If you're a parent, grand parent or anybody under the age of 30, you must have heard about this global video game phenomenon. Along with Angry Birds, Candy Crush, World of Warcraft, Wii Sports and Call of Duty, it's one of the greatest gaming success stories of the 21st century, but for those of you who's only involvement with your kids' gaming fads is paying for them, just what is it? It's certainly a game that hides it's depth and complexity with its simple graphics and unassuming gameplay. It's also does more to show how games can be creative and educational, while still being a proper gamer's game than any other game I can think of.
What do you do?
As the name suggests, Minecraft is all about crafting items from mined minerals. At the most basic level this means making tools and building structures for your character, Steve. However, it also features cooking, farming, potion making, combat and even its own version of electric circuits.
- If you want to build faster and fight more effectively, you need better equipment. This means mining, smelting and crafting on an ever escalating scale. For example, you can make wooden weapons with your bare hands, but you need wooden tools to dig out stone to make stone tools and weapons, you can't do that with your bare hands. Likewise you can't mine iron ore to make iron armour and weapons with wooden tools, you need stone tools, and so on.
- (In survival mode) monsters come out at night (spiders, skeletons, zombies, creepers, endermen, etc). To survive the night you have to do one of the following:
- Make a weapon and fight them off.
- Make a shelter (perhaps even just a covered hole in the ground) and wait until dawn.
- Make a house with a bed and sleep (by far the fastest way of making it through the night).
- There are three worlds, the main overworld, the Nether and the End. You spend most of your time in the overworld, but you need certain equipment to build portals to get to the Nether or the End, where you'll find even better ingredients and minerals.
The other thing to note is that the worlds are randomly generated; unless you get someone else's "seed code" no two Minecraft worlds are the same.
Who needs ultra realistic graphics?
On launching the game or checking it out online, the first thing you'll notice is that the graphics are very basic. It looks like a 3D game from about 1993 (I often think it looks like the original Doom). Everything is made from blocks with very low resolution textures on them. This means not only can the game run on just about any PC (and even smart phones), its world has a Lego-like look and feel to it. For example: |
| Honestly, this is what this 5 year-old game looks like |
However, that doesn't stop it offering some pretty amazing views, especially if you're creative with your building designs, for example:
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| Blocky or not, that is a majestic landscape |
Mining and crafting
So most of the time you will be digging underground to get cobblestone, coal, sand, iron ore, platinum ore, obsidian, etc. You then take that all back to your shelter where you have to use crafting tables, furnaces and stoves to make better building blocks, tools, weapons, armour and equipment. As well as the sliding scale I mentioned, some things require other things to make them. For example, if you want to make a potion, you must first smelt sand to make glass to make a bottle. It's generally pretty logical.The tricky bit about crafting on the PC version is knowing what you can craft and how to arrange the ingredients in the crafting grid. For example, here is the design for a bow:
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| Placing sticks and string in the grid in this patten makes a simple bow |
Most of the time there is some logic to this. For example, picks, shovels, axes and hoes all follow the same basic design - two sticks in the middle and a bit of stone or iron at the top, but the number of bits of stone or iron and the shape they're in determines which tool you create. The tablet and console versions (Xboxes and Playstations only, no Nintendo consoles) eliminate this part of the game entirely. If you have the ingredients, you just pick the tool from a list.
Farming and more
As well as the mining and crafting, you can operate a fairly complex farm within the game. You can sow wheat, oats, carrots, flowers and saplings in soil blocks, but you then need to irrigate the farmland with water channels. You can also breed chickens, sheep, pigs, cows, dogs, cats, horses, donkeys and mules by following certain breeding rules (nothing sexual, it's always based on have two of an animal, then giving them certain foods). |
| A simple example of an irrigated crop farm |
These can then be used for everything from food to restore your health to wool for your bed and carpets.
Getting scientific
There are machines in Minecraft too. Starting with basic items like minecarts, pistons, switches and pressure plates, which can be connected with a ore call Red Stone. This acts like copper wiring and can be used to make buttons to open doors, provide power for railway lines or make really complicated devices, like this fully functioning (and absolutely massive) calculator: |
| A calculator made from Red Stone and light blocks that actually works |
In summary
Minecraft is to video games what Lego is to physical toys, both in terms of popularity and its range of ways to play. I'll be honest, I don't have the time or the patience to play it for long, especially in survival mode, but kids the world over love it.In terms of which version to get, the PC is the most expansive version, but it is more complex. It costs around £20. The pocket edition on tablets is £5 but it's like the caffeine free version; it lacks many of the features of the other versions and the touchscreen controls take some getting used to. The console versions are about £16 and are by far the most popular versions. They can also be played split screen on a single TV with up to 4 players. However, Microsoft recently bought the rights to the game, so it will never come to Nintendo consoles, and I don't know how much more support there will be for the Playstation 3, 4 and Vita versions (which were released before the buy-out).
Finally, I have to mention Stampy Longnose and Ballistic Squid. They are two funny British lads who make daily Minecraft videos for kids on You Tube (unlike the majority of gameplay videos on YouTube). They are a huge hit in their own right, with their videos getting millions of views - they've even appeared on Simon Mayo's Drive Time and BBC News. I've included a link to their YouTube channel. Stampy's intro video is a nice summary to everything Minecraft (it's about 3 mins long).
Rating
Now this isn't a review of the game, but I figured I'd give Minecraft a rating anyway. Quite simply, this is perhaps the best game ever made for kids. It's creative, expansive, deep, involving, rewarding, promotes cooperation and it's great for teaching resourcing, planning, simple electronics and physics, and even basics of farming. My only warning is that it can become a major time sync, but if your kids is going to spend hours playing any video game, few offer more than Minecraft.
Recommended age: 4 years and up
Useful links
- Official Minecraft site: https://minecraft.net/
- Pocket Minecraft for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mojang.minecraftpe&hl=en_GB
- Pocket Edition for iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/minecraft-pocket-edition/id479516143?mt=8
- Stampy Longnose YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/stampylonghead
- Recipe guide: http://www.minecraftcrafting.info/
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