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Saturday, October 2, 2010

Minecraft Craziness

javaw 2010-10-02 10-11-22-52

Like seemingly half of the gaming community these days, I’m playing Minecraft. This seemingly simple game has incredible depth and potential. You start with your bare hands and nothing but wild spaces around you. After harvesting some raw materials and building some basic amenities, you need to put up shelter for the night. Why? Because if you don’t you’re not going to see the morning.

Monsters come out at night, ranging from the mundane spiders and zombies to the arrow-shooting skeletons and the exploding creepers (seen above – he’s the green guy). It’s wise to be indoors somewhere when the sun falls, but without light to chase the shadows from your borough, monsters will spawn there too. So you build torches, and you begin to see the depth this game has. You can dig into the earth with your pick axes (keep a couple at all times, because they break) looking for rare minerals or random caves, you can build amazing structures around the landscape out of stone, brick, wood, glass or whatever else you dig up or make, or you can make a farm with food and animals to live on and just be a homebody.

javaw 2010-10-02 09-28-36-22

If I had to leverage a complaint right now, it would be that it’s too easy to  lose your shelter in the wilderness early on. I had a nice three story cave home in my first game that I lost track of while trying to find food and leather. I never did find it again, actually. Also, the game can eat up memory like no one’s business, which can lead to crashes.

The game has a lovely 3D 8-bit look that belies it’s amazing depth. If you’ve got any mind at all for creativity, this is something you have to try.

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