I can hear you readers already. “But Connor! Minecraft’s been playable for more than a year!” That’s true, but on the 18th of November 2011, the game was finally moved from beta and “released”, and that is why I’ve chosen it as my game of this year.
I won’t patronise anyone by describing what Minecraft is in this post. Practically everyone who has logged onto the internet in the last year has heard of Minecraft. As of writing this, Minecraft has sold 4,256,559 copies (and I watched the number increase every few seconds).
Minecraft has come a long way. I’ve been a player since Alpha, when there were few features and many bugs. I still got many, many hours of fun out of it. Then the game progressed to beta. More features, still a lot of bugs. The game matured and evolved, with new things added every month or so. Now, the game that was released has a final boss, weapon and armour enchanting, alchemy, pre-built structures to discover and explore… The list of things to do is infinite, and that’s what draws people to Minecraft. The limitless possibilities.
I’m not much of a builder. In fact, the house I’m currently residing in is a very badly built, small wooden shack. I don’t care, because I’m never in my house. I’m busy adventuring. I’m out seeing the amazing, procedurally generated landscape and the wonders it holds. I’m busy exploring the deep underground caverns, the abandoned mineshafts; I’m far too interested in what the game builds than what I can build.
What makes Minecraft great is that is how I play it. Everyone plays Minecraft differently. Some don’t explore at all, they merely start with a flat world and build something amazing in creative mode. Some people do just enough to survive. Some people painstakingly mine to collect ores. Some people’s sole mission is to reach “The End” and defeat the boss. It doesn’t matter to me;I play my way, and that’s what makes Minecraft my choice for GOTY. The fact that I’ve been given the tools with which I can create my own style of play.
When I go home over the holiday season to visit my family, I’ll be taking my computer, where I can run a server for me, my sixteen-year-old sister and my nine-year-old brother to play together, where we build a town and explore together. We can spend hours in this new world that we can explore and build on as we please, and it’s the simple things like that which has made me choose to nominate Minecraft as the Press X or Die Game of the Year.
This was so close to being my pick. My reason for liking both it and Skyrim so much is basically the same: you can do whatever you want.
Skyrim has attack animations though. :P
minecraft is so fun… but it takes a lot of time