It's a Square World After All!

My son showed me this game he found online. He and his best buddy Jac were playing it constantly. It was a beta version of a game called Minecraft.  Little did I know at the time that I would be up in the wee hours of the morning playing this game.  I have been playing this game since 2009 and I am totally addicted. It is now on both Xbox and the computer. 

Minecraft is a game of building. Wikipedia calls it a sandbox building game.  I want to give a shout out to Markus "Notch" Persson of Sweden who invented the game, and now markets it through his company Mojang.  Above is a city I built called Mishaville.

Minecraft begins when you are spawned in to an environment, with nothing. The world slightly resembles Legos in the fact everything is in 3-d  blocks. Whether you are in the forest, the tropics, the desert or the artic, you start with nothing. I was lucky, my son taught me early on to kill sheep and get wood to make a bed.  Otherwise in the beginning you are in for some long dark nights. When you sleep on your bed, you lay down and it is morning.  You find wood for tools, and build some dwelling and learn to mine for ore. You mine for silver, iron, copper, gold, and diamond. You create everything.  There is a challenge in getting the items you need to make things like axes, and shovels, furnaces, fishing poles and armour. Eating in the beginning of Minecraft was not such an issue. It now is a necessity in the survival mode.

I spent frustrating days where I was lost in a mine and could not find my way back, so I would go around in circles building my tunnels trying to get out. Or worse in the beginning not taking enough light and being trapped all night (which seemed like an eternity) underground in the dark. My own fears of claustrophobia became apparent as I kept hitting dirt with my hands trying escape from the dark and dank underground. You learn quickly.  As you can see, I learned.  I love this game, and have spent hours at a time building castles and towns. 

There are several modes to the game. You can play in survival, which means you have dark creatures to battle.  In any darkness (even shadows of day), creepers, skeletons, Zombies and spiders spawn to kill you.  Oh the great thing is that if you are killed you are re-spawned. you lose what you have on you, but your homes are safe. There is a mode called Hardcore. If you are killed there, your world is deleted.  I would never play that mode.  There is a mode called peaceful mode. That is one I originally played in. You have day animals like pigs, cows and sheep, but no wolves, or creepers, skeletons, zombies or spiders. You can still die in peaceful mode.

 Then there is creative mode, that is what I play in now.  You can not die, unless you fall in lava. You can even create underwater, which I have done.  I spent many months starting with nothing, mining for everything and making things from scratch. Then I decided one day why????  The creative mode has anything you could every want at your disposal, so you can get creative.   I've built kingdoms. Now there are more complex capabilities, like building electrical, mechanical and even nuclear devices.  My son does that, I don't even know how.  You can build many different places at one time.  The computer generates towns sporadically in the landscape, with beings in them that resemble Squidward from Spongebob Squarepants. They just walk around you can spawn them in creative mode.  They really don't interact with you, but will react passively if you bump into them.

  This is the back end of the castle I build in a city called Covert Cove. It has a theatre with real theatre seats like the opera, large restaurant with a kitchen, tunnels through the two sides, a ballroom, apartments, a school, swimming pools and many more things. It is  acutally still under construction. It started with a small house away from the castle.

I read that Minecraft now has a pocket edition for Xperia play. There is also a Mine Con for addicts, I should have went last year, it was at Las Vegas. Next year it is in Europe.  I am not really a gamer yet, though I may become one. Even if I never do I will always have a copy of Minecraft.  I don't apologize for not playing in survival mode.  I love it and will learn to do many more things.  Also there are many creative amateurs developing mods to make it more interesting. There was a mod with pets. I had cats and it was a pain, they had cat boxes, and I  had to feed them regularly. They reacted to you to by getting angry. You could do nothing else but feed your cats and empty their boxes.  I had one mod called Twilight. It never gets more light than twilight, and there are more snowy areas in that mod. I had a dog and lived in the trees. You have to try this game, I promised you will love it. When I tire, I leave it alone for awhile and then I can't wait to get in and try something else. I have a town called Blow Up Doll, I just use TNT and blow up the mountains, it is a great stress reliever.