From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc
Kendrick Kerwin Chua <
kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:
Play:
Minecraft (PS4) - I wanted to try a more current version with a larger
map (and a better chance of having more biomes and structures), and
despite not having been keen on how the trial played, I still thought
I'd give this version a shot. And it's actually not bad, if you make
sure to pretty much never use anything except the d-pad in the menus,
and increase the FoV (60 seems quite a low default, I went for 70).
My spawn point was right on top of a village almost (and I've found
others since), definitely preferable to my Vita map with no villages
at all, but yet again I was in a large snowy area. Luckily near one
edge of it at least, with a forest and plains and a rocky area not too
far away. The snow buildup around my base in the snowy area has been
absolutely relentless though.
There are two main problems I've found with this version (which seems
to be the current Bedrock edition, matching most other consoles though
still differing somewhat from the PC Java version). Firstly, the
updates after the Aquatic one (the last the Vita got) changed ore
generation, so to me at least diamonds seem harder to get now. And the
bedrock layer is essentially twice as far down, so arguably you're
digging further to get less.
Secondly, the Vita version would let you save anywhere, and if you
died you could pick exit-without-saving from the menu and just reload
and try again. Not so here, as unless you enable cheats death means a
respawn - generally back at your bed - with no items. You're supposed
to be able to recover the items you dropped when you die, but I don't
often manage that; I think this is because you get just five minutes
to do so (if the relevant area is loaded and active) before all the
items are destroyed permanently. So on the PS4 version, after one
frustrating death that lost me a bunch (attacking a certain baddie in
a way which is completely safe on the Vita but apparently isn't in
this version), I started using more limited gear with no enchantments,
and stashing loot more often with a closer respawn point. Sometimes
this meant using no armour and a stone sword, sometimes full iron
armour and an iron sword. Now, iron armour does give you 75% of the
maximum unenchanted protection, so it's not terrible - but more often
I ended up using the no-armour approach because it takes a decent
amount of iron to make a set of armour, and even that was a bit much
to risk.
For me, I have to say that both the problems above combined have made
this version of the game somewhat tedious to play at times. But I got
to see more stuff at least, it *mostly* runs a lot better (that said
I've had weird multi-second freezes at times, which is a bit grim),
and I did manage to beat the End boss on this version too.
Want:
An iron farm in Minecraft, to make iron stuff feel more disposable. I
know this can be done, but the setup sounds rather involved.
To find instances of each Minecraft structure type I've yet to see. It
sounds like there are at least ten of those, though most are quite
small.
GTA III (PC) - Oh look, you can't get the original version on Steam
anymore, only the broken remaster. Guess what I just bought the disc
for?
That was one of Rockstar's sillier decisions I thought.
Bin:
There seemingly being no obvious way to tell where a fortress is in
Minecraft's Nether. On the Vita the Nether is only about 300x300 IIRC,
so maybe it's reasonable enough to just wander about until you find
it. But with the heavily increased difficulty of the "infinite" Nether
on PS4 - unless you happen to get extremely lucky with the biome
generation, somehow getting the most End-like one everywhere you need
to go - I ended up just tunnelling around and absolutely minimising my
time in the many large open spaces. And I looked up the nearest
fortress location on chunkbase.com rather than wandering.
That increased Nether difficulty, and the way it's been done. The
biggest issue might be the skeleton spawns, as they have ranged
attacks and spawn a lot. Ghast spawns are reduced relatively, and
their aim is definitely nerfed (on the Vita they would always shoot
directly at you if they had line of sight, even if they were outside
of the draw distance), but having skeletons as well makes things so
much worse.
Minecraft's completely absurd process involved in making a zoomed-out
map which correctly tiles with others and lets you keep a copy at base
in case you lose the one you're carrying. You know, like basically
anyone would want, and the sort of thing which is entirely automatic
in most games and with no risk of losing a map ever. AIUI the order is
like this - craft an empty locator map, go to the right side of
-64,*,-64 (not 0,*,0 because that would be too obvious), activate the
map there, use a cartography table four times with extra bits of paper
to get the map's zoom level from 0 to 4 (which also blanks it because
that's a fun gameplay mechanic which makes total sense), go to the
right side of -64,*,-64 again (and activate the map again maybe, not
sure) to get something on the map again to check the copy works, make
another locator map, use a cartography table to copy the marked map to
the unmarked one, and put one of the maps e.g. in an item frame on a
wall in your base. Oh, and make sure your map is one of your active
items when exploring or it'll never be marked, and make sure you have
the right map for the area you're in. Also, since copying a map
actually works like (say) a hard link in Unix despite this never being mentioned that I could see, either copy will update the other because
the copy is by reference not by value. I'm not sure how
non-programmers are supposed to make sense out of that last bit. Or
anyone out of any of it, TBH.
Microsoft - this is probably the shorter version of the above.
-Rus.
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