Minecraft

Another photograph from near the Nanaimo River. We'll probably venture farther afield later in the week, but it was still a little warm today and we went for a long walk yesterday. Today's picture-taking was more experimental, since it was somewhere I'd previously already taken lots of pictures, so less of it worked, but I got a few neat effects.

The theme of this vacation seems to be Minecraft, a game that I've been avoiding since I really don't have enough time to explore and play it to its full potential. This remains the case even though I bought a copy, but I like supporting neat ideas. It's unfortunately pretty badly buggy on my laptop (and I really dislike the requirement for the Sun JDK, since I'm trying to switch completely to OpenJDK), so I may not play much while on vacation and wait until I'm home to poke at it some more.

But I'm finding that it's more fun currently to watch other people play than to play myself. Since there are two other Minecraft games going on at the moment, that provides lots of interesting things to look at and speculate about. I really like the way the crafting system works in the game and the complexity of it. I'm the sort who is looking things up on-line, but I'm watching other people play who like discovering everything for themselves.

It's really an excellent game if you like the free exploration sort of thing. I'm not as sure on playing it on non-Peaceful mode yet, where there are hostile enemies and one has to keep things well-lit, but I haven't played it much myself so far and may change my mind.

I doubt anyone reading this hasn't already heard of it, but if you haven't and you like exploration and construction games, take a look. (And most people don't seem to be having as much trouble on Linux as I do.)