Like most of the inter­net, I have been obsessed with a quirky lit­tle game called Minecraft. I have lost count­less hours to this game build­ing shel­ters, explor­ing cave sys­tems, and fight­ing against the mon­sters that come out at night. It’s truly a remark­able game that deserves a lot more praise.

Here are the Cliffnotes. Minecraft is…

• A sand­box game which allows play­ers to build con­struc­tions out of tex­tured cubes in a 3D world
• Set in an infi­nitely large world
• A world that allows you to build the most intri­cate struc­tures you can imag­ine out of sim­ple blocks
• Updated almost every week by its cre­ator Notch (Markus Persson)
• Both sin­gle­player and multiplayer
• Pro­foundly addictive

That’s all nice and dandy, but I think the best way to let you get a taste of a game is through a short game­play video…

Before I cut this off, I feel it’s impor­tant to men­tion that this game is still in the alpha stage. There are bugs, glitches, and crashes. How­ever, the don’t detract from the fun expe­ri­ence of play­ing the game at all, and buy­ing the game is still a good invest­ment. Notch will con­tinue to develop the game, and early pro­jec­tions place the game’s com­ple­tion some­time in the fall of 2011. You can play it now though!

Also worth not­ing is the player base. From my expe­ri­ence, play­ers are actu­ally in the 18–30 range, which is sur­pris­ing con­sid­er­ing how child­ish the game looks. Please don’t judge Minecraft until you have had a chance to play it. Here, try the clas­sic ver­sion for free.

You can buy Minecraft Alpha for around $13 right now. Exchange rates may change in the future.

Gam­ing Heav­ens also runs a vanilla Minecraft sur­vival server. If you’re inter­ested in that, the con­nec­tion IP is gamingheavens.com.