Minecraft To Officially Launch 11/11/11 235
tekgoblin writes "Minecraft has currently sold about 2 million copies and it's still only in beta. However, the developers have just announced that the game will officially launch on 11/11/11. The date 11/11/11 was actually chosen because it falls on the same date as other various game releases, the most notable being Skyrim."
Ah yes.... (Score:3)
It seems Slashdot currently has currently first class editing :)
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oh.... well now it's not funny.... they fixed it
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No, I haven't bothered to look it up, why would I?
Your post is useless and so is mine.
Which date? (Score:5, Funny)
Is that mm/dd/yy or dd/mm/yy?
I wouldn't want to get my dates mixed up.
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Obviously it's yy/mm/dd! Were you raised by wolves or something?
Re:Which date? (Score:5, Insightful)
I like the European date format. dd/mm/yy makes sense, since it goes from the smallest time frame (days), to the largest. The American format seems silly.
- PS: I'm American.
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I still prefer reading them in that order. Broadest timescale to most precise.
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Well, to me, YYYY/MM/DD is the only format that is equally easy to understand for people all over the world. Without knowing where I'm from, it's almost impossible to know which date I'm talking about when I say something will happen on 09/11/2011. On the internet, this gets confusing rather quickly.
The date format is the only one I'm aware of that's commonly used where the largest unit doesn't come first (in writing). Let's try that with two others:
- time: 12 minutes and 13 seconds past 9 --> 13:12:9 fo
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Just see the millions, thousands and ones as different units.. he just put the largest unit at the back, and the smallest one either at the front (European) or in the middle (American)
Sure, it makes no sense to anyone with a bit of a brain. The same thing goes for both date formats! I say we should all move to YYYY-MM-DD, the iso standard. Barring that, at least have the size units in proper order, DD/MM/YYYY. Either way, two-digit years are sooooo 99. Srsly.
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It's just a habit. I live in Europe but I use the yyyy/mm/dd for my photography collection exactly because it is always sorted correctly. As a result I read yyyy/mm/dd just as easily as dd/mm/yyyy, I only get confused with people use the irritating mm/dd/yyyy or some other variant.
Just because you're not used to it doesn't mean it isn't "human readable".
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For the record, I'm from Germany where we use DD.MM.YY. For me, dot-separaton implies that ordering, dash-separation implies ISO 8601 ordering and slash-separation implies the weird
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Makes sense. That's my format of choice for anything that needs a date in a filename. Anything else (honestly) just seems stupid and backwards. I Hi-Five those wonderful forward thinkers of Mandarin Chinese!
Re:Which date? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know you're joking but....
I like the European date format. dd/mm/yy makes sense, since it goes from the smallest time frame (days), to the largest. The American format seems silly.
- PS: I'm American.
Agreed, but it would also make even more sense to do it big endian, that way it's in line with how we notate time ie; YYYY/MM/DD/hh/mm/ss.
Re:Which date? (Score:5, Insightful)
And YYYY/MM/DD sorts very nicely.
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Here in sweden this is the most common format when year is included:
YYYY-MM-DD
Which is also the ISO standard for dates.
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Since Japanese specifies the type of number even in dates, you never have any doubt about whether that number is a day or month or year anyways...
Btw, the official ISO date format also is yyyy-mm-dd, which I switched to for any communication. Since the colon is only used for this format as a separator, there's no ambiguity.
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Don't give the Japanese too much credit: in dates the year used is often the year of the emperor's reign. For instance, this year (2011) is Heisei 23, whereas I was born in Showa 38 (1963). This is still extremely common, although they recognize our system of years as well.
Almost as horrible as their "system" of numbering houses and naming streets (i.e. most streets have no names, and houses are sometimes numbered based on when they were built, not on their location).
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Everyone on the planet should switch to GPS + relative-to-oceans-altitude coordinates for addresses.
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Actually, the date format used by most seems silly. Best Date format is yyyymmdd hh:mm:ss It doesn't need fixing for anything. You need to shorten it, you can cut off end bits as needed and it still is readable. You can take out all the punctuation that makes it readable and it is just as valid. You can strip bits easily. You can sort it.
