Minecraft: A Review
by Kassadee Marie, HSM team writer
If you plan on playing Minecraft, you’re going to be doing a lot of grinding.
You’ll have to dig through tons of cobblestone to find a few diamonds and a little bit of gold. What makes grinding in this game more acceptable than in most games is an element of excitement. Since mining is done deep below the surface, there are many unexpected thrills to be found while digging through the mines. Even with a peaceful setting (no monsters are spawned) you may find you’re suddenly standing on the precipice of a deep chasm. Looking down into some of the depths that are in this game can make you feel agroraphobic. Or you may remove a block of stone that was holding back a flood of water – or red-hot lava. If you identify a bit with your avatar, you’ll be jumping back in surprise at least a few times. Don’t become complacent.
And if you think all of that is frightening, wait until you go into the Nether, a separate dimension that is reminiscent of Hades, with depths that make the abyss in the regular world look like tire tracks.
In addition to breaking up and then building with blocks of various materials, this sandbox game offers monsters to fight, farming, animal husbandry, day and night cycles, and weather, such as rain and snow. You’ll find mountains, valleys, caverns, lakes, oceans, rivers, deserts, jungles, grasslands, and areas of snow and ice there. There are also pre-built forts, temples, and villages with NPC’s in a few locations. Each world map generated is unique. There are people who say the graphics in this game are bad. I say, they’re missing the point. Like Lego’s, it’s not the material that you build with, it’s what your imagination can come up with to build. Google some Minecraft images to see a few of the incredible things people have done and then let your imagination go. If you can dream it and you have the time and patience, you can build it.
Minecraft can be purchased for PC/Mac, and there is also a Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition for sale in the XBLA Marketplace, and a Minecraft: PlayStation 3 Edition for sale on the PlayStation Network. Minecraft: Pocket Edition is available for iOS and Android. There have been several updates to the game and there is additional content that can be purchased, such as texture packs and avatar bundles. Minecraft is coming out for Playstation 4, Playstation Vita, and Xbox One soon, but there is no release dates for those versions yet.
Who makes Minecraft? A small Swedish company called Mojang (which is Swedish for gadget). It was founded in May 2009 by Markus Persson as Mojang Specifications. In early September 2010, Persson founded Mojang with his friend Jakob Porsche and soon after brought in Carl Manneh as a CEO. According to their website: “Mojang is an indie game developer studio based in Stockholm, Sweden. We develop a game called Minecraft and another game called Scrolls.” “Minecraft is a sandbox construction game where you can build anything you can imagine. It also has scary monsters, like creepers who tend to want to destroy what you have built.” “Scrolls takes place in a world where the essence of conflict is stored on a parchment. You use the power of creatures, spells, and ancient machines to gain the edge in battle, deploying your forces by using scrolls: some rare, some common, some brutal, some tactical.”
They also sell merchandise through Jinx. My favorite is a tee-shirt that says “One More Block, One More Block, One More Block, One More Block”. If you play Minecraft, you get that.
- Sandbox environment
- 3D play
- Creativity
- Excitement
- Variety
June 10th, 2014 by Kassadee Marie | 1 comment
Home is endlessly entertaining to this California girl. Kassadee has been in Home for about four years, and loves almost everything about it (with a few notable exceptions). She spends way too much money there, and perhaps too much time... Someday she will travel the world and write about the people she meets and the places she sees.
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We just have the Pocket Edition for my son’s tablet, and while it’s a more “stripped down” version of the game (no NPCs, but you can still create a nether reactor, for example), he dives right into it for *hours*. He picked up a guidebook at his school’s book fair this spring; between that and watching how-to videos on YouTube, that’s when he really started to take off with it. I knew he was making serious progress when I asked him if he wanted to go outside. His reply?
“One minute. I’m smelting.”
Now, what six-year-old knows that word, uses it correctly, and chooses that over outdoor play?!