Minecraft (subtitle: I was one of those 143,932 people)

I’d heard about Minecraft through a few different avenues, but it took Penny Arcade making a comic about it to convince me I needed to try it. The first time I tried to play the website was down, replaced with a plain text explanation that amounted to “I’m making so much money right now, be patient.” I tried a couple days later and got through. I spent about five minutes in the free version before I spent the fifteen bucks to get access to the paid version.

If you’ve never heard about or played Minecraft, here’s the summery: It’s Legos with zombies. You live in a bright and colorful world during the day, but at night zombies, mummies, spiders, and all manner of evil creatures come out, and you’re the only one on the menu. Come daybreak, all the bad guys exposed to sunlight promptly burst into flames and die.

Allow me to explain. I spent the first half hour trying to figure out what the heck I was supposed to do. After I looked at the wiki, I was off to the races. I started a new world and immediately headed to the highest mountain I could see. I climbed all the way to the top, and started digging down through the mountain. I hollowed out a good sized room near the peak and set up a makeshift workshop. After fashioning a pickaxe out of the wood and stone I had procured, I started digging down again.

After a few minutes of delving a winding stair into the depths of the earth, I broke through the ceiling of a huge underground cavern. After mounting some torches on the walls for some light, I was met by the denizens of the cavern: namely a giant spider and his three zombie buddies. After frantically trying to climb back up to my stairway, I was quickly caught and killed, and found myself back on the beach in another part of the world. And all happened in about twenty minutes of playtime.

If you like sandbox games, or Legos, or creativity, or fun, I’d highly recommend at least trying the game. Looking around some of the public servers is fun too. People have created some amazing stuff.