You have been warned.
Okay, so on to the review. Minecraft is an indie game in development that started with pretty much one guy putting together a cool little game. The basic concept is this:
You are in a strange land, with no other people around. There are animals that graze peacefully, lush trees, tall mountains, wide open oceans, and every so often, a cave. You can interact with pretty much anything, the trees, the dirt and rocks, the animals, pretty much everything. If you go around collecting things, they will pile up in your inventory, which when you go to, you'll notice a crafting screen. There's no tutorial yet, but people have figured out most of the stuff you can make. So you can turn logs you've gathered into planks, and the planks into sticks, and so on. Eventually you can figure out how to get a workbench, which opens up even more crafting options, including the ability to make tools, which help in the gathering of resources, and of course, the more resources you have, the more you can build with them.
All goes well, you've spent the day gathering and building things, you've got a bunch of tools, some wood, maybe some rocks and dirt as well. You're just getting the hang of things when you notice that the game is getting darker. Oh, cool, a day/night cycle, right on, you might think, wondering idly if there's a way to make light in this game. After all, you do have wood.
And then you hear something. Footsteps, a groan, perhaps a clatter. The pigs and cows didn't sound like that, neither did the sheep or chickens. You hear again, but this time, it's louder. You look around, desperately trying to find the source of the sound when you see them. The dead, come back to life. Monsters from the darkest reaches of the land, and they come only wanting one thing.
Your flesh.
Suddenly, the things you have gathered and made are no longer simply interesting, they are necessary for your survival. You swing a shovel at a nearby zombie, wondering if you could have made a sword instead. You get some distance and start building up a wall with the dirt and stone you've collected, trying to gain some respite from the surrounding horde. You barricade yourself in your makeshift shelter, a single hole at the top so you can see when the light comes.
Finally, after hearing them outside all night long, day breaks. You dig yourself out to see the undead burning in the light of the sun. The spiders wander off, no longer interested in you as prey. You don't see any creepers, hoping they shared the same fate as the undead.
You gather more things, craft more tools, this time a sword to keep you safer against what comes at night. You dig deeper into the mountains, finding coal to make torches. You build a bigger, if still modest structure, so that this time when the monsters come, you'll be ready.
That's basically how your first few hours of the game go. After that, you start to expand. You build bigger, delve deeper. During the day, you might farm, or hunt the wildlife, or chop down trees for precious lumber, perhaps replanting some seedling so you don't have to travel too far for wood. At night, you delve into the caverns, mining iron, coal, gold, or whatever you can find. As you dig, you will find new cave systems, enemies, and possibly even great treasure.
Before long, the landscape is changed by your design. You can build any structure you can imagine, carving out halls of stone under the mountains, or a castle at the top of a hill, or perhaps a simple wooden lodge in the valley with a quiet garden in the back.
And that is the danger of this game. This unfinished not even out of alpha game with graphics from 1994 manages to be as addicting as hell. It even manages to scare the shit out of me sometimes.
Every game is different, every map made randomly. You never know what you'll find when you dig or explore. The game is unforgiving. You could die from falling, or digging under some sand or loose rocks, or flood the cavern with water or lava. You could unleash a horde of monsters that had been in another cave altogether.
Or you could get lost. In getting pictures for this review, I intended to get some shots of a cave system under my house that I had delved into, to give a proper sense for how it looks down there. Between heading down and coming back, I managed to get exactly zero screenshots and I spend at least an half hour totally and irrevocably LOST. On my next expedition, I'm bringing more signs.
People have likened this game to Dwarf Fortress. Having never played it, I couldn't say. What I can say is that this game sings to the part of me that loved just exploring in Morrowind. This game is nowhere near as pretty (but imagine if it was), has no plot (but has multiplayer), and no real point.
But I can't stop playing with it. It's like a giant world of lego bricks that I can play with endlessly, explore courageously, and potentially even team up with other people to do the same thing. Now, as a caveat, I've not actually spent a huge amount of time with the thing, but I've spent many hours in a row already and I keep going back. It's a simple little game that keeps demanding that I do something new. I look at videos of let's plays and tutorials on how to use red stone to make clever gadgets and how to get mine carts to do incredible things.
I'm going to stop talking about the game now and show you my little world, what I can of it, at least.
This is my house, a simple stone affair, set atop a hill not far from my spawn point (where you start the game and where you go when you die). It's built over a series of cave systems, one of which I can use as an emergency exit (or entrance, depending). To the right is my freshly constructed greenhouse, where I can grow and harvest crops without worry of interference from monsters or animals. I have some more landscaping to do around it, but it works for the moment.
This is my front door, with signs to welcome and warn guests. My door is solid iron and keeps out the local riff-raff.
This is the view from my roof, where I come sometimes to contemplate quietly under a starry sky, and laugh at the monsters who can't get me. The sun is setting, soon they will arrive.
This track leads to another large dig site I have established in the distance. The road goes through three mountains and currently has two stations. Work is progressing on advancing the project.
This is the naturally formed cave under my house that I broke into as I attempted to build a sub-basement.
Inside my house, this is my bedroom on the second floor. Spartan, but it has a wonderful view. It also has the added benefit of escaping either up to the roof (which has an emergency ladder for running away), or down to the main floor (and below).
This is the main floor, the first part of the house I built (though it's been through many renovations since the original structure, it contains everything I need, storage, furnaces for cooking and smelting, and a workbench to make everything I could need.
This is the basement, currently only for storage of bulk materials and overflow, there are plans to expand.
The sub-basement. You can see the emergency door to the left that leads out to the surface cave, to the right you can see a secondary crafting and smelting area for dealing with the direct results of the many dig sites I have sprawling under my home, and in the center is the pit to hell itself. I went down to get pictures for you all, and came back with nearly all my tools shattered, my body bloodied, my mind broken, and carrying sweet, precious iron in vast quantities.
My tools broken, I went to make more to discover I had no more wood in my reserves. So outside went I, to the veritable forest I had planted, and I climbed atop the greatest tree I could see so that I might let none of it go to waste. From here you can see the back of my house, my greenhouse, and my railroad, tunneling off to greatness. The sun, however, was setting, and the job would take the rest of the night.
Looking to the west towards the end of the night, I can see lights where I left torches to mark previous expeditions or dangers. Closer, and to the left, one of the undead stalks me, unable to reach me in the great tree I am felling.
With daylight comes the end of my task, and doom to the horrors of the night. The undead burst into flames, the spiders lose their will, but what of the creepers?
That is a tale for another time.
There you have it folks. Minecraft. My world is not all that spectacular compared to some that you will find on Youtube and the like, but it is thrilling to me at least. This game, for an Alpha, is amazing. It currently works on the model Mount and Blade used, which is that you pay a little bit now (about $13 US), and all future versions are free. The developer, Notch, is currently in talks with Valve, and has apparently made a boatload of cash just off the Alpha version.
I leave you with a video trailer made by a fan that some of you may have seen already. Trailer
Remember, you were warned.
Do not go to http://www.minecraft.net/
Do not get the game.
Above all, do not play.
As for me? It is too late for me. You all must carry on without me.
The caverns call...
[/img]
* Anyhow, welcome to the server, glad you're staying with us..
