for the less artistically inclined of us.
With even Minecraft becoming finite due to the lack of processing power on the 360, I had essentially given up hope on finding something like MC is on the PC. And then I downloaded the Xenominer demo.
There are no enemies in Xenominer, nothing hunts you during the night and other than one anomalous structure there is no sign of life on the moon that the story places you on after your ship crash landed with you as the only survivor.
Accompanied by the occasional comment from DAI-SE, the disembodied voice of the ship's AI, you have to find oxygen and set up a base camp to survive and expand DAI-SE's processing power. Sounds like an easy ride, right? Wrong.
Unlike MC, where the night is dangerous due to the creatures that wander it, the moon of Xenominer is practically an enemy all on it's own. Despite the 'mineral-rich' description, you'll often find yourself hunting desperately for the one mineral that you have practically none of(copper in my case), whilst trying to juggle expanding DAI-SE's ability to produce better gear for you to use to hunt minerals with and expanding your storage space to cram all the crap you dig up into while you try to find a use for it.
And before you plan any long treks along the surface there's an important note you need to read: You're on a moon, which has no atmosphere. Besides a lack of oxygen, this also means that there's no real magnetosphere. And that means that you'll be doing vampire impersonations, because the radiation will kill you dead.
And all of this with an infinite world size.
Combining that all together has made Xenominer a rather fun thing to play around with and it's got a practically perfect price at 80 MSpoints. In other words, all that for only a buck.
Thoughts?