MineSaints RowCraft
What does Minecraft have in common with Saints Row?
Well. Let’s see, Minecraft is a game about creating and building whatever you can imagine, and allowing you creativity to flourish in wonderful and unexpected ways.
In Saints Row, you run around naked and beat people to death with a giant dildo.
In Minecraft, you play with friends and work together; you play survival and fight and toil to collect the materials from which you build a world.
In Saints Row, you run around naked and beat people to death with a giant dildo.
Your instinctive answer would be that not much is in common between them, but these two games are linked in very interesting ways.
Firstly, I’d like to stress I am talking about creative Minecraft here. Not survival mode (you’ll see why in a moment).
Secretly, in the back of everyone brain, is a little part of us that wants to do something really stupid, just for the sheer heck of it. Have you ever REALLY wanted to punch someone in the nose? Like a very tall official looking man explaining in every minute detail the reasons why he refuses to hire Arabs. Or an 40 year old woman with dreadlocks that smells of grass describing the healing powers of yoga and why “money is a corruption” and “man should return to his primitive peaceful ways”. The only thing that’s stops you from swinging your already clenched fist at that person is the boundaries of society. Fortunately, those don’t exist in games.
Which is why most players of Minecraft creative mode end up blowing everything up with TNT and most players of Saints Row end up beating people to death with a giant dildo, because, as a species, we are drawn to those games.
Basically, these games are about freedom, and one is far “funner” (to use this term simply to express the enjoyment one experiences) then the other. But in my opinion at least, the other is far more gratifying to play. (For the record, “gratify” means to pleasure, satisfy and fulfill desires.).
I’m sorry, but Saints Row is the fun bout of ungratification (which isn’t a word, but, hey ho – “funner” isn’t either ) While being ludicrously fun, Saints Row simply doesn’t make the player work enough. It won’t be long before the player unlocks the “penetrator”, and you can beat people to death with a flabby pink cock. What more could you want? The game is finished from that point on and the rest is meaningless fun.
Minecraft, even in creative mode, still forces player to work, and by doing so creates a vast sense of achievement when the player finally does finish their build. And, oddly, this build is almost always something constructive, it seems, that even though the option to blow everything up with TNT is there, players quickly tire and not before long are spending their time build redstone computers and houses.
So yes, I think Minecraft is better, but I’m not dissing Saints Row. The game developers knew they were engineering fun, and they did it well. But in the end of the day nothing can top the satisfaction created by those simple blocks.
And don’t take this as advice to punch those people.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph, or Lawsome, as the internet folk call him – Spends a lot of time making games, most of which fall apart or don’t work and are never published, but the few that survive can be found on his account at Yoyogames http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/users/Lawsome1997. He mainly enjoys writing about game theory but you’ll see him do a few reviews. He avoids games that look generic and would rather play something original than something fun. He has strong opinions on games and can hold his own in an argument, if you tell him that COD MW3 is the best game ever he may bite your head off.
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