Minecraft

Minecraft is, in the words of its creators, "a game about breaking and placing blocks. At first, people built structures to protect against nocturnal monsters, but as the game grew players worked together to create wonderful, imaginative things."

Minecraft was released for the first time on 17 May 2009, available only on PC. After numerous updates, improving and fixing the gameplay and mechanics, it was released in full on 18 November 2011. An Android phone version was released a month earlier, and an iOS version the day prior. On 9 May 2012 it was released for XBLA, said version co-developed by 4J Studios.

The game recieved many awards from the 2011 Game Developers Conference (GDC), including Best Downloadable Game and Best Debut Game. In the year 2012 it was awarded a Golden Joystick award in the category of Best Downloadable Game. The PC version has over 11,000,000 downloads as of today, and over 20,000,000 across all platforms.

Pre-Gameplay

Upon creation of a new virtual world, the player may choose to play in either Creative mode or Survival mode. Creative mode allows for the player to fly indefinitely, have infinite blocks, and have no health or hunger meter. The player is also invisible to enemies, can break any block regardless of its required tool, and weapons or armour will never lose durability. A player may drink a potion infinite times, shoot a bow without needing arrows, and sprint forever. Survival mode, on the other hand, keeps the player's feet firmly on the ground unless he is jumping. He may only place blocks he has acquired by means of mining, excavating, or punching, and he must carefully watch his hunger and health meter. In this gamemode he may choose a difficulty - Peaceful, which does not allow for the spawning of hostile mobs and lets the player's health regenerate instantly and prevents him from becoming hungry. Easy, which allows for hostile mobs to spawn, allows the player become hungry, and does not let him regenerate his health meter unless his hunger meter is full. Normal and Hard are simply more difficult versions of Easy, except for in difficulty Hard, if a player's hunger meter runs dry, he will take damage until he is killed. (You cannot die by hunger in Easy or Normal.)

The player may also choose what sort of world he would like to play in. He may choose from Default (generates mountains, plains, rivers, jungles etc as usual), Superflat (an infinitely flat 4-block-thick world, usually meant for Creative mode), or Large Biomes (which generates a Default world, except 16 times larger in size). He may enable or disable the generation of structures such as NPC Villages, Strongholds and Abandoned Mineshafts; he may input a world generation seed to change how the world generates (a seed is a string of characters such as 'worstseedever'. That seed, when input in an XBLA world prior to the 1.3 update, would spawn the player immediately next to a Dungeon).

When the player is satisfied with the presets of his world, he will create the new world.

Gameplay

The player spawns on a set coordinate (x, y, z). Unless he sleeps in a bed at night, this block will continue to serve as his spawnpoint if he is killed.

The first thing he will do is search for trees. It sounds a little odd, but the key to survival in Minecraft is to punch down trees with your bare fist, which is always seen onscreen on the right-hand side. If your character has a customised skin (appearance) then it will show in first-person upon his arm.

In Survival mode, a player begins by punching down enough trees to craft a workbench. You only need a single block of wood (acquired from tree-punching) to create said workbench. When you have your workbench, you will need to begin crafting tools and weapons to survive. The more you mine, dig, and explore, the better materials you gain, and the better tools and weapons you can craft. The better your gear, the safer you are.

In Creative mode, a player has no set requirements. He may choose to use colourful wool blocks to build a giant pixel-art (popular pixel creations include characters from Super Mario, Legend of Zelda, and Minecraft itself), or he may choose to build as he would in Survival. He can create maps, parkour, towns, mountains, and caves at his leisure.

Minecraft has a built-in but optional achievement system, allowing for the player to work his way slowly towards the endgame. When the player reaches the final part of his game, he will defeat the final boss and take its trophy, and when he returns to his home, he will silently watch a 10-minute narration by two unspecified but very different entities.

Minecraft has become immensely successful since its release in 2009, updated often and ever more customisable. The game has changed, evolved, and become something that Mojang never expected to see. You can play a (rather bad) free version on the website, and if you decide you like it, it's $26 you'll not regret spending!