Graham Edgecombe

Minecraft

Minecraft is a sandbox game, playable in single- or multi-player, in which the player(s) create and shape the world around them. The word is based on 'cubes' which can be created, replaced and destroyed. There are around 10 types of these cubes which can be created yourself, with a few being automatically handled by the game (such as water).

This seems fairly simple and repetitive, however, you have complete control over what you make and it can actually become quite fun and addicting.

After just a few minutes of getting the hang of things, you can build houses such as the one I created below:

Building can only be done from 3 or 4 blocks away, so, I ended up building some scaffolding around the edges to help finish the job!

You can create underground mazes, dungeons and mines too. After around 10 minutes or so of building, I had already started carving out an underground area in the rock:

Players can setup their own servers to run and play on other peoples. This is probably to help distribute the load and there are always plenty of servers with quite a few players logged in. I've setup a small server for testing purposes here: http://minecraft.net/play.jsp?server=b97a3cb798c4c11c1275fd2cd57d4464 (my in-game name is Ancient).

The game can be played at http://www.minecraft.net/ and is free at the moment (although it looks like you will have to pay to play once the beta testing is over!).

There is a community with a wiki, IRC channel and forum and things always seem to be pretty busy (which is suprising since it is a relatively recent development). All in all, seems like a pretty good and fun game, and I'll definitely carry on playing in the future!