www.minecraft.net
Anyone else play? It's amazing how such a simple game with silly graphics can be so addictive. I play on a few servers and the wife and I each have our own private games going.
I think I love it because it's a zero-pressure, no win game. The only goal is to do what you want to do. You can be as ambitious as you want or you can just chill and relax. I play on peaceful so the monsters don't come at night for me (it can be terrifying in a cave, trust me) and I just explore. One night I just started looking around near 11pm. I found some caves and kept exploring and when I finally checked the clock, it was almost 6am.
Recently found this amazing cave system on my map that I still haven't completely mapped out. Takes a couple of minutes to walk across the main chamber and I've mounted almost 200 torches in it. It's so big that I'm actually going to install a large lava flow in it for added illumination.
Anyway, it's a really fun game, worth the $13 for sure. The story behind it is interesting as well- one guy did everything and he's made millions off it, $13 at a time. A couple of weeks ago he opened the servers up for free play when he was doing upgrades. When the servers came back up, 26,000 people paid for accounts and he's been doing over $100,000 a day ever since. Amazing. Rumor has it that he's going to form an actual small company to aide further development (the game isn't even in beta yet!). There's a very active community always coming up with neat hacks and add ons too.
I play a bit.. it's a cute game, but it has a ways to go before it's totally usable.
It's definitely good for some hilarity.
http://www.youtube.com/v/LnjSWPxJxNs
He announced changes for the halloween update. "smarter, harder monsters" sounds pretty bad, they tend to kick your ass now because they spawn and overwhelm in numbers, I don't need ones that think about it as well. Biggest bummer by far is that torches are no longer permanent- you can build lanterns but easy, infinite torches are one reason why exploring is so fun in this game. I switched over to harder difficulties to add some excitement but if torches expire in places like my massive cave (monsters can spawn in darkness only), it really limits your ability to do work. Also sucks for all the art servers out there that use thousands of torches for stuff.