My $.02
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This is still weird format. Using Unix time is much more rational. It is based on the SI unit of time, the second. It avoids the ugly mix of archaic Babylonian base sixty number system and decimal one.
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Unix time isn't just rational. It's an integer!
Leap seconds (Score:3)
Using Unix time is much more rational. It is based on the SI unit of time, the second.
The UNIX timestamp is based on UTC. UTC [wikipedia.org] is based on atomic time plus an offset to keep the Prime Meridian facing the Sun every 86400 seconds. Earth days are slightly longer than 86400 seconds, and UTC is periodically adjusted to match the planet's actual rotation by adding leap seconds (e.g. 23:59:60) [wikipedia.org]. Such a leap second has the same UNIX time as the second after it. So yes, a split into day and second can be justified.
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But Unix time is defined as having exactly 86400 seconds in a day. No more, no less. Leap seconds cannot be represented, which makes this format unacceptable for any serious long-term use. But that probably doesn't matter since time_t is going to overflow in 2038 anyway. If the Mayan end-of-epoch in 2012 or the Apophis asteroid in 2036 don't destroy us first...
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define 'most'....afaik yyyymmdd is used in China, for example...that's 1/5 of the population...I hear Japan uses that too, so that's ~1/5...
ah, I see this has already been documented to some degree of accuracy : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country [wikipedia.org] : DMY is 3200 vs YMD 1500
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Nobody expects the Canadian Inquisition!
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The best part is that a list of dates in the YYYYMMDD format, when sorted alphabetically, is automatically sorted by date.
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You could even eliminate the 'th'. In Dutch, we say "11 september" (we even eleminated a capital there).
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While it makes sense, in the long run having the month first helps with planning things. Often things have a firm deadline by the month, but the actual day on which it is finished in the month is very flexible. For historical dates, except in rare instances, months are accurate enough to follow what happened so long ago (and often so are years). Being as specific as listing the day is pedantic in most cases, particularly after the fact.
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It is also a lot more useful for expansion.
You know, in short-term scheduling, you need the day only. So you can write "on the 12." - but then when you need to be more specific, you simply expand that to "on the 12.5." - you add more detail as required, and you always add in the same way (at the end).
It's logically consistent. Then again, maybe I just think so because I'm European.
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The yyyy-mm-dd makes more sense because chronological order matches alphabetical order.
And that's just convenient.
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And it is also the one used in databases AFAIK.
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I'm Canadian and I always use day, month, year.
Of course we use mostly metric up here, maybe its another metric VS imperial thing...
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I like using ISO formatting for dates YYYY-MM-DD. Then again, I'm a programmer.
But I was curious about date formats. I knew Wikipedia would have some insight [wikipedia.org]. They have an interesting global map of color coded countries that use one of the 3 formats (Y/M/D, D/M/Y, or M/D/Y).
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I like the European date format. dd/mm/yy makes sense, since it goes from the smallest time frame (days), to the largest. The American format seems silly.
- PS: I'm American.
While I completely agree with you on this one, I'm helpless when it comes to working with it. It's like customary vs. metric -- I can't think that way. Fahrenheit vs. Celsius, can't think that way. And yes, I think that logically Celsius makes far more sense.
The only way around such bullshit is to just teach the right way with the kids a
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mm/dd/yyyy goes from smallest to largest...
months are mostly single digit while days are generally double digit and years are generally put as 4 or 2 digits. So it's possible to cut off the leading zero without it looking weird: 4/17/11, etc.
That not looking weird is because of the slashes separating the fields. 41711 as a date would definitely look weird, whereas 17/4/11 doesn't.
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If you mean minutes by mm, then you are correct... if not, then I guess you got a pretty strange idea of small and large.
As far as I know (and probably the rest of the world with me), a day is shorter (or smaller, as you put it) than a month.
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"/" also can't be used in filenames
Re:Which date? (Score:5, Funny)
Is that mm/dd/yy or dd/mm/yy?
I wouldn't want to get my dates mixed up.
Huh? I thought 11/11/11 it was binary and I'd missed it by 1001 years and 11 months.
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Mr Bergis, is that you?
