Minecraft
Ever since Minecraft became available to the general public in early 2009, people have been flocking to the game because of its relative ease of use, multiple modes of gameplay, unique building concepts, and expansive multiplayer options. Since a game like Minecraft has never really come out before, it would have been easy for people to sort of brush the game off as an independent game that didn’t really get the development budget that other, larger games get, however this obviously has not become the case, as Minecraft has surpassed 4 million sales, and has become one of the most successful independently created games that has ever hit the market.
Learning to play Minecraft doesn’t really take a whole lot of work, one of the phrases that really define the game: “punch trees, get wood”, basically sets the tone for the entire game when it comes to playability. Everything is set out in a fairly straightforward sort of way which allows the player to quickly choose what sort of building tool or weapon they want to use with the scroll of the mouse wheel. The environment is also simple as there are a few different types of blocks that you might encounter when you are walking around your randomly generated world. In order to set blocks or use tools, it literally only takes a click of a mouse, there isn’t much in this game that is complex, meaning that you are free to make it as complex as you wish with your building and fighting skills.
While the majority of the game is fairly simple, you can start getting into some more complex items and places as you progress through various stages of earth. When the game was first being developed, and especially in the alpha mode, there wasn’t a whole lot of things that you could create, but the fundamentals were there, the blocks of everything, some tools, and some food. Since that time, a wide variety of new types of blocks, tools, food items, and creatures have been added to the world. This gives players the ability to do a few more things that haven’t previously been possible.
One of the better features about Minecraft is that it has several different modes of playing the game. While they all have their own strengths and weaknesses, most people play in survival mode or multiplayer mode.
Survival Mode – This is the basic mode that most Minecraft players will play when they are in single-player mode. Your character has to survive day and night while collecting resources in order to live comfortably, as well as gather food in order to survive. There is a sub-mode in survival mode that is called “Hardcore” which puts the hardest setting on and deletes your world if you end up dying.
Creative Mode – This mode allows you to do a lot of things that you aren’t able to do in survival mode, namely, it lets you fly in order to quickly go from place to place. In addition to this, you also get an unlimited amount of resources which will allow you to build whatever you want without having to worry about going and getting more materials.
Multiplayer Mode – Being able to play with other players is one of the best features about Minecraft, since other people will actually be able to see what you do with your time instead of living in your own Minecraft world with your creations that you can’t even share easily with other people.
When you get a Minecraft account it is a good idea to do a quick tutorial before going online, especially on some public servers where being killed is allowed. If you only have a very rudimentary knowledge of the game and how it works, you can get frustrated quickly by getting killed over and over, losing all of the items and resources that you have collected and being forced to restart with nothing.
Playing in the multiplayer mode, you will either have to join a public sever or a private server. While many popular games have both sorts of servers, usually, setting up a private server with other games is a lot of work, especially when the developer or creator of the game would rather see you use the public servers that they control. Minecraft goes in a different direction with this, actually providing players with a way to easily create their own private servers in order to play the game with only other people that they want to play with, this provides for a more enjoyable gaming experience, especially if you know the people you are playing with.
There are a few options that multiplayer servers can employ which makes the game more enjoyable for people as well. Sometimes, the owner or admins on servers can make the time of the day change, usually making it morning again as soon as it becomes night, thus enabling most people to continue working on whatever they are working on without having to worry about in-game monsters that can potentially kill them, and the lack of light that comes along with the night period in the game.
Minecraft has really made it possible to create just about anything you want within the world, since you can easily change the landscape to suit your needs. Very few games have ever allowed users to control the dynamics of the world quite as much as Minecraft does. This allows you to design living spaces, sculptures, even create simple switches and calculator systems. Looking over Youtube for videos of Minecraft sculptures and buildings, you will come across a wide variety of things, some of which took their creators hundreds or thousands of hours in order to create.
By getting a Minecraft account, you too can enjoy the vast world which is generated completely at random. The price can be a bit expensive, but it is well worth it, since the game is extremely open-ended, which means that technically, you can play for thousands of hours and still find new things.