Minecraft

[Knight Errant]

Imagine this:

You are washed up on the shore of an unknown continent. Land stretches out in every direction as far as the eye can see, while behind you islands dot the shoreline. Your only goal is to survive... your only tools are your hands and what you build with them.

With your hands you chop down a tree, with the wood from a tree you make a pickaxe and begin carving out the side of a mountain. Not for jollies... for shelter. For when night falls... the monsters come. You find a deposit of coal and fashion torches. You use your ample stone to craft stone tools for yourself as you continue to dig downwards... faint moans and creaks outside from creatures which would love to feast on your flesh.

Day breaks, the monsters burn up in the light... but you are so deep by now you cant tell. You find a deposit of iron and smelt it into steel. Finally, days later, you emerge... clad in shining armor and sword to face the horrors of the night... and win.

But that is just one part of the tale. The next goes on as you take stone harvested from the depths of the earth and raise it up into a mighty stone fortress. Secure in your mastery over your domain... your eye wanders across the untouched waves. You build a boat and set off for unknown shores...

THAT is Minecraft.

The game is in Alpha at the moment. You can play for free, or buy the whole version for $13 like I did. When it goes into beta, which is soon, the price will double. Minecraft's graphics are nothing to drool over, but its blocky style is, in my opinion, quaint and nostalgic. Plus, every world is randomly generated. No two are the same... and the total in game space is larger than the surface of the earth. Its THAT big.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylVtj-1Ccgg <- brief video. I encourage more youtube searches to see what the game has to offer... its crazy.

[Zoey]

Gah, damn you! Must... resist.... buying urge....

Anyways, I really looks interesting. I will defenately give this game a go. Thanks for showing me another way to waste my free time!

[Knight Errant]

I just found a cave deep underground... its so deep, its only a few squares above bedrock, the unmineable stone that makes up the bottom of the game world. This nightmare void deep within the bowels of the earth had monsters pouring out of every dark corner.

The only places they werent pouring out of was around the-wait for it... pits of lava. Why did I not just seal up the entryway and forget I ever found it? Because its labyrinthine passageways are rich in gold, diamonds, iron, and Red Stone... the rarest mineral in the game.

By now I have cleared a good portion of it, set up torches to banish the darkness, mined out what ore I found, slayed what monsters I found. The lava? I filled the bucket I made with it and took it back to the surface to fill the moat around my stone fortress.

Hehehe...