Has anyone here tried this? I didn't see any threads on this. My son showed this game to me 5 days ago, and I've been obsessively playing ever since.
It's a sim game, but can certainly be played casually (once you get past the initial fixation, lol.) You are a person in a simulated world, full of beaches, grassy valleys, and mountains, and you set about gathering resources to craft things. Chop wood from trees (with your hand!) and make a craft table and a wooden hatchet and a wooden pick axe. Now you can chop faster, and start to mine with the pick axe. Once you get coal, you can light torches. Once you get rock (which you automatically get when you mine rock) you can mine iron ore. Once you get that, you can build a furnace, smelt the ore, and keep making more stuff.
You can do all of these things, but at night you must have a house to lock yourself in, because that's when the monsters come out, and they're coming for you! Unless you play the peaceful mode, which I do, since I love to run free at night and watch the moon and stars. If you do get killed (fall into lava, drown, get buried in sand because you dig out a mountain of sand directly above you), you just re-spawn back at your original starting point. However, you will have lost everything you were carrying in your personal inventory. All of your structures remain intact.
Anyway, great fun, a change of pace, and it's a game that's always there when you feel like playing. For all of the boxiness of the graphics, they can be very pretty. (Sunrises are my favorite; the flat boxy clouds are hilarious. There are animals, too!) Minecraft Alpha is the latest version, it's not even in the beta mode. The demo is very limited; you have to buy it (it's about $13), and the site promised that you'll get all the upgrades (to beta and the final release) for free. They're still working on the multi-player version, which is apparently still pretty buggy.
www.minecraft.net is the download site.
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