Revisiting an old Minecraft map I made pt. 2

My last blog post about Minecraft was about a map I made on the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft many years ago. This blog post is a continuation of that, as I will be looking at another one of my Xbox 360 maps. I present to you: Slime Run, my parkour map.

The player starts off in a small town area with a few houses and armor stands which I dressed up with armor and heads. These armor stands have signs next to them, so they're supposed to be like NPCs who talk to you and tell you things. The "NPC" featured most prominently in this map is named the Guide, and he is supposed to "guide" you throughout the map. Not much else is in the starting area and I didn't really think it out too much.

Then, the actual gameplay begins. You climb up a ladder where you are greeted by a list of rules which are as follows:

1. "Have Fun
2. No greifing
3. Respect Host
4. No Cheating"

There is also a completely empty leaderboard and a list of credits, which show my old Xbox username "OctavalBus5921", and my good old friend "A TOWN DIZZLE". I noticed that a lot of the signs had colored text, which I definitely did not know how to do, so it must've been my friend Dizzle who made that happen. Speaking of things on this map made my people other than myself, I should mention the really nice, well constructed hot air balloon near the start of the map was made by him as well. Once the player reads the rules and credits thoroughly without ignoring them like everyone surely did back in the day, they finally get to begin the PARKOUR. HARDCORE PARKOUR.

First off is the Forest Level. I don't think I scaled the difficulty of this map perfectly, but I broke it into eight different levels (plus one seasonal bonus level) which are supposed to get progressively harder. The first level is the forest level or something, not much of note besides the cool ass hot air balloon I described before. There area also a few fences which you have to jump on, which are a huge pain in the ass and probably shouldn't have been included in the first level.

Next up is the Ice Level!! This one is unique because it has a few cool detailed floating icy islands as platforms, which of course weren't made by me. I tried to take advantage of the fact that it was ice themed, so naturally many of the platforms are made of ice and it is very slippery. One such platform, as seen in the screenshot, reaches the floor of the superflat world and looking back at it, looks somewhat phallic. Another thing that can be seen in the screenshot is a chest which had some bonus item or something in it. I think I put one in each level, see if you can spot it!

This is the Stone Level. There's not much to say about this level. The platforms are all made of stone or stone bricks. I put ore and stuff in some of them to add a little detail. On the bottom platform at the beginning of the stone level, I built a slime. The slime looks like some kind of messed up slime X ghast love child abomination, however. I build quite a few of these slimes around the level to make it feel like the slimes are chasing you and you need to do the parkour fast or else the slimes will do God knows what to you, but the end product is that there's a bunch of weird looking slime builds without much consistency on how I build the slimes.

Next we have the Desert Level. Much like how I used ice's slippery properties to set the ice level apart from the others, I spammed the fuck out of cactuses in the desert level. A few of the platforms have a cactus in the middle of them so players slam into them and get hurt and it's funny. There's also a grand big cactus maze which is pretty easy to solve, but once in a blue moon I would watch some random Xbox Live squeaker get pricked to death. Enough squeakers must've succumbed to The Prickening to where I felt it necessary to add a little checkpoint right after the maze. This level also marks the return of the fence jumps, which are still a pain in the ass.

Without a doubt, the most unique level of the bunch. Here is the Mariana Trench level. My memory is a bit foggy, but if I remember correctly, the guy who helped me build this map suggested it as a level. In a way, it's sort of like the Mariana trench because there's water and it's really dark, but that's basically it. It's just the sea themed level. Still though, it is very unique. Instead of being out in the open like the other levels, it's in a closed off hallway. Instead of dying when you fall, you land in the water and have to swim back (very annoying) so I like it.

The nether themed level brings us back to more of a "traditional" Slime Run experience. Naturally, I used a few soulsand platforms to make the level fit the lava theme, as well as some netherrack platforms with fire on them. I made a lava maze, which is just like the cactus maze from the desert level, but harder. To make the level more "immersive", I built a slime hanging off one of the netherrack platforms. I also built the "King Magmacube", a magma cube with a crown. I probably should've built more magma cubes in the nether level, because the only magma cube is the king, so he has nobody to rule over.

Next up is the End Level. Looking back at this level, I definetly feel it should've been harder and utilized the end theme more. The platforms consist of end brick, purpur blocks, purple stained glass and birch fences. The purple stained glass and birch fences were used because they fit the colors of the end, but I think it would've been cool if the parkour ended with some kind of ender pearl jump or something. Probably the laziest level of them. At least I built a little slime.

Last up is the Slime Level. You start off by jumping on small concrete slimes as platforms. Then there's a few easy slime blocks to jump across, and then there's a big drop and you must use your momentum from jumping on the slime block to make an otherwise impossible jump. After that there's just a few other platforms and you're done. It's a fairly short level.

And that's it. There was some kind of final level/King Slime boss fight planned, but it was never finished. Currently, I'm working on finishing and polishing this map even though it's probably not worth it. I'll be posting it to my PLANET MINECRAFT account. Speaking of which, I finished polishing up Kill Craft, the subject of my previous Minecraft blog post. It's available for download here. Thanks for reading.