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Minecraft To Officially Launch 11/11/11
tekgoblin writes "Minecraft has currently sold about 2 million copies and it's still only in beta. However, the developers have just announced that the game will officially launch on 11/11/11. The date 11/11/11 was actually chosen because it falls on the same date as other various game releases, the most notable being Skyrim."
YY/MM/DD is actually the one that makes the most sense. It's the only one that's automatically sorted by date, even by programs that don't recognize that it's a date format.
I don't get why Farmville is so popular. That truly sucks. In the space of a week, I managed to out-class all my Facebook friends who'd been playing it for years just by doing a quick bit of maths and working out how to make money. It was dull. Yet millions of people play it so often that I've had to remove its posts from my Facebook because of the spamming.
I don't get why WoW is so popular. I never hear anything but complaints about it, and certainly never play games on a subscription basis. And people still tell me they are pissing about £40-50 a month on the damn thing for years at a time.
I grew up with a ZX Spectrum. Maybe you're from a different era. Let me give you a hint. Graphics mean NOTHING. Not even worthy of mention. Not even an "it doesn't even look good", like that's the last saving grace of a crap game. If you count graphics in your evaluation of a game, you're the wrong target for most games. Hint: In a year's time, *every* game's graphics will look crap compared to today's. Does that mean the older games have somehow got "worse" without changing?
A game is either fun and absorbing or not. I spent most of last week playing Altitude (PC) and Batty (Spectrum) with my girlfriend. We didn't care that it wasn't 3D, or high-res, or anti-aliased. It literally did not factor in at all. We honestly spent more times looking at ZX Spectrum colour clash. Didn't mean we didn't enjoy it though. I don't think my girlfriend even noticed that the Spectrum *had* colour clash.
As for "not fun", no you don't see yourself laughing at it, or entertained. But what it does is absorb you. That's a really tricky thing to achieve in a game. Some games are endless restarts of the same chapter, but some manage to absorb you so much that you don't even realise that's what you're doing.
Minecraft is a sandbox game. It's about people building a little virtual world of their own like we were promised for the past 50 years. It's similar to the 3D Construction Kit "game" of many years ago - very few people can make something impressive but everyone enjoys having a go and making their virtual world, even if the graphics are atrocious by modern video card standards. That hardly matters - it's just fun to tinker. 3DCK was literally dithered polygons (and only about half-a-dozen at a time on the Spectrum!) when I first looked at it but immediately thought "whoa, that's something I want to tinker with". There was also something called VU-3D on the Spectrum. Go look it up. I spent hours tinkering with that. Not a "game" as such, in the same way that Minecraft isn't a game.
I play Minecraft - not masses but I've had a couple of long sessions on it, alt-tabbing back and forth between the Minepedia and the game. I actually prefer it without the monsters at night, which some would say is the only interaction in the game.
It's just nice to build a little world and explore it. I actually quite enjoy the times when I've done a big build job and my "character" walks out of the house, down to his little jetty that I made (deliberately facing West), gets in a boat and has a little paddle towards the sunset. And then he turns around, sees the distant light of his little home in the dusk and sculls back on home.
And more annoyingly, I keep finding myself thinking "if only you could craft X or collect Y" and wondering how to go about programming it (I have resisted the temptation to look at the code thus far and, anyway, my Java is rusty - if it's easy to add new things, I'll never escape the damn block-universe).
It doesn't matter how "fun" it is. Personally, I'm pissed off with Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 at the moment because of the constant restarts from checkpoints. The game is fun, when it flows and absorbs, but otherwise that's just a chore. Whereas Minecraft - you can even be "immortal" if you don't have the monsters at night or fall off a cliff (though finding string is always a problem then, which means my character can't fish from his