Minecraft (version 1.5)

You start Minecraft empty-handed at the beginning of a peaceful day in a strange cube-based landscape. You can explore this world by running with the A-W-S-D keys, and you can punch the ground with a left-click. Everything else is a bit of a mystery, but as soon as you place your first block with a right-click as you build your home, you'll realize the enormous opportunities that Minecraft offers you.

Playing Minecraft
There are three broad aspects to the game, beyond just moving through the landscape in a first-person view. The first are the mundane things, which are easiest to interact with: the blocks, items, animals, and plants. Players can generally harvest what they need from these by right-clicking, and they get materials in return. Farming and animal husbandry are the apex of this part of game play.

The second is magical: your character or items can be enchanted with magical abilities. Potions, brewed from various in-game elements, buff up your character while items can be enchanted from a magical table?which provides stronger enchantments when surrounded by bookshelves.

The third, and most complex, aspect is redstone: an in-game system for creating electrical circuits. With redstone, players can build automatic doors, complex animal harvesting devices (read: slaughter houses), and even fully functioning computers in-game. It is difficult to grasp for many first-time players, but Minecraft will certainly reward you if you can make the personal investment to learn.

Thankfully, Minecraft is flexible enough that players can enjoy the game on their own terms. It even offers two modes of play, with Survival Mode more geared towards dodging enemies and building while exploring the surprisingly beautiful landscape. If you're more into the redstone and/or enormous architectural triumphs, Creative Mode offers a pallet of every block and item in the game.

Minecraft is also flexible in its hardware requirements. The developers say it requires at minimum 1GB of RAM, a dedicated video card (preferably nVidia GeForce 6xxx Series or ATI Radeon 9xxx Series), a 1.8GHZ CPU, and the latest 64-bit installation of Java. The game runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, with updates released simultaneously for all three. I used a Windows 8 machine and a Mac Mini in my testing. There are also versions of the game for Android, iOS, and XBox 360.

The Minecraft Way
Minecraft is a game in the purest sense, presenting players with rules and obstacles and inviting players to provide their own goals (for the most part). This is in-line with the biggest rule of Minecraft: you have to work for everything.

The only real advantage the player has over a hostile landscape is the ability to build, so if you don't want to die, you need shelter. If you want shelter, you need to gather materials. If you want to gather materials faster, you need to craft tools. If you don't want to cower in a dark hole all night (eight minutes of real time) then you better build a nicer house. To really enjoy the game, you need to put something into it.

There's also the game's unique, visual style?just about everything is made from blocks. This includes the water, leaves, even the iconic and explosive Creeper monster. While the graphics of this Java-based game are simple, sweeping vistas and sunsets still manage to look stunningly beautiful.

The Joys of Multiplayer
The game really comes alive when you and your friends start playing together. In fact, once you start logging in regularly to see what's been built and share your resources, going back to your single-player game will probably feel downright lonesome.

Adding more players to a locally hosted game is simple, as any single player world can be shifted into a LAN multiplayer game with the touch of a button. Playing larger games with distant players is a little more difficult, as Minecraft requires that you own and manage your own game servers. Update 1.5 teased a new developer-hosted service called Minecraft Realms, but it will probably be some time before it's publicly available.

An Ever Changing, Infinite Game
Mojang began selling copies of Minecraft before it was finished, offering players frequent updates and thereby avoiding the bloated, years-long development cycle and sky-high prices of most major game releases. The developers also actively engage with their audience to get a sense of where the game should go, tweaking it with each update.

New features also add enticement for lapsed players to come back. After not playing for some time, the promise of a pet dog in-game lured me back for many more weeks of play.

The Downside
The strange thing about Minecraft is that it is both deeply creative and deeply mindless. The process of gathering materials to build, and even the process of building, is often dull and monotonous. While the game's work ethic can be inspiring and addictive, it can also be discouraging.

Despite efforts from the developers, redstone still feels awkward in the game. The recent 1.5 "Redstone Update" did lower the bar for redstone creations by adding several ready-to-use items. Things like the item-moving hopper certainly renewed my interest in redstone, but using even these prefab items still requires a lot of patience.

Lastly, most sandbox games have at least some kind of cursory story to move the players along when they tire of adventuring on their own. Minecraft still feels more like a platform than a fully-fledged game, and its "end" is strange and disappointing. Mod makers have worked to fill the gap with stories and puzzles made with Minecraft, but for now adventure maps are still in the realm of advanced play requiring some special knowledge to use.

An Investment That Pays
Unlike many games, Minecraft requires a personal investment. It won't tell you to build a sixty-room castle complete with secret passageways, library, alchemy chamber, portrait gallery, underground forest, lava-chandelier, and portal to another dimension, and then reward you for doing so. You as a player (and I mean, the person behind the computer) have to want to do those things enough to feel that their completion is its own reward.

What Minecraft presents is a huge world with its own consistent rules, giving players plenty of space to explore on their own terms. The detail-oriented will thrill at the possibilities of an enormous sandbox, but even a dabbler will find pleasure facing off against the wilderness while their humble tower rises from the blocky landscape.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/VFClXWgDeL4/0,2817,2416810,00.asp

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