Adventures in Minecraft 360

It's been a long time since I last posted, so I wanted to write about the most recent game I found on XBLA.

Minecraft!

I have been looking forward to this, ever since Tobuscus started making Minecraft gameplay videos (His first video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVAcd-ffIMg) where he has adventures in WorldBuscus. Anyway, that's how I started learning about the game, and it's a good way to waste an hour or two. And also a good distraction from writing this post.

So, I just started playing Minecraft, this being my first time actually playing, and I want it recorded for future generations so they can learn from my many, many... many mistakes. Seriously, at one point I left my house and I fell onto Creeper (I fell down the ladder to my house) and his friend caught me by surprise, killing me, and destroying my poor house in the process.

Let me walk you through my unfortunate first few hours of the game.

So I started on Peaceful, because I wanted to get a feel for the game. And it was good, for a while. But, it turns out, that I picked the only mountain in the game which was nowhere near a single block of coal or iron. And. as I found out in a very unfortunate accident, very close to a pool of lava. Seems I wasn't ready for peaceful...

Sometime later, after mastering the controls, and my urges to swim in lava, I had built another House on the highest point of the map, it was intended to be my own version of Mount Olympus, I even brought water and tilled earth to grow my own crops up there. I was, and still am proud of my creation. From there, I could see most of the Surface-World and the lights of the random torches I placed across the world.

It was going well. So I got bored...

I decided that moving up to easy would be a good idea to help keep my interest. You have to take your time on things like this. I started a new World, and built a new house before nightfall, (complete with windows!) still unable to find coal once again, probably because I was cooking some windows, instead using cacti as a barrier vs. Creepers and hid in my dark and lonely wooden hut. What fun that was, but we've all done it, right? The cacti were effective though, at times they were even keeping me away from the house. And for the first few days I felt kind of safe. This is where I decided to move houses, and I built one above ground, so that I needed a ladder to reach it. That's where it started to go wrong. I should have stayed with my friendly neighbourhood cacti friends, because this is when I fell from the ladder and met my new Creeper friend...

For any beginners out there, I have three basic Rules that I hope will help keep you alive longer. Just a shame I forget about them...

Rule One: Check your surroundings before you open the door. I cannot stress this enough. It may be that I'm just unlucky, but it seems that everytime I leave the safety of my house, there is always a Creeper, or a skeleton just hanging out by the cacti, waiting for me. Granted, it did get better once I made torches, but still, I think the game is out to get me.

Rule Two: Never underestimate the power of shutting the door behind you. I won't go into that, just trust me.

And finally, Rule Three: Make sure it's definitely Day Time before leaving the house. No amount of torches or cacti defenders will help if a Creeper decides he doesn't like your face.

If you ever thought before that you wanted to see what all the fuss was about with Minecraft, the Xbox version is great, but as development started months ago, Notch (the creator) and Mojang (the developers) haven't been able to keep the Xbox version the same as the current PC version, so there are some differences. I do recommend this game for Xbox though, as there will be updates soon, and even though it isn't fully up to date yet, I've still wasted most of my last few days playing Minecraft. There's always something to do, and it can keep even the most easily distracted occupied for days at a time.

Happy Gaming!
Oli