If you have not been in your mother’s basement and have gone online in the past two years then you have probably heard about Minecraft.
Minecraft is a sandbox construction game. It’s a structure uses an almost completely 3×3 blocky structure, giving it an extremely high resemblance to Legos, which is possibly why many kids like it.
It starts you off in a randomly generated world (unless you use a world seed), and offers no hints, no tutorials, and no objectives (except The End), other than an optional bonus chest. In fact I had to go almost half an hour of confusion because I couldn’t figure out how to craft a stick (or anything for that matter).
Something to watch out for is that Minecraft can be very time consuming. I had started playing at about 4:30 p.m., planning to play for about an hour or two, just to take a quick glance at the clock and find that it was 10:30 PM. So I wouldn’t recommend this to someone in Honors or AP classes, for they sometimes have to do a lot of homework and studying.
Another commendable thing about Minecraft is it’s gameplay. It offers three different modes. Creative, where all the items (minus a few hidden ones) are given to you (hence the term, Creative), Survival where you “live off the land,” and for the more bold and die hard players, there is Hardcore, exactly like survival, except it’s licked at the Hardest difficulty and no respawns. But for these special maps called adventure maps, the is a fourth mode called Adventure. It’s just like survival except you can’t place or destroy blocks.
Minecraft, if you are playing alone, can become very repetitive. And unless you install one of the vast mods that add new content, you may just be stuck being bored until the next update comes.
And although they are minor, (most of them) just as most video games, comes glitches. A well known famous glitch is when walking a player may occasionally be able to see through the walls. And since it’s written in Java and not C++, it can be run on Macs as well, not just PC and Linux. Consequently, Minecraft has really high performance requirements.
And Minecraft isn’t just a computer game. It is also found on Android, Xbox, and iOS. But I personally do not recommend buying these versions because they are heavily “watered down” versions of the computer game.
While the game has a few glitches and rough edges here and there, Minecraft is a really good game and I would recommend it to the adventurous and creative people who have some time on their hands, and is a great replacement for Legos. It constantly receiving patches and new content and can the computer version can be purchased for $26.95, $19.99 on Xbox Live, and $7.99 in Google Play or the App Store.
By: Abby Ray