Minecraft

I've been playing a lot of Minecraft recently. In 7 words, it's a block-based building and survival game. That description, however, doesn't quite do it justice. Instead, I'll list some of the stuff I've done so far in the game.

• Blew up a mountain.
• Carved a fortress into a (different) mountain.
• Built a castle.
• Got lost in one of the game's randomly generated cave systems for several hours.
• Fought a forest fire.
• Rode on a pig.
• Fell down a giant natural hole.
• Punched a skeleton, chicken, cow and giant spider in the face.
• Tested making land mines.
• Built a bridge in the sky in order to reach an existing floating chunk of land.
• Built and managed a farm.

There's currently two major iterations of the game: Classic and Alpha. Classic is free and, being so, lacks many of the major features of Alpha. I believe it has a basic version of the survival mode as well. Alpha, the version that is being actively developed, requires you to purchase the game (I believe it's currently about $10 USD) but opens up all of the possibilities.

One thing that definitely deserves mention is the world generation. Upon creating a new game world in Alpha, you'll see a loading screen which will tell you that the world is being generated, after which you'll be dropped off in the world. As you start exploring (And you'll definitely want to start exploring), the game will continue to generate new landscape, which can result in some seriously amazing vistas. For example, here are a couple screenshots of the area that my friend and I are settling down in, as well as a map of my singleplayer game's world generated with the player-developed tool Cartograph (click for full-size):

Y'know how I mentioned a floating chunk and cliff earlier? This is a different floating chunk and cliff.

We're planning to build little houses along the walls of this hollow mountain that we found.

Map of my singleplayer world. If you zoom in a bunch on the center island, you can see the stone trail I built out from my fortress to the ocean. I'm not really sure what's up with the map chunks that aren't connected to anything.

You'll note from the screenshots that Minecraft has a pretty distinct visual style (For reference, that thing in the bottom right corner of the first screenshot is my sword). Most of the blocks that make up the world are cubes, and everything has a very pixellated look to it. It may be a little different at first, but once you get used to it, it's really got a charming feel to it.

Now, I mentioned survival earlier. The game's got a day/night cycle, and if your difficulty level isn't set to Peaceful, you're going to want to avoid being outside at night. When the sun goes down, monsters appear, so you'll want to work quickly to find and establish your hideout. As you progress, you'll be able to craft weapons and armor and possibly consider venturing out at night to battle the baddies, as well as move on to bigger and better bases.

The alpha version of the much-anticipated Survival Multiplayer (SMP) mode is currently out, though unfortunately it lacks the Survival aspect of the title at the moment. Even still, I've been having a lot of fun exploring with friends and also preemptively setting up our fortress for when monsters are added.

As I mentioned earlier, the game currently only costs about $10-15, and that gives you free access to all of the current features plus any updates in the future. If you're a fan of exploration/building games like I am, I'd definitely recommend it.