CastleMiner Z – Minecraft’s BEST Knock Off

Minecraft is one of the most successful games of all time with over 200 million copies sold that being said since its release in 2009 there have been numerous people and companies that have tried recreating its success some of these games such as Terraria and 7 Days to Die

Have taken inspiration but went a completely different direction while other games have just completely ripped off Minecraft entirely out of all of the Minecraft rip-offs only one remains fondly remembered by many people including myself this game is Castle Miner Z and although it looks like a horrible monstrosity let us dive deep to

Understand the history game plan more of Minecraft’s best knockoff on November 19 2008 Microsoft started a program that allowed for Indie Studios to publish their games on the Xbox Live store these games would be under the title Xbox Live indie games and would be fairly cheap usually in the range of one

To five dollars that being said the first year and a half of the program was relatively quiet mostly being ports of successful new grounds titles and 2D Platformers however this would change in 2010 because of a man named Thomas stone see Thomas stone was a former employee

Of Microsoft who in October 2009 founded digital DNA Studios and after being inspired by the success of Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2 he released Avatar paintball on May 29 2010 for three dollars Avatar paintball as a whole is a pretty mediocre multiplayer shooter however it was successful enough to keep

Thomas stone afloat for the next year and the months following Avatar paintball’s release another small indie game called Minecraft exploded all over the Internet and YouTube it would explode even more in early 2011 selling over a million copies however it was only for PC so numerous Indie developers

Work to make a game that looked and played just like Minecraft but for the Xbox 360. the first of these was called fortresscraft and would be released on April 8 2011 and would sell over 500 000 copies just in the first six months following this was Total Miner which

Unlike fortresscraft had a survival mode and this game itself would also be massively successful getting millions of views on YouTube and finally on July 27 2011 Thomas would release Castle Miner now Castle Miner was just a knockoff of fortresscraft so I guess that makes it a knockoff of a knockoff anyways because

Of that it was just a simple building game with no survival elements Thomas would continue to update CastleMiner for the next few months adding new blocks and new terrain however it never really catched on the same way Fortress crafter Total Miner did and now Mojang themselves officially announced that

They were going to be releasing Minecraft on the Xbox in a few months so Thomas changed Focus he would turn Castle Miner into a survival game and so two months later on November 3rd Thomas released Castle Miner Z and it would quickly become one of the highest

Selling games on the Indie store and eventually would be the highest selling Xbox Live indie game with over 1 million sales so let us now get into the gameplay to just understand what makes this game special for me and many other people CastleMiner Z starts by spawning you in

A gloomy overcast world and all you can hear is the wind howling which a little side note but I have to give credit to the sound design and soundtrack in this game for being a mostly single player Indie Venture it’s just incredible and it has a really amazing feel anyways for

Some reason X2 is a giant Bedrock Tower and also spawned with you are some basic tools 16 torches and a pistol which yeah there’s guns in this game from there you kind of just walk around and the view distance is pretty bad so it just kind

Of feels off and what makes it even worse is that there are no animals in this game so it’s just kind of empty there are also no structures except for the Tower and the world generation itself also just kind of feels off see Minecraft Beta generation was Fantastical but grounded this instead

Kind of just feels like those 90s desktop renders anyways the further you go out the harder the game gets once you pass 200 blocks these zombie skeleton things which already spawn randomly now run at you and can kill you quick and also a dragon spawns which just makes

Your life miserable so that means you’re pretty much just talk to in Minecraft things you craft explore cave mind some ore and then craft again and that is really most of the game it’s really not that engaging and is easily repetitive however Thomas would add things over

Time that made the game Stand Out far more than anything else like it on the Xbox to begin he had a new biomes and oars which although weren’t incredible made the world generation have a lot of variety the next thing he added was hell yeah you can go to hell in this game

Hell was just like this giant pit underground and you could find demons and there was Bloodstone which was the best ore in the game and the last major thing he added was aliens which were these Pokemon looking dudes that would spawn in these weird craters inside of

These craters you would be able to find alien goo which you could use to make laser guns and swords there were a few other things that were added throughout such as RPGs C4s and lucky blocks but they weren’t too big to the gameplay all of these things added were actually

Really cool and I remember as a kid spending weekends with my friends trying to collect all the laser weapons and I remember personally freaking out when I joined some random person’s world and seen alien stuff for the first time before being kicked that all being said the new enemies added didn’t really play

Well much like pretty much everything in the game but it made the game feel a lot larger than it actually was before wrapping up the gameplay I want to point out that building in this game is completely off but in a really bad way to begin the player really isn’t even

