The State of Minecraft

It's been a long run for Minecraft and it's still kicking. I had expected the game to have already been long dead after 1.00 yet it keeps getting updates and bug fixes. Some of the newest updates have really added some game changers to Minecraft. First of all, the villages have been given a nice work-over. Villages now come with iron golems that protect the village. Villagers now have children and repopulate the town. They will also move into new buildings as the player makes them, which makes for a great time waster. Second we have new mobs and biomes that make the game more interesting. The jungle biome being the newest addition adds ocelots which can be tamed. When tamed, the ocelots become house cats that will sit on your furniture and be a nuisance.

The villages are one of my favorite things in Minecraft these days. You can build  houses, shops, or anything you can imagine and villagers will occupy the buildings. I have started a project to make a somewhat advanced city for them in hopes to modernize their living situation. I also heard that in the next updates to come we will finally get to trade with villagers! One of the other things I really enjoy in Minecraft these days is multiplayer. Multiplayer has gotten a lot better, whether it be bug fixes, optimization, or just more user friendliness, it has certainly been changed for the best.

Some of the more recent updates include the new height limit, which makes the buildable area of the world twice as high as before. With the new height limit there have been some amazing new buildings made. New chat features such as link sharing also make the multiplayer experience more fun as well. New decoration blocks such as smooth sand-stone blocks and creeper sand-stone blocks have made an appearance as well. All in all Minecraft has improved greatly since official release and continues to get better. With the upcoming mod api I'm excited to see what cool new game experiences awaits us!

You can view all the changes to Minecraft at the following link: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Version_history

Minecraft 1.0.0

With minecraft 1.0.0 out there hasn't been many changes to the game except enchanting and breeding animals it seems. I was really hoping for more from the game but it seems like mojang just wanted to get the game over quickly so they could work on their other project scrolls. Mojang has stated that they plan to continue working on minecraft, but whether they will add new content or not has yet to be confirmed. On the upside of things, because of the official release modders can now work on their mods without worrying about updates all the time so we can finally have some good updated mods for the new version. unfortunately mojang has yet to implement the modding api they promised earlier this year. This makes it hard for modders to make content that could potentially work with the server version of minecraft and instead modders must force the minecraft user to download the mod to use it on a server assuming the server is running the mod. Although there are many useful and fun plugins for bukkit, a modded server version of minecraft, plugin creators are still very limited in what they can make for the game. If a proper api was in-place there would be unlimited potential for minecraft as a sandbox game.

What I always loved about minecraft was the building aspect, when I first tried the game I knew this was the game I would play for a long time, I am a big fan of sandbox games and especially when you can build the content for the game, that is even better. Minecraft started out very simple, a square limited level with small mounds of grass, then it got caves and lakes, then oceans and new items and weapons and tools. then new animals and monsters and new worlds and finally dragons. As fun as minecraft has been to me, it has started to dull very quickly and I feel that minecraft has gone in a bad direction it trys to be an rpg game but it's really just suppose to be a building game. It always was, I don't know what changed it but minecraft is a shadow of what it was before.

Here is what I think of the released version of minecraft:
Gameplay: 7/10
Story: 4/10
Graphics: 3/10
Replay Value: 10/10

Overall: 6/10
Minecraft has quite a way to go before I can consider it a finished game. At least we can play some mods while mojang gets it's act together.