Posts tagged review

Earlier this year — I’d like to say April — I was convinced by Tyler Epperson to purchase Minecraft. Of course, this wasn’t my first time hearing about it. At this point, Minecraft was already nearly two years in development, but I never even considered spending money on it.

Can you blame me though? The game looked hideous. And, beyond that, I couldn’t really fathom a game which inherently had no purpose. It made me think of those horrible sandbox Flash lego games.

And yet, Tyler managed to coerce me to spend money on this. He set up a server on some old PC he dusted off, and began teaching me the basics of the game which he himself learned by watching Yogscast videos. Through the process of preparing for zombies in the night, I learned the basics of breaking blocks, crafting, placing blocks, and building basic tools.

At this point, while my buyer’s remorse was drowned out in the adventorous feeling of building a shelter and hiding from zombies, I still figured that I’d only play this game at most for 4 times. Nope.

About an hour in, I was hooked. We were trying to create this massive mine to extract as many valuables as we could find. To get extra help down in the mineshaft, we convinced the two other guys in our Skype call to also purchase Minecraft. And soon after, they were hooked. Our initial mining operation quickly developed into a small civilization of 4. Operating like a hunter-gatherer tribe, we were building and surviving in the face of some pretty damn scary monsters.

Of course, no civilization is complete without a proper system of handling waste. As our mining progressed, our inventories were stuffed with useless blocks that we didn’t need, so a 4x4 pit of lava was created as an incinerator. And while we were busy building up our village, an unlucky sheep got too close to the lava pit and caught on fire. The sheep, running in panic, managed to catch a tree on fire, and this quickly progressed into a full-blown forest fire.

It was fucking brilliant.

After making some minor repairs to the mining house where we all lived, we realized that it was time for all of us to venture out and build our own residences within the vicinity. I was building a simple wooden house with a lava waterfall suspended above it, Rafael was building something above the clouds, and Tyler was building some elaborate fortress. 

In Tyler’s thirst for the land required to build this massive structure, he decided to evict me from my property. He wasn’t too happy when I refused his demands, so he began breaking bits of my house. This eventually turned into a full scale war. My house was pretty ruined, and the lava waterfall was used against me.

I decided to get him back. While he was off exploring, I used /give to fill my inventory with monster spawners, and subsequently, his entire fortress. We decided that we should just create a new world and made amends.

Within this initial few hours of gameplay, I quickly realized the beauty of it. Minecraft is this amazing sandbox game with a dynamic and interactive world. You can do pretty much anything that you want to. Build, survive, kill, destroy. All within an awesome dynamic world that you can endlessly explore.

But I can’t talk enough about how unexpectedly fun this game is. It’s graphically weak, the website just screams horrid, the game is very buggy (though this has been improved), and the laws of physics are at times ignored. And yet, all of these things play into the awesome experience of Minecraft.

If you’re skeptical, just buy the game. And when you do, I recommend that you set up a little server and play with some friends. This wiki is a great place to refer to as you play (i.e to quickly look up crafting recipes, different blocks and items, etc.)