Minecraft

Minecraft is the sort of game where, from time to time, the people watching you play will ask questions like, "Did you just rain lava down upon your enemies?" or, "Why did you tear apart that mountain with your bare hands?"

The answers to those questions are, respectively, "yes," and, "because it got in my way." Yes, in Minecraft you can pick up lava in a bucket and pour it down on top of the monsters that are trying to eat your face. How satisfying is that? Also, you can literally move mountains, one piece at a time. Take that, mountain! That's what you get for standing between my base and the super-awesome floating island I want to build a castle on!

What, I didn't mention being able to build castles on floating islands? Or the fact that the procedurally generated maps are are about eight times the surface area of the Earth?

Seriously, the only thing this game lacks is magical dust that can only be obtained by mining rocks near the core of the planet. Oh wait, it's got that too!

Minecraft is, basically, a free-roaming adventure game. Currently the only goal is "don't die", but the game is still in alpha. And it can at times be a challenging goal, with zombies, skeleton archers, giant death spiders, and suicide-bombing mutated pig creatures all out to get you.

But what makes me love the game is the ability to freely build pretty much anything you want. Floating island castles are just the beginning. Massive complexes of mines are standard, they pretty much happen by default while you're gathering enough stone for all your other awesome constructions. And it's only natural to build an underground lair into these mines. I usually have several. Underwater bases are common and easy. My dream, as yet unrealized, is to build an underlava base deep near the core of the world.

You can craft a number of tools, plus weapons and armor. Different materials will give you better quality products, with wood or cloth being very low quality, stone and steel being in the middle, and the rare diamond being the top quality.

Basically, it's like everything you'd ever hoped Legos would be, in a video game. Go check out the free creative mode, with no enemies or crafting. And once you've done that, head over to Youtube and look up Minecraft Infdev.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go throw snowballs at pigs while planning out the best way to hollow out a mountain for my home.