ISO 8601 (Score:2)
I'm disappointed with Slashdot. Every sane person writes dates in ISO 8601 format.
YYYY-MM-DD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 [wikipedia.org]
So, uh... (Score:2)
They're going to release it on Veterans' Day (Armistice Day, Remembrance Day)
This seems... odd.
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BMO
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It's also the opening of Karnival in Germany, Singles Day in China and Pepero (Pocky rip-off) day in South Korea. Non e of which seem to produce much on an outcry.
Could move it to the day before, but then you'd collide with Panama Independence day, Ataturk Rememberance day and the Heroe's day in Indonesia. And the day after is the death day of Cornelis Wreeswijk and Percival Lowell, and the Comoro islands joining the United Nations.
Point being, you can't really pick any day without it being significant in s
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It's also the opening of Karnival in Germany, Singles Day in China and Pepero (Pocky rip-off) day in South Korea. Non e of which seem to produce much on an outcry.
It's also Sint Maarten in the north of Netherland. How are kids supposed to be going around the neighbourhood singing songs for candy, knowing that a new game has just been released? Terribly insensitive.
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Not just any corduroy day -- but the most corduroy day in a CENTURY.
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They did the same with Call of Duty: World at War, I don't have too much of a problem with Minecraft being released on that date as it's really unrelated to war, but I felt the CoD: WaW stunt was a bit tasteless, 11/11 isn't something that should be trivialised as a marketing stunt for a game about war as it's frankly disrespectful.
Re:So, uh... (Score:5, Informative)
Nov 11 is a holiday in most of the western world, as it is based on the ending of WWI in 11/11/1918.
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you mean 1918/11/11
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>>Nov 11 is a holiday in most of the western world, as it is based on the ending of WWI in 11/11/1918.
But more importantly, it's the release date of Skyrim.
Let's just hope they've finally fixed the bugs from Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout, Fallout New Vegas...
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Back in the day, on my old TRS80 Model III (Score:2)
I would always enter 11/11/11 as the system date. (You would have to enter the date every time you restarted). I must have been psychic.
Someone better tell Bethesda (Score:2)
...to reschedule the Skyrim release date. It'll be a disaster going up against the sheer awesome firepower of Minecraft!
Skyrim Delayed -- Devs Playing Minecraft (Score:3)
I expect many fans of one game would enjoy the other. I'm more likely to buy Minecraft than Skyrim this year, but mostly because my desktop is old and feeble.
By the way, last time I looked at the Minecraft site, it had sold over a million licenses. Isn't that a colossal success already?
Obligatory XKCD (Score:2, Informative)
http://xkcd.com/861/
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Speaking of painkillers [blogspot.com]....
High on the Charts at Gamefaqs (Score:2)
So what did I already buy? (Score:2)
Also, is that whole thread-per-connection thing gonna be fixed before then? (Signs point to no, of course.)
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The alpha or the beta obviously.
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is that whole thread-per-connection thing gonna be fixed before then?
Without a proper select() that can wait for both events from sockets and events other than from sockets on Windows, what's the right way to handle multiple connections?
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Let's just all agree to have all important things fall on symmetrical dates. "On 5/5/2011, it will be a frigidly cold -40 degrees at 0 longitude. Ex-president Bush says this has him 'Literally Chuffed.'"
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Not even if you use antimatter?
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Isn't that terribly rude?
Why? It isn't like anyone owns that date. A large majority of people don't care about Minecraft or Skyrim anyway. I'm sure a bunch of numerologists have their own plans for that date.
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They've already sold an estimated $33 million worth of Minecraft with very little costs. Furthermore, nothing will actually change on release date; the game will be sold for the same price before and after that date. It's just a development milestone target. I don't think "suicidal" applies here.
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They've already sold an estimated $33 million worth of Minecraft with very little costs. Furthermore, nothing will actually change on release date; the game will be sold for the same price before and after that date. It's just a development milestone target. I don't think "suicidal" applies here.
What!? They promised me when I bought the beta that it was going to cost more when officially released! Those lying nordic scumbags!
I had fun with Minecraft for a month or so, then just stopped playing it. Don't know why. Maybe I'll check back on the official release date to see if they've made any interesting changes.
