Nope, that’s it. I have crossed the valley of sanity and gone into the land of the mental. Last week it was the most profitable game of all-time, and this week it is the second most owned game of all-time, right behind Tetris. What will I do next week, review the ability to breathe? Seven out of ten, it would have been better if there wasn’t a load of pollution and a pandemic around making it needlessly difficult to just survive on an inhospitable rock endlessly falling through space.

Speaking of inhospitable masses of landscapes that hate you and all your artistry, Minecraft. I don’t know whether to yell about it overtaking my life when I introduced my dad to it or speak about that time I first saw it, fell in love myself, and continued to play it for several hours until I went blind. It is arguably one of the most, and brace yourself because I’m about to get on one of those game reviewer tropes and wear it like a hat, “transformative” games of the last 20-years. It not only innovated what a majority of the games being developed and released were, but it also changed the landscape of gaming and entertainment as a whole.

Minecraft‘s success is thanks to word-of-mouth. However, standing at the right moment in history, it not only got the playground word-of-mouth these previous hit cultural icons got: it had the whole internet. Like most, I would learn of this ugly pixel-based looking hellscape of hatred from some targeted video recommendation on a site you might have heard of, called YouTube. I don’t even know the specific video that got me, I can’t remember the YouTuber either. Quite frankly, I don’t care; they are probably on some kind of register or support Nazis now anyway. I just saw this magical little town of blocks a group of people had made from nothing, it was unlike anything else.

The world of online video games passed me by, and still does thankfully enough. I’ve made it clear several times with anecdotal tangents. I prefer the style of co-op where you can punch someone for cheating or attempt murder on a sibling for stealing your gold. So to think several people from across the planet had come together to create a town, an actual town with little buildings to impersonate shops for each person to buy and sell things to other players and colorful houses that would show everyone’s personality, it was simply weird. I can’t even remember the exact time frame because part of me remembers 1.6 so well, but I know this YouTube thing came from 2012, which would be version 1.2 or 1.3.

This (of course) was the height of when I was enjoying Minecraft, and I’ve dropped in and out over the years since. However, it was around 2016 and 1.9 I really fell out with it, about the time I introduced it to my dad. If I fell in hard, I don’t want to know what my dad has done. He’s still in that honeymoon period and will not let go no matter how much I’ve tried to pry it from him. I’ve introduced him to two games, Minecraft and Satisfactory, both games I love and he’s already played them for hundreds of hours more than I have. Why am I telling you this? He’s not the type of person who would play a Dark Souls, Yakuza, Metal Gear Solid, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Watch Dogs, or any other game.

Minecraft is one of those games you could drop someone with almost no knowledge of gaming into, and they’ll eventually fall in love. Sure the tutorial is non-existent, but once it gets dark and the angry bushes come running at you, you learn pretty fast. Eventually, he’s gone deeper and deeper into the game, continues to watch far too much of it. He even fell backward into the land mods. It has gotten to the point where I, the one that introduced him to the bloody game, has to ask “What’s that?” with the confusion of a stupid and skepticism that it is in fact vanilla Minecraft.

My sweet spot was back in that 1.6-era of the game, a simpler time. Now the nether is filled with even more hatred of your existence, Ariel has new friends, and now there are radioactive squid in cliffside caves. No wonder I am always confused when I see the game. Though the updates might be at a slightly slower rate, they are still regular enough that I am lost five years on. I did recently return, as I regressed into my basic instinct to be a bit creative and take on stupid projects. My most recent one is something not exactly like the US Capitol, but close enough that I can do underground tunnels and a massive dome.

I’ll never finish it, of course. I might have high ambition with the project, but I don’t have the time to finish it anytime soon. I think that’s where the game succeeds in one of its best forms; if you want to do something stupid and create a massive building, you can. Even if that required what can only be described as a metric ton of TNT to blow an enormous hole in the ground for foundations. Of course, you can do so in creative mode.

For years, I’ve played the game as normal in the survival mode, but I just didn’t feel like doing that this time. As I said, the project isn’t exactly a small one. Most of my creations in survival tend to be cave systems with little underground villages, as I’ve done and tried to do several times over. I enjoy those villages, I cherish all the little ideas of bringing the outer worlds to my evil underground layer fitted with the most evil of things, a tube station to quickly get around. I’ve done it so many times I’ve run out of creative ideas for that style of building which I enjoy.

That is where I find my issue with Minecraft, for all that is said of my love, it has never died or moved on. No matter what the game is, be it a Yakuza, Metal Gear, or even Grand Theft Auto until the most recent one, at some point the populous moves on. I think it is more indicative of the industry overall having a desire to keep you playing and consuming for longer, hence the length of games getting longer and longer. The problem I find with that is I’ve often found myself jaded on the games that do this. Grand Theft Auto V, sports titles (FIFA & Madden), and yes, even Minecraft.

If you are going to play it, I’d suggest the Bedrock Edition. As anyone who has ever tried to code will tell you, if you code in javascript, you are an idiot! It (Bedrock Edition) simply runs better, is being supported more by the team behind it, and is naturally better in every way. “Oh, but mods!” I don’t care unless you are talking about the mining turtles because they were fantastic. Otherwise, let’s all just take a break from it, recharge creatively, and move on. At the very least so I can stop hearing about it for several months.

It is either that or we make stupid things like 1:1 scale model Hogwarts (I hear they don’t poo on the floor anymore) and other model railway-style projects that make us endlessly boring.

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Minecraft

$26.99

9.5

Score

9.5/10

Pros

• Near endless creativity.
• Sometimes interactions with the angry bush monsters are funny.

Cons

• Bedrock Edition's microtransactions.
• The Java Edition runs like thick soup.