Minecrack

Behold a new and unspoiled land!

My oldest kid has been playing minecraft in her browser, that's how you play the older version.  She asked me if I could get her the new version with crafting in it and I thought that might be fun so I looked into it and picked up a copy.  I also picked up a copy of the portable version for android.  I also got the minecraft server so we could set up a shared instance to play on.  I also got a big needle full of smack ready to ween myself off this later, because it's super addictive.  I was 'testing it out' for her and I ended up testing most of the day.  I tested how to get killed by spiders and how to kill a chicken and how to run from zombies.  I tested getting wood and digging a safehole.  By the end of the day we were swapping recipes for torches and stoves and talking about the dangers of eating rotten meat and dark caves.  It's pretty fun.  I haven't got the server set up so we aren't doing multi-player and we have 4 different worlds going on at the moment, one on the tablet, one on my phone, and two on our computers.  The portable minecraft doesn't have crafting in it but it works very well - even on my phone.  On the Transformer Prime tablet it runs like snot.*  My daughter prefers creation mode but I'm hard into the survival.  There is a real story in there surviving your first night in a dark hole while the zombies shuffle just outside your makeshift wall of dirt.  Crafting refines that experience, gathering wood, finding coal and making my first torches was an amazing experience.  Penny arcade did the perfect cartoons for this:

I can see me and the kids sitting around with headsets on fortresses and building crap on our home minecraft server.  It must be said that it's a hell of a lot cheaper than Lego.





*that means good in case you didn't grow up in Northern Ontario.