User Blog:
Minecraft: A Lesson in Addiction

While I know I'm coming a little late to the party on this one and that many have discussed the crack-like addictive simplicity that is Minecraft, I felt alltern8 needed its own little take on this Sandbox classic in the making.

My article history on this site is starting to look a little hipocritical though, with my opening articles discussing my hatred for Sandbox titles, to be followed up by my love of Mount and Blade: Warband, and now Minecraft. We'll have to chalk this up to a golden new age in my gaming life where I've begun to discover the diamonds in the rough. However, like Warband, there are certain reasons that purposeless games like this intrigue me and hold my attention, they arn't completely so. While you "can" do anything, there are certain things that you "should" do, and these are catered for.

However, before we get into that aspect of this building, mining, crafting extravaganza, let's put down a couple sentences on what Minecraft actually is. In a nutshell, it's a randomly generated world, with 90s console graphics, day night cycles and a sheer massive game world to explore. However this fails to capture the magic that this game holds and you will indeed struggle to explain to people in words what is it about this game that grabs you so strongly; but I'm going to give it a shot.

You play a man, a man with fists and an inventory; at the beginning, that's it. Walk and jump around a bit is almost all you can do, apart from your ability to punch stuff. Punching trees gives you wood, earth gives you blocks of the stuff, rock, you get the idea. Taking these materials you can craft other blocks, a workbench, a furnace, tools, swords, armour, TNT, bridges and more. All these are designed to give you the "building blocks" for the world, letting you create pretty much whatever you want.

Before you can do this safely however, you need to protect yourself. While during the day everything is wonderful and safe, at night, zombies, skeletons, spiders and more all come looking for you. So you build a shelter, you put a torch on the wall to keep the darkness (where enemies spawn) out. Holed up in your wooden or stone shelter, you must then wait out the night; all the while listening to your enemies scrabble and moan against your defences, hoping they'll hold until morning.