Re-Minecraft

I'd given up my Xbox 360 addiction to Minecraft.

2 months ago I lost everything I had in the Netherworld, hunting down bits and pieces to create the newly created ending to Minecraft on the Xbox: fighting the Ender Dragon. I was nowhere near close enough, but I lost all my very labor intensive items and all that I had collected since I started working towards the end.

It was very easy to give up. I could move back to some of my back log of games. I could put some time into the harder mode of Batman: Arkham City, torture myself with more Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and try to enjoy some of the really awesome games released in Microsoft's Games for Gold program.

Then I got a paycheck that fills the coffers after our weird annual schedule that pays on December 1st and the 18th (instead of the 27th), creating a really long fiscal January. With that paycheck I fulfilled a work deal that said we'd all buy PC Minecraft and start a server. Well, I'm the only one who went through with it.

I don't like computer games. I hate using a mouse and keyboard to move and jump. I hate sitting in this chair (which I chose to be uncomfortable so I wouldn't spend hours sitting here). What I didn't realize is how quickly I would fall back into Minecraft's pixelated grip. I found a few servers online and tried them out, only to realized that most of them only give you resources to play the game if you partake in their voting system, creating accounts and pushing up the popularity of their servers. I just paid $36 for this game; I'm not wasting my time helping make someone else more money.

So I started a couple of maps on my computer and spend a little time here and there getting used to the new controls and tuning my computers settings to find a comfortable medium between good graphics and a useable frame rate, something I'm not used to having to do with a console like an Xbox.

I think what got me hooked again was my own experience in the Xbox version. I quickly built the important things; fences to keep in animals for health and bad guys out, mining for iron to quickly be ready if I found diamonds, using seeds and plants effectively with animals for luring and breeding, and the ever important cup for transporting water and lava.

The side benefit, and maybe the only real benefit, was my son checking things out and sliding a chair over next to me to watch and direct. I enjoyed explaining things to him and describing how the system worked. He quickly got the idea and helped me start constructing a system for catching zombie mobs: a border around my house of pressure plates and trapdoors that drop down to a tunnel system that filtered the baddies into my basement bad guy zoo. He was catching on quickly for a 5-year-old.