And she fell down into the big Underground....

Lately, I've been playing Minecraft. A lot. When my husband first showed me the game, I thought it was meh, but once I tried it myself, I found it very addicting. The graphics and gameplay are simple, and there is literally no story, dialogue, or (if you in multiplayer mode) combat. All you do is dig. And build your ultimate _________ (<--- Insert whatever you've always wanted to build here).

If you are in single player mode, the concept is simple. You start out somewhere on a randomly generated landmass, with nothing in your inventory. You must find shelter and a light source before nightfall, because soon the monsters will be out. This comic from Penny Arcade best describes the early stages of the game to me.

After a while, I kept deleting and restarting my single players saves because I wanted a landscape that was inspiring and really would challenge me to build something fantastic. When I loaded this world in, I was wowed from the start and have been in love with it ever since. However, being in the shade from the cliffs and grotto means that I have to deal with more monsters than usual, and I have died several times.

Last night, a friend of mine from lotro and I received an invite to play on another lotro friend's multiplayer Minecraft server. We checked it out, and have decided that multiplayer is much more fun than single player. Sure, the game is still in alpha, so the multiplayer mode doesn't at this point have all the functions that single player does, but the general concept is still there. I found it much more fun building things when other people could see what I was building and not only admire them, but offer advice, make their own modifications, and such.

Theories and I are in the process of building a gigantic fortress - which, due to a lack of knowledge about where the rest of the players had started building, is VERY far away from everything else, but we are okay with that. The friend who invited us built a massively long bridge/highway from their village to our fortress, so now we at least know how to get to them if they need us, or we need them. Multiplayer currently has no monsters though, so unless we are suffocating under a pile of sand and need to be dug out, that won't really be an issue....