Saturday, June 2, 2012

Goodbye White Dwarf... and hello, Minecraft!



Hey all!

Sorry I've been gone for a bit; work being brutish, coupled with the arrival of the FANTASTICALLY addictive game Minecraft, have limited my gaming time!

A quick word, if I may, about Minecraft.  Fantastic game.  Basically legos in an infinite world, but instead of colors you get elements and materials... iron, gold, dirt, wood, etc... and you can build anything you can imagine.  It is cheap.  It can run on ANY computer, because the graphics are exceedingly simple.  It takes about five seconds to download, and can be played from either your computer or even through a browser on a random computer.  I highly recommend it to ANYONE reading this blog.  At the top you can see my latest project... a MASSIVE castle and gatehouse.  There is more castle on the back side, and the entire mountain is hollowed out, allowing a Great Hall, multiple guest complexes, a natural grotto, a spa, an art gallery, work and forge rooms, a master bed complex, and more.  Thankfully, everyone I play with on my server is a big time miner, but we've still run out of cobblestone a LOT.

To the right is another shot, this time from the front.  The only way in the castle is through the gatehouse tower at the right, which leads to the bridge you can sort of see.  BTW, the ENTIRE interior is finished, all floors and ceilings matched, and furniture and rugs and everything built... along with some great water features and even a lava display.  Yeah, Minecraft is fun.  Oh, and ignore the tree at the top tower; a jackass friend of mine put that there last night, and I just noticed it.  Chop chop chop!

Now, about White Dwarf.

I've been reading WD for years.  Years and years.  Basically every issue back to around issue 100 or so, with the pygmy adventure and the rest.

But holy cow... between the blank white covers featuring whatever they are currently selling, and the endless "How to paint blah blah" and the reviews of their own product, it has just become nothing but an expensive catalogue.  So... I'm done.  I am calling up to cancel my subscription.  Wargames Illustrated is enough for me.  Sorry, GW... let me know when you stop being such a focused, product-based company.


4 comments:

Simon Quinton said...

I knocked off buying white dwarf years ago. I bought it occasionally if they printed rules in there or the odd scenario for LOTR but that's all sadly died off

Broeders said...

My son is a confirmed Munecraft addict. He's building a castle himself at the moment.

As for WD, I stopped buying it years ago. It is as you describe - an endless plug for GW products.

A typical edition is

- 6 pages of the latest models / troops available for one of the 'races'. These essentially demonstrate why your 40K / Warhammer army is now useless UNLESS you now buy these troops / models.

- 4 pages of 'how to paint these models' - showing how you now also need to buy 12 new paint colours to make them look right.

- 16 pages of background info on these troops and how they need to be used and if you don't have them you might as well jack it all in.

- 12 page battle report where the 'race' wins a monumental battle by use of the new troops / models.

- some adverts for Forge World, Black Library etc.

- a couple of pages of adverts / info on the other GW ranges.

That's it. I downloaded a whole raft of early WD (#7 to #150) from the interweb. Every one of them was a delight - scenarios for 4-5 rules sets, interesting articles, great pictures....

Progress is not always forward!

Fjodin said...

HUZZAH! ANOTHER MINECRAFT PLAYER!

Mikko Asikainen said...

Wow, you really endured WD for a long time if you only gave up now. I think the last time I saw anything resembling worthy content in that rag was when Mordheim came out and they rolled out additional rules for it in WD. And that was in.. 2000?

Now Wargames Illustrated is something I too subscribe. I'm really happy it didn't become a White Dwarf for flames of war, but has lots and lots of other content as well.