Minecraft 1.2.4

Oh it's sometimes interesting to play a piece of software and occasionally check the changelog/update-feed for it. It's not something I do often, but with a game like Minecraft, where updating means your cities crumble into the sea, and gargantuan monsters rise up from the deep, it's good to see what might happen. Sometimes it's pretty safe.

Mostly there's:

"Made cats more realistic (read: probably annoying). I hope it’s enough to cancel out any joy you may receive from the previous feature!"     Which refers mostly to people who ask that perennial question, 'What the fuck ever happened to minecraft?". One day there was a sort of infinite, digital lego set where skeletons and spiders and exploding quadropeds tried to destroy you  as you ran through caves looking for mushrooms and lava. Lava was the third or fourth most important resource, and invaluable for killing vast numbers of enemies, animals, and trees at once. That simplicity and accessibility would be missed in later installments. Enchant your shovel, enchant your pick-axe, at the expense of XP that should go into a skill tree. Enchanting should rely purely on free, arcane nonsense. (Or obsidian repeaters, or something that doesn't tie right into another half-assed feature). But I digress,  fight a blocky dragon far, far away from your own painstakingly built fortress. You'll never actually level up. The high score isn't e&3021 anymore. Now it makes no sense at all. You can do all kinds of things, avoid the ending of the game like a plague, and enjoy yourself. Following this story the past year and a half, there's still no real conclusion. A lot of things were thought up and implemented, some of the promise disappeared (as it should), and animals stopped spawning freely.  So much happened, in fact, that while I was checking Skyrim for typos, minecraft got above its own cloud layer (for the second time). Minecraft is the ghost of yesteryear that casts a long shadow, and with a new programming team may yet enter its golden age. People can only hope it will. It's still a very striking project, kind of sunk in self-importance and conceptualism, that could yet be worth the €10 anyone (nerdy enough) paid for it. Or not. My main impression of the story is that patience has been called for. After all, it takes patience to hollow out an entire mountain range and fill it with death traps and explosives. There's a lot of typos in Skyrim, by the way. They are especially noticeable in in-game literature. For reference, pure reference, there were almost no typos in Morrowind. However in Morrowind, with all its patches and expansions, there were some pretty damning bugs in scripting, &ct.