Minecraft

Okay, I'm pretty much playing a lot of minecraft lately. After finishing my 31 days of horror movie reviews on Halloween, I needed a break, during which I... just played Minecraft. In case you don't know, minecraft is a game. You can get it from minecraft.net if I am not mistaken.

Minecraft did not win me over at first. Typically in MMO's and fantasy games, there is a lot of questing (which I don't like), a fair amount of fighting (which I love) and a little bit of crafting thrown in to "power the game economy" which translates as "another way to waste your time in the game while paying us ridiculous sums of money." I hate the crafting in games as you can NEVER craft anything you can actually use, and it's usually only something you can sell cheaply for a tiny sliver of copper or two.

Minecraft in it's first iteration was ALL Crafting. That's all you did was run around and build stuff. This put me off the game at first, despite there being the added Survival mode, which is essentially the game currently under development. When I say under development, I mean the guy who makes it is busy coding his ass off, and while the game is only in Alpha (the first phase of game development, before Beta and the released or final version), it's enormously fun to play.

So here's the deal. You spawn essentially naked in a randomly generated world made of... blocks. It sounds odd. It looks odd. You may even see farm animals made of blocks. Blocky sheep, pigs and cows roam the open grasslands. Chickens are made of smaller blocks, and run around laying eggs. They moo, oink and baa at various intervals (not the chickens), roam around and are generally there for the same reason as everything else... They are a resource.

Everything in the game is a resource. Well, just about everything. Trees are harvested for wood to make everything from tool handles to stairs to torches. Other materials are harvested to make stronger tools, different objects or entire buildings. You can make a suit of armor out of cowskin, a sword out of stone and wood, and replenish your health by killing pigs and eating bacon. Mmmm bacon. Blocks that make up the very ground can be shoveled out, mined away with a pickaxe, or otherwise recovered to make use of.

Thus, the name of the game, Minecraft.

Of course, you only have one day to gather up what resources you can. When night falls, the zombies come out. Which, wouldn't be so bad if it was just zombies. There's also skeletons, spiders, and creepers, which just run at you and blow themselves up like mutant green suicide bombers. It's a difficult task to survive the night without some sort of shelter. Hopefully, you've made one by then, because the night lasts as long as the day, and you have to make it til morning, when you can again walk the land freely and get back to the important task of making yourself a safe place to live.

It's severely addicting, and that and life in general has made it impossible for me to write my novel (and also delayed my blog postings). A friend told me about nanowrimo, which is basically National Novel Writing Month, and I signed up to write a novel in the 30 days of November. I've done 6 pages, which is about one day's work, and I haven't had a chance to get back to it and it's already the 11th. So, I've essentially got to write a 50,000 word novel in 19 days. Should be fun! Wish me luck.