Scaled to the world and this is because the game uses the Xbox avatar so blocks feel a lot bigger than the player and this is really opposite to Minecraft since the player feels a lot bigger than a single block but is actually comparable in size next the jump height

Is also just completely wrong I don’t get why this is this way but for some reason you can jump three blocks in this game so bases have to be gigantic to not feel small and useless the worst thing though is just the complete lack of block variety or even things like slabs

There are stairs but as mentioned before with the three block jump height it’s just better to make jumping platforms as a whole the building in the game just feels so limited and just doesn’t even feel right overall Castle Miner’s gameplay is the bare minimum it’s just incredibly dull and boring but its

Gameplay is not what makes this game special in my opinion what makes it special is its atmosphere its aesthetic The Sounds the biomes and the overall look of the game was really different from anything I’ve played then and pretty much have played now all other Minecraft clones I’ve seen really try to

Go for the exact style of Minecraft down to making the sky the same light blue Castle Miner on the other hand goes a completely opposite direction making the game feel dark and creepy but all this being said I think what people need to realize is that back in 2011 and 2012

There was nothing like it on the Xbox and even when Minecraft officially released on the Xbox in May 2012 for the first few months it got old quickly because it lacked a lot of the things the PC had but Castle Miner on the other hand was 17 cheaper played somewhat the

Same and had tons more to explore it really wasn’t until the summer of 2013 that Minecraft on the Xbox caught up to the PC that all being said what happened to Castle Miner Z Thomas stone and digital DNA as a whole Castle Miner Z would have more and more

Added to it till November 8th 2012 when from then on it would only see the occasional bug fixes in the spring of 2013 the game would go to PC and would get a steam release in 2014. the PC version is similar to the Xbox version though it has a completely new main menu

The worst Huda I’ve ever seen in a video game and a new crafting system and while since 2015 there’s just been no updates for Castle Miner c as for what happened to Thomas and digital DNA as Castle Miner Z got its final updates digital DNA would release Avatar laser Wars 2 on

August 8th 2012 which itself would be moderately successful the next year on June 19 2013 digital DNA would release Avatar Warfare which also saw some success but what’s most interesting about this game is that a lot of its weapons would be reused for a failed Castle Miner sequel called Castle Miner

Warfare Castle Miner Warfare would be released on April 2nd 2014 and pretty much combine the assets of Avatar Warfare and Castle Miner Z it was a complete failure both because the gameplay was terrible and because as a whole the Xbox Live indie game Space fell out of popularity soon after this

They would release one title for the Xbox one which also flopped then they went to the PC market where they released flop after flop till they released death toll on April 11 2018. devtool was kind of a battle royale but mixed with tarkov and Arma basically it

Would be eight teams of four dropping on an island where they need to capture four briefcases to escape the game would also have tons of different Vehicles such as helicopters boats apcs and even horses however this game looks really unpolished and seems way too complicated

To really take off so after a few months the game was dead and pretty much abandoned other than three bug fixes and the game being made free to play the game has pretty much killed digital DNA once and for all as they haven’t made a game since then interestingly there was

A Discord message made by digital DNA that spread around soon after the death of death toll supposedly the game was a tremendous failure reportedly costing over 350 thousand dollars to make and only got thirteen thousand dollars in return this caused pretty much everyone to be fired except for Thomas which now

Only operates the company to collect royalties Thomas himself since 2019 has gone to making tick tocks and even attempted to sell the original coverage of his games as nfts the most recent update is from January 19th 2023 as now Thomas and possibly some investors have shown interest in making a castle miners

A reboot which most likely will be funded by Kickstarter personally I have to say even though I have criticized Thomas and digital DNA’s game design I hope to see a reboot for this game in conclusion Castle Miner Z is a nostalgic relic of the early 2010s it’s

A game that came out in the perfect time and for the perfect platform and because of that it sold over 2 million copies making it the most successful game from the Xbox Live Indie program the game itself was both mediocre but also captivating its gameplay was terrible

But its style and world was vast and memorable as for my opinions on Thomas stone and digital DNA this simply looked to cash in on ongoing Trends and gaming and sometimes it paid off to great effect I really wonder if devtool was a legitimate attempt to enter the game in

Space by making something different or were they just kind of hoping to cash in on the then ongoing Battle Royale craze we may never know as digital DNA themselves seem to really stop existing after 2019 and Thomas has said nothing about it anyways thank you so much for

Watching I made this video since CastleMiner Z is one of those games that I feel anybody who had an Xbox in the early 2010s has either played or seen it once and really it was a huge part of growing up in that era for me that all

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