Vegging Out and Terraria

I love Terraria!

I would say that I LOVE Terraria, but I know I am goin to wind up with yet another Grandia moment where I forget to capitalize LOVE and have to make another 5-4-5 screw-ups list.  A blogger can only do that so much before they embarrass themselves and leave blogging, and I have already left this blog twice now.  I don't think Musings can take too many more leavings.  Besides, I have Google AdSense now, that means big money, big prizes.  I love it!

(DISCLAIMER: Musings of a Lehigh Valley Guy began and still exists because I love writing and nerdy things, and want to share that love to the world.  Imagine it as ice cream.  The money I make from AdSense is like the chocolate sprinkles.)

(SOURCE: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/105600/header.jpg?t=1447354225)

Terraria is one of the most well known mining/building games on the market, besides Minecraft.  I prefer Terraria to the latter, to no fault of its own.  Terraria hits me in the nostalgia zone.  It reminds me of Wonder Boy in Monster World or Ys III: Wonderers from Ys.  There is also much more to do, namely because it is 2-D and has had more people involved.  For a while, Minecraft had Markus Persson, a heroic game designer by any measure, programming the whole thing.  Minecraft also has the whole 3-D perspective to its advantage, which leads to some amazing architecture.  Terraria also suffers from its bosses behaving more like Flatland, with the A Square that is your PC is visited by the A Sphere that is the Eye of Cthulhu.  It breaks the willful suspension of disbelief, and leads to situations where, the best course of action is to wage a war of attrition and hide behind the mound of dead bards.

With the criticism out of the way, I want to discus what I love about the game.  Each biome is artfully rendered and each one unique.  The different environs have unique underground locales and dungeons that come with their own enemies and materials to build and use.  The current game has either a demonic biome or a bloody biome that is reminiscent of  a haunted cartridge creepypasta.  The latter biome, by the way, is my favorite.  It makes me think of some godlike entity that died and that its ichor corrupted the world.  There are also biomes that come after certain conditions are met, meteor landing sites and a heavenly realm known as the Hallowed.  However, even in the Hallowed with the unicorns and such that run wild, everything wants to kill you.

Above we have an image of me playing the game with my warrior character, building an appropriate wizard's tower for my wizard/magic-based character.  We also get to see the Amiibo collection Krista and I have, but that is not important at the moment.  I think I have spent a good few hours just joyfully collecting materials and building this tower.  I can't even sit down to play a heavily grinding based RPG for twenty minutes, and I beat all the original NES Dragon Warrior games.  I find the sense of exploration and building the world to be satisfying.  People love seeing their own creations, virtual ones are no different.  I once built a castle in Minecraft, throne and all.  Those were good days, relaxing in the LV, waiting for Comic-Con to come around.  But I digress.  Minecraft and Terraria are both art games in their own way, with RPG elements added on to mix things up and make them exciting.

There wasn't really and point to this post, just wanted to talk about what I have been up to, and to talk about Terraria.  It's fun to blog just for fun from time to time.

:)