Danny, Tamoor and Mark are in Germany as I write, leaving me to sulk bitterly and curse their Gamescom-attending hides. While they wander about Cologne gawking at underwhelming console games and stuffing over-sized bratwurst suggestively into their mouths, I’m going to tell you a little bit about what I’ve been up to. “Avoiding working on CG,” I hear you chorus? Very funny. Now shut up.

In between stints of Starcraft II (and boy, have I been playing a lot of Starcraft II), I’ve spent my downtime playing Minecraft. Citizens may well recall that I’m the resident PC aficionado here at CG, as indicated by my constant utterance of the phrase “PC Gaming is best” at the slightest provocation. Well, now I’ve got proof.

Totally the kind of game you should let your depressed little brother play.

Developed by Markus “Notch” Persson (ongoing since early 2009, the game is still technically in Alpha), Minecraft is essentially a building game, the environments randomly generated each time you play. You can dig dirt, mine materials and erect mighty structures in a seemingly endless sandbox. Oh, and it looks like this:

Beautiful, no?

It’s a wonderful, blocky, pixelated paradise that you can reshape as you see fit. The world is comprised entirely of blocks that can be dug up and repositioned, or used to make other blocks. So, for example, knocking down a few wooden blocks will let you turn them into plank blocks that can in turn be used to make benches, walls, and even (once they’ve been crafted further) into tools. You can mine stone for walls, coal to help make torches and even iron and gold. As a child I was hopelessly obsessed with Lego and Minecraft scratches a similar itch. It is, at its heart, a game about putting different blocks together to make whatever your imagination has conjured up, and it’s brilliant.

The game also has an amazing, incredibly active community behind it. For example, check out some of the insanely complex block arrangements that players have used to sculpt images over at the Minecraft Museum. The likes of towering Marios, impossible skyscrapers and giant scale model Humvees can be found within its image archive. Persson keeps a regularly updated blog on the development of the game and there’s a massive forum and wiki behind that too.

Minecraft comes in a couple of flavours right now. Sign up at the game’s website and you can play a version of it in your browser. If you feel like supporting an indie developer you can pre-purchase the game now and get a downloadable version to play on your PC that includes a host of other features. It’s currently priced at just under €10/£9 and gets regular weekly updates that add improvements and tweaks for free. And there’s multiplayer to boot. The finished game will be on sale for €20, whenever it happens to be done.

It’s well worth checking out, a perfect way to lose an hour or four in a laid-back manner. Down the line, when the game’s multiplayer becomes a tad more stable, I’ll be looking into setting up a Citizen Game Minecraft server. In the meantime, why not join the CG Minecraft group?

Barry White