Minecraft - Worth a second look

If you are like me, the first time you saw Minecraft, the first thing you thought was, what the fuuuu....?
It's no surprise, given that the game makes Paper Mario look like Fallout 3 by comparison.

I downloaded it on the advice of a friend, and was almost ready to give him a serious tongue lashing. The "game" made no sense at all. I had nothing in my inventory, and I was wandering around in a landscape that looked like some cubist painter's nightmare gone wrong.

I gave up on it totally, and it was literally months later that a different friend told me about this awesome game he was playing where he chopped down trees with his bare fists like Chuck Norris and built a castle from stones he pilfered from a mountain he tore down to ground level.
I had to know, and NOW, what awesome game would allow you to do such epic acts of epicness.
I was absolutely floored when he said "Minecraft, where have you been, under a rock?"

Apparently, I had, because I didn't realize that the game I had dismissed only a few months before had become an internet sensation, and was one of the coolest things since sliced awesome on toast.

I dashed to my computer and started loading the amazingly small program. At his instructions, I hammered a few trees down with my fists, broke them into lumber, built a workbench, and started making tools that would quickly start me down the road to conquering my own blocky universe... well, that was until night fell.
He instructed me to tunnel a hidey-hole into the mountainside and with the dim light of a torch just outside my meager structure, I waited as hordes of zombies, skeletons, and weird lumpy aliens wandered around, looking for me!

Fast forward to a few weeks later and I was a Minecraft junkie. I had gone places and done things that my friends were scarcely aware you could do, like build transparent towers of glass and create elegant waterfall elevators that reached above the clouds. Additionally, I had figured out how to mod textures and the resolution of the game textures. Not satisfied with the amazing texture packs out there, I had to make my own, and had become a bit obsessive over making the textures look as real as I could.

In retrospect, I have to say that Minecraft is one of the most amazing games I have ever played, though I am not sure that "game" is quite an appropriate moniker for it.  I think "creativity engine" is probably more appropriate.  I find myself reminded of many happy childhood hours of time traveling adventures with Lego blocks, and the inner kid in me delights. However, Minecraft is hardly just a bunch of digital building blocks, it is a universe of unexplored possibilities!  And unlike the tedious dungeon grinds of World of Warcraft, Minecraft's unscripted world, simple as it is, truly engages me.