If you’ve heard of Minecraft, then you probably spent about two non-stop weeks playing it once you did find out about it. I heard about this game sometime last week and have already sunk in about 60 hours of gameplay into the game. Minecraft is a sandbox game or an open world game where you mine 3D blocks and then use those blocks to make buildings. That’s pretty much it. But once you really start building things you’ll find you want to keep building things, your ambition becomes bigger and you try bigger scale things. Then you start playing on multiplayer with a bunch of friends and not only do you build giant buildings you show them off to your friends. It’s basically a giant construction video game which you can show off to your friends and have them praise your genius. Oh yeah, and at night there are zombies.
Sandbox games go back all the way to 1984, but the most revolutionary of the sandbox games was the Grand Theft Auto Series and can now be seen in most games you can play now. The idea is that you have a large world in which you can explore, take missions and do whatever you feel like. In Minecraft it’s much the same way but with no conflict. It’s basically what the Animal Crossing games tried to do, but they made it better.
Minecraft development started on May 10, 2009 by Markus Persson who is known online as “Notch”. The game has a single player mode and a multiplayer mode which you can join with friends on servers. It’s currently in the alpha stage and so not everything has been instituted into the multiplayer, but it’s continually growing and will be entering beta soon. There are also multiple single player modes. It does currently cost 10 Euros to buy the game. Also if you buy the game now you’ll never have to buy the later versions.
Overall I love the game and have spent way too much time playing with my friends on our own server. I’ve built my own Lair, Log Cabin, Castle, Glass Maze, Dog Track with Dog Sculpture and I’m currently building a Library. Some other things which have been built by some friends on my server include a Lighthouse, Calvary, a Black Mage and Darkwing Duck Statue, an underwater city and a ballroom which uses lava as it’s natural source of light. Be warned that if you do get into it, it will suck your life away.
If you want to know more check out the Official Website.
Also for a really cool article showing off some of the cool things people have made so far including Notre Dame, The Empire State Building and the entire map from the first Pokemon games go Here.