I paid Notch for the privilege of playing his wonderful game shortly after Penny Arcade did a couple of strips about it. The game is electronic crack, the best / worst kind of habit-forming drug since WoW, and a lot cheaper.
The first world I played in, I built myself a tower. A fucking
tower. It rose gracefully into the sky, higher and higher with each passing day. But every morning, there were creepers waiting on my front lawn--giant, green, exploding cocks with
faces, for Christ's sake--just
waiting to destroy my stronghold. At least two of them every morning. Eventually, I grew tired of filling in the craters and repairing the damage, so I built myself a perimeter fence and grew quite adept at killing the motherfuckers while standing well behind it. I eventually drove the bastards away, but the game had a cruel twist of fate in mind for me: as I was mining out a stone cliff face for more cobblestone with which to build my ziggurat, Minecraft froze, and when I restarted it, it spawned me inside of the solid rock I'd just spent most of an hour demolishing. I tried to dig my way out, but digging was futile. When I died, all my gear was left inside the mountain. If some forgiving quirk in the game physics forced it out, I was never able to find it.
And the sick part is? That only made me want to play
more!
and playability
I mean - you can just pick up minecraft and start playing
whereas DF requires a unix style manual
I suppose. I kinda forgot about that after I memorized the DF controls, but yeah that's a major problem too. I kinda wonder what the turndown rate is on DF. Probably something like Graphics > Controls > HOW DO I BUILD A GODDAMN BED > Death and mayhem.
Agreed. I tried to pick up Dwarf Fortress a while back, but I realized ten episodes into a fifty video plus length YouTube tutorial that I had no idea what the hell I was doing. It wasn't just the ASCII graphics that soured me on DF; I could have gotten past that if the game's learning curve wasn't quite so steep.