![]() ![]() The world above the mine is sparse, populated by a few trees, your miner’s tent that functions as a save point, and the store. The premise is simple: You are a miner, you have a mine. But to see why I did this, I should fully explain the game. Needless to say, this fully worked on me as I feverishly dove through the mine time and again to dig as far as I could and grab whatever minerals and ores I could get my grubby little paws on. There’s a psychology behind the addictive properties of games like Miner Dig Deep, Harvest Moon, ect., a psychology that shows that when people are given feelings of gratification in achievement and in acquisition, they feel good and strive for more. ![]() This fact alone caught my attention and left me playing for fifteen hours before I finished it. Despite seeing how popular it was on the Indie Games listing, I was curious and confused: How does one make a game about mining that popular? That addictive? That good? How about if the game has the same addictive elements of a game like Harvest Moon, but you eschew the farming elements and instead incorporate a gigantic randomly generated mine. Unintentional rhyming aside, the title and the game fit considering the relation they have: Gems, and mining. The title of this column is almost ironic with the game we have for Gems in the Heap this week, Miner Dig Deep. Granted there’s a ton of other review sites and such that also do this, but more publicity can’t hurt, can it? To refresh you people on what this is, and to inform newcomers, this column is where I fully review and critique games from the XNA Community that appear on the Xbox Live Game Marketplace’s “Indie Games” area, and I try to find titles that truly shine within the lot of almost nine hundred games the listing has currently. Welcome to the second week of my Thursday column, Gems in the Heap.
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