Minecraft

Minecraft (Currently in Alpha) (By the time you read this, Beta will be released)

Rating: (No rating, but it's no doubt E if sent to ESRB)

Score: 9.0/10

                Indie game developers live in a good time. It's probably never been easier to get small-name games out to the mass public, whether  via iPhone, Xbox Live Arcade/Playstation Network, or even PC. There's a game sporting the name "Minecraft" on PC now that had a development team of one (slightly more now), and yet it's a huge success. What made it such a hit? This game is a PC exclusive.

                It'd be best to explain what is Minecraft first. Minecraft is a first-person blocky adventure game about mining and building. You likely will spend your days outside where you can gather material or search the area around you, and your nights at your base hiding from the enemies that attack in the night. You might laugh at that and think to yourself "I don't need a base! I'll fight the enemies". It gets trickier when they have bows and arrows, bombs, and zombies and you (at that point in the game) will have a wooden pickaxe at best. That's why any Minecraft player will tell you to collect material most of the first day, and build shelter before the sun falls.

                So what can your base look like? That's the great thing about Minecraft-- your base can look like anything you want it to. It can have a waterfall, it can have an underwater passage way, it can be made in a tree, and it can be made purely from glass if you want, or sand, or whatever. You're given all the freedom you need to go crazy. As a quick example, my friend's server consists of four friends. The admin has lava surrounding his house and a treehouse extension, another friend has a giant tower with a waterfall of lava and water, another friend has a relatively simple house on top of a mountain (and it takes forever to get up there), but that friend is making additions to his house even as you read this. Me? I live in a cave, have an underwater passage to my house, have a waterfall in my room, and have an extra tower portion and mid-air bridge connecting my house to the admin's treehouse. That's just one example of a lot of creativity on one server, and there's plenty more where that came from.

                Where does all this creativity come from? As you dig, you'll pick up the material you just destroyed. For example, if you destroy some sand, you'll get a block of sand in your inventory. You'll need a pickaxe to mine. There's four different strengths of pickaxes: Wooden/Gold, Cobblestone, Iron, and Diamond. The higher the strength, the more abuse that pickaxe can take before wearing out completely. You'll need pickaxes to mine coal to use as a heating source in furnaces (you'll have to make a furnace first). You can then use the coal and the furnace with sand and iron ore to make glass and steel bars respectively, along with other less useful stuff (steel can be used to make great armor, and glass just simply looks really fancy).

                You can have the fanciest base in the world, but it may provide you no shelter if it's not lit up properly. You see, enemies spawn in darkness, which is why they spawn at night. If you dig underground and stumble across a dark section of cave, it's more than a worthy investment to light it up. It will keep enemies from spawning and make sure you can see where to mine.

                Speaking of enemies, you'll find quite a few, but four in particular spawn often. Skeletons have bows and arrows, zombies walk towards you and attack at close range, spiders pounce at you, and creepers explode. Creepers not only explode a small radius, since that would be only a minor inconvenience, they come up to you, and explode you and everything around you. Considering you're either working on your base or mining underground, there's never a chance this isn't a pain, since everything around you will be gone. The pain is increased exponentially when you find out that when you die, you lose all your stuff. You can sometimes (keyword: sometimes) find that stuff and get it back, but it's still worthy of quite a bit of rage.

                Minecraft is a game that doesn't have a focus on one group of individuals, it's really for everyone. It's not complex enough that only gamers will understand it, and it's not over-simple that gamers can't jump into the creative nature of the game and enjoy themselves. Although it's fun offline, it's even more fun online when you and your friends are all working to the common goal of "goofing off". It's not a complex game, nor is it genre changing, but it's exactly what it wants to be: simple and fun style made by one man who, because of his lack of team, needed to focus on gameplay. Games nowadays don't seem to have quite the respect for gameplay in substitution for HD graphics.