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Back To Basics: Here's What Minecraft What would you say about Tetris if you were to review it today? "The music is catchy and the puzzles are very tight." It's not hard to see the point - Tetris has so much more than that. But it's almost impossible for people to separate it from their cultural resonance. Minecraft, the free-form building and survival game, hasn't yet seeped into the global consciousness to the same degree, but it has become something far more than a mere game. It has been purchased and played by more than four million people. It is the brightest example of an indie success story you could name, having never been near a publisher or even an investor. Markus ’Notch’ Persson, the project's lead developer, is nothing but a celebrity. That one-word nickname guarantees instant press and gamers attention for any and every pronouncement it is attached. There are Tshirts, there's costumes, there's conspiracy theories about an invisible enemy in-game, there's podcasts, YouTube videos are so numerous that one person could not watch them all at once, and there's even a dedicated video comment site featuring a girl wearing pink hair with a huge fan base. It is not easy to determine exactly where the game stops and its online legends begin. Review Minecraft? Deep space You might also like to review Justin Bieber. ("The hair is very shiny but the voice quite weedy; 7/10.") Except, somehow, Minecraft wasn't released until today, and thus today is the day it is intended to be reviewed on. It's been in beta and alpha for a few years now. Anyone who paid the reasonable amount of first PS10 or later PS14 was granted immediate access and all future updates. There is no mystery surrounding the'release' build, although a nearly-finished build has been available since the last week. Review Minecraft? You're welcome to review Minecraft. Back to basics: here's what Minecraft, the game, really is. It's a block-based sandbox with two key player abilities: to create and to destroy. You can give and take with one mouse-button. You can hit almost anything with your cuboid or any other tool you have, and it will eventually fall apart. Pick up the debris left behind, and you'll have a piece of building material. You can then put that in the world. It will appear as a cubicle. Mine more materials, stack other cubes onto and around your first blocks and, with even the gentlest smattering of imagination, you'll have created something. It could be a tower that towers over the entire world. It could be an elaborate Gothic castle with spires that pierce the very sky. It could be an operational minecart and track. It could be a crude or simple phallus. It could be Justin Bieber. It could be almost anything, and that is Minecraft. It is so simple in so much ways, but can be so complicated if you choose to build a complex construction project that will require patience, time and rare types of blocks. But you don't have to. No matter if you're a casual clicker, or a skilled digital architect, you can make something that makes you proud. The game is broken up into two key, additional forms. One mode is multiplayer, where the combined efforts and imagination of a group can produce some of most impressive sights you'll see in this or any other game. You'll find amazing things on a popular server: impossible cities in clouds, vast underground mines and waterways carved into functional circuitry. You can create tools, structures and weapons using simple'recipes of materials'. Whenever a new block type has been added to the game, Minecraft's building potential has grown exponentially. The endlessly changing world combined with the developers’ canny programming-minded sense of which new block types could theoretically possibly be used for makes Minecraft a marvel of electronic possibility. It is the fundamental 'what-if?' The possibilities that video games offer are endless. However, most of us won’t be able or willing to take part in such grand creations. Most of us will dig a big hole in the ground, stick some torches on the walls and feel like we're home. And that, I think, is Minecraft at its most important. They're yours, no matter how primitive, hapless, or infantile they may be. The hole in the ground will feel homey because you are the one responsible for it. Ah, the monsters. That leads me on to the other key facet of Minecraft: the one that might be a little less vital to the game itself, but is the zeitgeist-y heart of Minecraft's online fame. Ghasts. Endermen. Spiders. They are lumbering and stupid block beasts. If they see you, they will relentlessly try and kill you. They usually come at night, which is good because they are mostly quiet at night. You build in the short daylight hours. In the long night-time you hide. Or you fight. It is about survival - creating first shelter and later weapons and armour to fend off these single-minded, cartoonishly crude and yet effortlessly menacing hunters. Rarer blocks and ever more complicated mining and crafting creates sturdier gear which will keep you alive for longer - although, in most Minecraft modes, death is but an inconvenience that loses you whatever you're carrying and flings you back to the geographical start point. Your location and any precious, valuable blocks you were about to mine, are the real losses. This can make it difficult to find your original starting point if you haven't been careful. New-ish to Minecraft, but front and centre in the release version, are an experience system and an endgame. You can get experience by killing other things. Experience is then spent on a complex buff/enchantment program. Although this latter-day aspect of the game isn't the strongest and encourages more grinding than imagination, it will be expanded and hopefully will become more than an MMO-style layer for stat-chasing. Similarly undercooked, if clearly ambitious, is the pursuit of a climactic boss battle by attaining the rarest substances and building portals to the game's two additional dimensions: an underground hell realm and its ethereal inversion, The End. Here, you'll find tougher fights, rarer materials, and eventually, the bloody great dragon. This final fight is ridiculously and intentionally tough, its reward is an arguably too-big-for-its-boots 'poem' and, well, it just doesn't quite feel in the spirit of Minecraft proper. It is a clear goal to aim at, and for some people it may be necessary. There are two types of players: those who find it difficult or impossible to abandon Skyrim's main quest and those who have to do everything. This aspect, and the levelling, seem a long way distant from the simpler virtues of construction and survival that first made Minecraft the internet's darling, and I worry slightly about this toybox of a game staggering under the weight of such additions if more are to come. These narrative and roleplaying elements are completely optional. You can also build a tunnel from anywhere. Or, you could build another rockyphallus. Minecraft is yours to do with as you please: its single greatest feature is that, every time you start a new game, it gives you a new, random and infinite world, strangely beautiful in its blocky minimalism (very much thanks to truly lovely lighting and music), a new adventure and a new, endless box of digital Lego. Minecraft is a towering achievement in the very possibilities of gaming, and it does this without losing itself to either esoterica or cynicism. It's a game anyone can play and everyone can get something out it, no matter how imaginative or skilled they are. They will make it and have an experience that is theirs and only them. The last two decades of public-eye programming have provided a vital and enjoyable lesson for modern gaming. Be your own person, listen to players, and be proud of what human beings can accomplish, rather than what your can make them do. Minecraft might be inseparable from its own fame by this point, but one thing's for sure - it deserves every bit of it.
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