The Other ‘-craft’ Computer Game
We recently (ie in the last few months) discovered Minecraft down our way, and oh my word it's fun.
It's a game with no goals but those you set yourself - no quests, missions, minigames or anything like that - just a world you're plonked into in which you need to survive (there are monsters that come out at night, or in any area of darkness), strive and (ideally) thrive. To do this you recover materials from the world around you and use them to construct... well, pretty much anything you like, really.
The game's presented in a wonderfully retro style - all cubic blocks and chunky landscapes - and from the moment you arrive it's yours to do with as you like.
The game's still officially in beta, with official launch next month, and can be played in single- or multiplayer modes. Singleplayer has its charm; you have to live completely on your wits and ingenuity; but I've rapidly learned to love multiplayer. The main reason is that The Mrs is running a server on which some of our old Warcraft friends are playing with us, and because of the time difference, we're only on at the same time occasionally. Which means that when we get on, we get to go and see what the others have been doing in our absence - an enormous fortress in a cliff, a pyramid of sand out in the desert, it could be anything.
Something I've discovered to my surprise is that I'm quite enjoying engineering projects; not a thing that would usually be the case in games or in life. I've been developing a rail network between our various holdings, making use of the switches, levers and power sources built into the game to develop quite complicated switching between lines, and I'm currently embarked on a side project that should be a lot of fun before I go back to develop the rest of the network and build actual stations, etc.
I'm a rank amateur at creating stuff in Minecraft though - check out some of this stuff to see the kind of vision some people are applying to the game (not all of the embedded videos in this page are still there, by the way).