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They forgot.
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BMO
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No -- they just want their Trench Warfare bonus pack to be a nice surprise!
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Thankyou.
Worse yet... (Score:3)
Let's just home they get around to fixing bugs instead of shoveling features up until the last minute. I'm fear that clearly since they don't know what beta means (beta means you're done adding features and are now testing and buttoning up your code to prepare to ship) that shipped may be confused with "time to debug". Sigh... There are some seriously major architectural problems with the code and he's currently telling the community that certain single player features will never be implemented in multi-pla
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and I clearly can't spell to save my life tonight. grr again.
Re:Worse yet... (Score:5, Funny)
and I clearly can't spell to save my life tonight. grr again.
The comment must have been in beta.
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and I clearly can't spell to save my life tonight. grr again.
The comment must have been in beta.
Let's just hope he gets around to fixing spelling instead of shoveling paragraphs up until the last minute.
Re:Worse yet... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Worse yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
_Nobody_ knows what "beta" means any more.
To Microsoft it means "We really want to release this, but it's too buggy even for our standards, but here, we'll let you buy it anyway."
To Firefox it means, "Time to revamp the UI from the ground up."
To Google it means, "We've released it and we know it needs more work, but we're too busy working on our next beta."
To Slashdot it means "Beta? What's a beta? We just test everything new in production."
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Does anyone actually play minecraft?
Everyone I know freaking wet themselves over how amazing everything you could built in the game looked.
Then they played for a bit and realized that 98% of the cool things you've seen were created not by playing the game, but by using the world-editor.
Most of those people have since stopped playing it.
I bought the game ages ago. I dig it. I don't play it, though. Pretty much for the same reason and because while i like a sandbox, I like some sort of motivation which the ga
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Or you know, you could try to create cool things in the game, makes it quite interesting when you want a 2 cubic diamond block and you need to find, mine and keep all those resources. Then think 'may I should cover that in gold, and that in Iron.
Then try building mega structures when you have to mine out below and around them. You can do a lot of that cool stuff you see, its just harder, and more rewarding.
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interesting when you want a 2 cubic diamond block and you need to find, mine and keep all those resources. Then think 'may I should cover that in gold, and that in Iron.
You have a strange definition of "interesting".. Minecraft looks okay, but I'd be more interested in doing stuff like the rollercoasters or playing about with the physics stuff, rather than just building a big block.. to me the game looked like a 3D version of LittleBigPlanet (but with flabbergastingly shitty graphics).
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Re:Minecraft SUCKS! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure why this was modded insightful -- there's nothing insightful about it. It's either a blatant troll attempt (hey guys, I hate on the popular fads cause it makes me look superior!), or borne of complete ignorance.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that I was incredibly underwhelmed by Minecraft, but saying it has poor graphics is like saying your novel doesn't have enough pictures - Minecraft was never intended to look pretty, and if you went into expecting it to look pretty ... well, you're a fool.
Similarly, while the 'game' part of minecraft essentially boils down to crafting and a simple combat simulator, if you went into it expecting more than that, you must have been buying blind.
But if you want to see why Minecraft is as popular as it is, it's not hard. You just have to stop thinking of it as a game (because as a game, it is lacking), and more as a world where you can create something -- in that regard, it is much more akin to playing with legos ... with hostile critters.
It has a unique style that's easily recognizable, which makes parodies fun (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uyxVmdaJ-w). It can generate some interesting landscapes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwkVTuHcuHQ). And some people just enjoy making stuff (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOpkpW1tDAM).
I don't have the patience to make anything interesting, and got bored with it in about a week, but I can certainly see it's appeal.
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but saying it has poor graphics is like saying your novel doesn't have enough pictures
Spot on.
More to the point, I don't think it would work with better graphics - the whole point of the game is that the entire world is made of 1m3 blocks, and you can move any of them. Maybe the blocks could have hi-res textures when seen close up - but I suspect that would be incongruous. The 1980s computer game feel works for me (and things like square clouds, sun and moon match the completely whacky physics).
Its about time we had another game that makes good use of vast, stylized, pseudo-random worlds
-1: Attempts reverse psychology on the moderators (Score:2)
I wish this was a moderation option.
