Nostolgic. I played this when I was 7. Edit: Thanks for responding. This was the first web browser game I ever played.
Reviews for "Mine Blocks"
Zanzlanz responds:
So you could be anywhere between 7 and 17!
Thank you for playing and visiting the game again :D
nice game
also I HAVE THE MARIO SKIN!
Zanzlanz responds:
Haha thank you, I'm glad you like it!
yes
Zanzlanz responds:
The world's shortest review follows right after the world's longest review! Nice!
I think that back in the day you had objectively worse textures for the game and I think I found some top ten video when searching for this game: "Top X shameless Minecraft rip-offs that you should never play". And I think your game with the old textures was in the thumbnail. Holy crap you can't believe how much I raged. Obviously I didn't watch the video though because I don't want Watchmojo vids recommended to me on YT.
As for the game itself, it not only reduces the number of dimensions(from 3D to 2D), but also the number of hours. I really like the fact that all you need to do to get to the Ender Dragon is make a pillar of blocks and go sideways from there and you'll get to the floating stronghold in no time. I died to the Dragon many times trying to destroy the crystals but once I destroyed the last one I just put on my iron armor and built a little box and killed her with surprising ease. Then she dropped 5000 scales and I made the dragon scale armor. I mean, in vanilla Minecraft I'm an immense noob, and only manage to get 5 diamonds at best, before eventually getting bored and giving up, but here not only did I actually manage to slay the final boss and beat the game(not counting the wither), but also got to wear a full set of an armor that is superior to the diamond armor, while also making me feel like I deserved my reward, like I am still a true Minecrafter or something. Thank you for that.
There were also some elements present in this game that I never felt in Minecraft. None of these new elements harmed the game imo, except for the Nether which thankfully got fixed. Zombies, Creepers and Endermen are surprisingly easy to kill, even with melee weapons, Spiders are alright, Skeletons are more annoying not because they're more dangerous, but because everything around them is weaker, and the new Nether Eyes are kind of annoying, but by that I mean they're just minor inconveniences that won't bother you too much. I think that if you ever decide to fix their bugged ability to clip through walls it would not only make them less memorable but it would also it would harm the lore of the game because it would erase an explanation for how they managed to escape the Nether. Speaking of the Nether, I didn't really like the lag in there but because I used to play Skywars on some Minecraft server I can tell you that I've seen much worse. And I really can't blame you for it, this game was made in a program designed for crappy 2 second long ads. Now that the lag got fixed it is a LOT less noticeable but the Nether still seemed like a clunky experience. But I like the addition of bone blocks in the Nether. I couldn't find enough skeletons to tame a dog so I just went there to fetch an entire stack or two. One last thing I want to talk about is the stronghold. Because I managed to find three golden apples(holy crap!), a bunch of redstone(understandable), but little iron in there. Most of the chests had stuff like bread, wheat, logs, and sticks. Maybe these discrepancies in the usefulness of items are a way to counter the players who didn't bother getting too many Ender Eyes coming in there unprepared and coming out with diamond gear? Idk, but it was certainly interesting. All of these new elements were interesting and made the game feel unique. I'm kind of miss the noclip Nether Eyes bugging me every once in a while in the real Minecraft. I hope some people as passionate as you will make a mod or something.
And yeah, uh... If it is true that you read every single comment(which seems true) then I uh... I'm kinda sorry I made you read all this. I'm still amazed you managed to remain active for practically 10 years. It only took you two years to reach 1.000.000 views here, and yet in the remaining 6 years you only managed to get 800.000. The math doesn't seem right, I wonder what happened, I'm kinda new to NG... I also kinda wonder what you'll be doing 10 more years from now...
Zanzlanz responds:
This is like the most inspired and interesting comment I've gotten in aaages and I loved reading through and hearing your thoughts about the game and how you experience it in particular!
The "Minecraft ripoffs" titles always scare me too, but YouTubers tend to go in that direction mostly just as literal click-bait. Oftentimes the content of the video is a little bit different. For example, DanTDM recently played Mine Blocks and was actually really nice about it in his video, saying it was well done and cute. He ran into a big Firefox bug unfortunately, but he didn't really use it as a negative still. I appreciated it, even if the "fake Minecraft games" title scared me haha. I think YouTubers are responsible for realizing there are real people behind these fan games and their videos have real consequences on those real people. Most of them are perfect with that, but I know that there are a few who are indirectly really rough on young and learning developers by mistake.
It's really cool to hear your experience with Mine Blocks and why you feel like you've gotten more out of it than Minecraft (at least in some cases). Obviously everyone's experience varies, but I agree that Mine Blocks tends to reward players quicker because of the reduced complexity. I mean, you can see where ores are right through the blocks in lit places haha! I think it makes reward more based on the amount of time you played since progression is faster.
I like the harsh feel that Minecraft gives as well, where you end up feeling that each reward is something to savor. But there's something nice about having a whole new game where the rewards are maybe closer to the amount of effort (if not too close, in the case of the loot chests, lol).
But yeah I don't think people really discussed that topic closely like you have here, so I appreciate those thoughts!
The lore with nethereyes is also something not many people bring up! That was the original reason why they dropped bedrock blocks - because they found a way to mine out of them. I love how coincidental it is that their collision would be sloppy and it would actually add to the lore like that. I love your perspective on all of this stuff!
Bugs can definitely be endearing. I think about this with the original Minecraft as well. Mine cart boosters were a thing - if you put two mine carts side-by-side, they would both go to max speed for a while. This created emergent game play with really unique possibilities. When it was fixed and replaced with powered rails, even though the system became intentional, it now has more pieces, and the uniqueness of discovering and innovating on a quirky bug was lost.
I'm sure the right decision was not to keep the bug and ignore it forever, but I 100% get what you're saying.
The world generator is extremely old and it's certainly showing its age! It's still running on the same generator that was made in October 2011! Instead of doing incremental fixes to the world generator, I would rather just do one big sweep to fix the weird issues and add a bunch of missing biomes and stuff. All natural loot chests have the same loot possibilities, and changing this would change the world generator - so that's why it hasn't been balanced or made more interesting. The world generator rewrite has just always been pushed back because more important things kept coming up.
I am now porting the entire game to a game engine I made, which will reduce lag by a lot, and will provide a better structure for me to rewrite the world generator finally! It still seems a long ways away, but I'm really excited to see that happen!
Mine Blocks hit its peak popularity in 2015, but most of these players were playing on random Flash gaming sites and not Newgrounds. Mine Blocks could only be played on a couple of websites when it was just starting, so that's probably why it increased in views so quickly at the start, and why it slowed down so much here later haha.
Things may have slowed down, but there is still a nice community of players, and I wouldn't want to just leave that. Mine Blocks is such a part of me and my life, and it's something that I really love working on, so I intend to keep working on it as long as people are here to enjoy it :)
10 years is a very long time to make stuff! That's enough time to make like 5 big projects I have planned haha, so I have NO idea what I will be making by then! We'll see, I guess :D!
Thanks again for the fantastic comment! Hope you have a great day!
Wow minecraft 2D the best in the world
Zanzlanz responds:
Well gosh, thanks a lot! :D