Minecraft is a in-development Indie game, created by Notch, I.e. Markus Persson.
In the games online "Creative mode" Players can use a wide assortment of basic blocks to construct anything you can imagine. The blocks, representing various materials, such as dirt, rock, cobblestone, cloth, bushes, logs, planks, brick, iron, glass, ect, can be combined in limitless ways to make anything and everything. From MASSIVE pixel artistry to real structures and items.
The Constantly updated and expanded Alpha game will set you back 10 Euros, Or about 14$. Every day it is updated and improved with some new feature or bug fix. Soon Notch will even be implementing Multiplayer for this Survival game mode. On Fridays, He adds new "Secret" features, leaving hints, while the community rushes to discover what's new. And this last week he released an offline client for playing the game on your desktop.
So what's the Alpha gameplay about? Well, your player starts in a randomly generated world, that is 2X large than the surface area of planet earth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NszGurDU ... r_embedded
Flyover of a typical - Alpha mode map
From there, you do what you want. Fashion crude tools from wood, to facilitate your ability to mine. Create a castle from excavated stone, live deep underground with the flows of lava and veins of Diamond. Or travel from continent to continent, fighting mobs of terrible monsters. Herd pigs and sheep, go spelunking in vast cave systems, or build a massive underground city. Or one that hangs in the sky, whichever you prefer really.
In Alpha survival you craft tools and items that allow you the cut trees, mine ore, dig holes, Fight monsters, and till earth for farming. Bows and arrows to defend your home, TNT, for quick mining, doors to keep the creatures out, chests to hold your treasure, Art to adorn your walls, signs for posting information, ladders to climb and descend, flint and steel to set fires, saddles for riding pigs, forges to smelt ores. Create miles of track and ride mine-carts through your cave systems or over land, down mountain slopes to the sea.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtlhZJi09TQ
Mine cart video
And torches to light your way in dark places.
One of the new updates added Items that allow for complex traps, with the use of "wires", levers, switches, buttons, pressure plates and more. Allowing you to open and close doors at a distance, lock monsters in traps, change track direction, and detonate TNT at a distance.
Using tools such as these, players have created infinitely looping roller coasters, Rock generating machines, complex traps for catching and killing livestock and monsters, and even basic computers and Logic Gates. But what Minecraft is really about, is building and exploring. The possibilities are nigh upon endless, limited only my your intelligence and creativity and perhaps persistence.
Check it out.
http://minecraft.net/