Re:Minecraft SUCKS! (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't get why Farmville is so popular. That truly sucks. In the space of a week, I managed to out-class all my Facebook friends who'd been playing it for years just by doing a quick bit of maths and working out how to make money. It was dull. Yet millions of people play it so often that I've had to remove its posts from my Facebook because of the spamming.
I don't get why WoW is so popular. I never hear anything but complaints about it, and certainly never play games on a subscription basis. And people still tell me they are pissing about £40-50 a month on the damn thing for years at a time.
I grew up with a ZX Spectrum. Maybe you're from a different era. Let me give you a hint. Graphics mean NOTHING. Not even worthy of mention. Not even an "it doesn't even look good", like that's the last saving grace of a crap game. If you count graphics in your evaluation of a game, you're the wrong target for most games. Hint: In a year's time, *every* game's graphics will look crap compared to today's. Does that mean the older games have somehow got "worse" without changing?
A game is either fun and absorbing or not. I spent most of last week playing Altitude (PC) and Batty (Spectrum) with my girlfriend. We didn't care that it wasn't 3D, or high-res, or anti-aliased. It literally did not factor in at all. We honestly spent more times looking at ZX Spectrum colour clash. Didn't mean we didn't enjoy it though. I don't think my girlfriend even noticed that the Spectrum *had* colour clash.
As for "not fun", no you don't see yourself laughing at it, or entertained. But what it does is absorb you. That's a really tricky thing to achieve in a game. Some games are endless restarts of the same chapter, but some manage to absorb you so much that you don't even realise that's what you're doing.
Minecraft is a sandbox game. It's about people building a little virtual world of their own like we were promised for the past 50 years. It's similar to the 3D Construction Kit "game" of many years ago - very few people can make something impressive but everyone enjoys having a go and making their virtual world, even if the graphics are atrocious by modern video card standards. That hardly matters - it's just fun to tinker. 3DCK was literally dithered polygons (and only about half-a-dozen at a time on the Spectrum!) when I first looked at it but immediately thought "whoa, that's something I want to tinker with". There was also something called VU-3D on the Spectrum. Go look it up. I spent hours tinkering with that. Not a "game" as such, in the same way that Minecraft isn't a game.
I play Minecraft - not masses but I've had a couple of long sessions on it, alt-tabbing back and forth between the Minepedia and the game. I actually prefer it without the monsters at night, which some would say is the only interaction in the game.
It's just nice to build a little world and explore it. I actually quite enjoy the times when I've done a big build job and my "character" walks out of the house, down to his little jetty that I made (deliberately facing West), gets in a boat and has a little paddle towards the sunset. And then he turns around, sees the distant light of his little home in the dusk and sculls back on home.
And more annoyingly, I keep finding myself thinking "if only you could craft X or collect Y" and wondering how to go about programming it (I have resisted the temptation to look at the code thus far and, anyway, my Java is rusty - if it's easy to add new things, I'll never escape the damn block-universe).
It doesn't matter how "fun" it is. Personally, I'm pissed off with Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 at the moment because of the constant restarts from checkpoints. The game is fun, when it flows and absorbs, but otherwise that's just a chore. Whereas Minecraft - you can even be "immortal" if you don't have the monsters at night or fall off a cliff (though finding string is always a problem then, which means my character can't fish from his
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It's complete crap. It's not fun. It doesn't even look good.
I'd post a witty reply to this blatant trolling, but I'm trying to build a glass tower underwater so I'm too busy collecting sand...
Thank you for letting me know that I'm not having fun, though.
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Well, I don't "pre-order" anything. But I played this game for more hours than I care to think of when I first saw it and thought "what's all the fuss about". Not so much a game as a sandbox-with-potential.
But the fact is that at no point did my computer struggle to run it. So it can't really be described as a resource hog. Yeah, the graphics aren't fabulous but I come from the ZX Spectrum era and have always held that that means nothing - and the point of the engine is that the graphics are crap to ena
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I crash out constantly. But then again I am connecting to a server on another continent. Lag seems to have a strange effect on the game, especially when multiple players are crafting and building things.
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