Minecraft Mining Straight Into Your Pocket

With all the success the PC indie-hit Minecraft has had, it's a wonder this hasn't happened sooner, but nonetheless, it happened: Minecraft is now available for all Android devices.

For those unfamiliar to Minecraft, brace yourselves for a wall of text:

Minecraft is a block-based game, similar to your childhood memories of building with Legos; everything is block oriented, from the dirt you walk on to the clouds gently moving over the landscape. Two goals exist, with separate game modes accompanying them. Creative mode allocates infinite resources to the player, allowing them to build to their heart's content, whatever that may be. Survival mode presents the challenge of surviving, as the name implies. With the recent update to 1.8, hunger has been added into the management of the player, giving a new dimension to worry about.

Many creatures exist in the Minecraft world, also presented in a block-esque art style; unfortunately at the moment, they're nonexistent on the mobile version, but hopefully Notch (creator of Minecraft) will be kind enough to Android users to add them in later. The creatures, or "Mobs" (short for mobile), are used as resources along with normal blocks, with items such as leather or wool from cows and sheep. Once the sun goes down in Minecraft's 10 minute day, hostile mobs such as zombies and animated skeletons start to spawn, and attack any player in sight. Hostile mobs generally provide resources for weapons, such as gunpowder and arrows.

Unique to Minecraft is its continuous updates from Notch; as the game is currently in Beta, Notch continuously adds new features to Minecraft, such as the Nether, a different dimension used for fast-travel. More recently, the addition of Strongholds and Abandoned Mineshafts have been added, giving a new adventure-oriented goal (hence the name "Adventure Update")

Surrounding Minecraft's development is the ever-growing fanbase; many Internet memes have spawned up from Minecraft, mostly involving the signature creeper, known for its destructiveness.

Whenever you see one of these green monstrosities, in the game or in real life, RUN. As the creeper gets closer, it lets off its signature "HISSSSSSSS", which is followed by a TNT-sized hole in the ground, or your creation.

Despite being made completely out of blocks and having a sort of childlike appeal, Minecraft can be surprisingly terrifying at times; walking around underground is made much more frightening when the dynamic light system cancels out all light except the faint orange glow of your torches. I've probably jumped out of being scared in Minecraft more than any movie I've seen, and the objective of those movies is to scare you. Something about being all alone and vulnerable in the middle of the Earth just gets to you...

Later in 2011, Minecraft is also being released for the Xbox 360; despite being made out of simple blocks with pixelated graphics on them, Minecraft actually requires a decent PC to run it, leading many of the wannabe player being unable to have access to Minecraft. Hopefully it will be more similar to the PC version than the mobile version is; the mobile version only has a creative mode currently, with a few survival elements such as ladders added in.