When Lockdown Boredom Goes Too Far

Before Covid would come around and ruin everything, my extended family would sometimes come around for a visit (mostly on special occasions such as birthdays and all that jazz), amongst them are a pair of cousins who I would always play video games with in the living room (stuff like Minecraft, Super Smash Bros, Dreams PS4/5, LittleBigPlanet, Goat Simulator, Ext), but once Covid hit, we weren't able to see each other as much. While we were in the middle of one of the lockdowns (I can't remember if it was the first, second or third one at this point), I got quite board, so I decided "well I've suddenly got all this spare time on my hands and I'm bored stiff, so why don't I do something special for when me and my cousins are able to see each other again", and with a little bit of inspiration from this one community made skin pack that contained a bunch of Minecraft villager versions of various characters (I.E: Mario, Link, Avatar Aang, Sailor Moon, Buzz Lightyear, SpongeBob SquarePants, A McDonalds Employee, Ext), I decided to ask myself "I wonder what it would be like if these characters had their abilities in Minecraft", and so I ended up coming up with a concept called "Minecraft: All-Stars" (you may have seen a world called "Minecraft: All-Stars" whenever I would need to stream myself doing things in Minecraft for various projects):

Here's the poster I made for it after expanding the roster a little bit with characters such as Super Sheep and Banjo-Kazooie (I know it's a big ol' clash of art-styles but I made it just for fun)

The idea of this custom game-mode is that you play a competitive game of Minecraft where you beat the game as quickly as possible but with the twist that you actually get powers and starting items that relate to whatever character you pick to start with, for example, a character like Mario would have a higher jump than Minecraft Steve/Alex and also start off with a flower and a flint and steel where as someone like Jack Sparrow would be slower than Minecraft Steve/Alex but he starts with a stone sword. In order to even give these characters their special attributes, I had to use command blocks in order to input the various commands that would give these characters their starting items as well as the corresponding potion effects, which I set to last for as long as I could, I.E: to make Mario jump higher, I would have to give him the "Jump Boost" effect. Luckily, I had a website called "DigMinecraft" to help me out with getting all the commands put together:

I also had a starting box made of glass (that way there wouldn't be a big shadowy area where monsters (or "Hostile Mobs", as they're referred to by the community and dev team) could spawn in. This box is where you'd select the character in question (although now I'm doing a second revision where the box is made of barrier blocks because they also don't generate a big shadowy area but they're also invisible and unbreakable in normal gameplay

As I was putting the whole thing together, I would end up getting more and more ambitious with the idea, eventually deciding to include extra characters and even adding in an entire soundtrack, which I would do by stealing music from the various franchises that would be represented in Minecraft: All-Stars (I.E: Mario, Minecraft, Sonic, Miraculous Ladybug, Banjo-Kazooie, Avatar: The Last Airbender, SpongeBob SquarePants, Doom, Ext.) and then sticking them onto Penfold, which I would then stick into my PlayStation and then let the music play in the background on shuffle (because at this point, playing them in order means you wouldn't get to hear music from all the franchises within a single match), needless to say I got a bit carried away on this front:

This is just a small sample of the soundtrack (and technically, I'm still going even after my cousins and I did the challenge)

When deciding the soundtrack for something like this, there are bound to be a bunch of tracks that you could attribute to multiple franchises at once and it would be perfectly fine, so I decided to label those tracks as part of the "Multi-Star" category, that way I wouldn't have to pick which franchise to put them with.

Speaking of the soundtrack, there are a few particularly interesting categories I want to go over, the first of which being the Mario category, as for this one I decided to also include music from some of the tangentially related spin off series (the Donkey Kong series, the Yoshi series and the Wario series) since the main characters of those series either originated in a Mario game (as is the case with Yoshi and Wario, thus meaning that characters such as Mona Pizza and Ashley are technically part of the wider Mario universe) or became Mario characters after the fact (as is the case with Donkey Kong, making people like King K. Rool also a part of the wider Mario universe), the only real exception to this rule is Diddy Kong Racing's soundtrack, which I've decided to put in the "multi-star" category because of the fact that Banjo from Banjo-Kazooie actually appears in the original version on Nintendo 64. (in fact, Banjo actually appeared in Diddy Kong Racing before Banjo-Kazooie would come out, meaning technically speaking he could be lumped into the wider Mario universe if it wasn't for Microsoft owning the character)

As for the real life and YouTube/internet categories, I decided to let those ones be the broadest categories of the lot, meaning for the YouTube/internet category, I can add in any song as long as it originates from the internet and doesn't directly relate to any of the other characters such as Sonic or Banjo, where as the real life category meanwhile allows for literally any song under the sun as long as it doesn't originate from the internet and/or relate to the other series such as Mario or DC. (in which case, those would either go into their respective categories or be labelled as "multi-star" tracks) I made them both broad because I figured that limiting them exclusively to the genres and personalities represented wouldn't really do either set of characters justice. (especially in the case of the McDonalds employee since McDonalds doesn't do a lot of original songs)

The original world I generated for this new game mode was made before the announcement of the caves and cliffs update was even announced, so before I decided to simply start doing a new map, I figured I could use the nether to go far out and incorporate the new caves and cliffs content into the experience (after enabling the "experimental features") since one block in the nether is equivalent to 8 in the overworld.

With all that explained, I think it's time I talk about a few of the characters now, starting with Minecraft Steve/Alex:

For these characters (who both share the same slot since they're basically the same character), I originally wanted to have them play exactly like they do in normal Minecraft where they don't start off with any items or powers whatsoever because I couldn't figure out how else to incorporate them in, but while I was working on programming the various all-stars and their abilities via command blocks, guess who got announced for Smash Ultimate as a DLC fighter:

Video Uploaded By Super Smash Bros

With that in mind (and once I actually got my hands on them in Smash), I decided to rework Minecraft Steve and Alex so that they instead started off with the items they use in Smash as a part of their move set instead (I.E: the wooden tools they start with, their crafting table, their anvils, their Elytra wings, ext.), incidentally, the original version of Steve and Alex would end up living on once one of my cousins suggested that I add in Dream (or as Dunkey called him in one of his videos "Dream Minecraft Channel")