Minecraft, an immersive, mammoth, and substantially unforgiving survival/creativity sandbox game with one of the strongest fandoms in PC gaming history, has always been something of a strange beast for me in regards to its appeal.

Thanks to its XBox 360 release last May, this JAVA fueled juggernaut still isn't showing any signs of slowing down its locomotive-paced popularity, which began on PC in 2009 and now boasts over 30 Million registered users.

Unlike some of the other indie game success stories of this generation (Cave Story+, Torchlight, or even Braid), Minecraft brought along with it an unprecedented variety of reactions, the more vocal ones being: "What the hell am I looking at and where did this come from?". Even though many might argue we've seen elements of its gameplay or engine before, something so rich and cut out of seemingly whole cloth had never been dropped into our collective laps so discretely or unannounced before, and in that manner.

After roughly a year and a half of following Minecraft news and seeing that a "stable" or "release candidate" product was monetarily available on its website (one of the biggest holdups I had in checking it out was its mercurial status as an ongoing Alpha/Proof of Concept application, something that spooks me easily), I decided to get out my credit card in July/August 2011 and take the plunge.

To my own shame and confusion, I didn't particularly get it. Or at least, I wasn't immediately compelled to dive in and go cuckoo-bananas building my mansion, dodging Creepers, spelunking for diamonds, making red-dust powered escalators, and so on. I understood it, sure. It was exactly as advertised.. I enjoyed the soft interstitial music and its crisp, smooth 3D EGA'esque art design; an immense, malleable world splayed out before me, waiting to be transformed into something glorious. Also, last I checked, I was still the same person who spent a morbid amount of hours playing SimCity and Civ 1 as a teenager... and those games, while different, involved building something out of nothing and watching it flourish: games with a direct ratio of what you got out of it being dependant on what you were willing to put into it. At its heart, that's Minecraft. So what was different? Was I just too old and lazy now to adapt?

 I'd be lying if I said laziness wasn't a factor.. it was more a combination of that and sheer disorientation. Want a game that plops you into the middle of something and says "lol, good luck bro", without as much as a pocket knife or even telling you your own name? (it's Steve, by the way), you can't do much better than Minecraft. Of course, that's no excuse.. anyone who doesn't know how to Alt+Tab and Google-Search for "%THING + wikia" by now probably has more pressing issues to be concerned with, and the raw, sink-or-swim experience it gave was exactly what won it its rabid fanbase.

So, in spite of having the sense to not expect some comprehensive, delicately play-tested and focus-grouped tutorial, I assumed that (probably thanks to an inflated sense of ego), I'd hit the ground running and manage somehow. Except, you know, that didn't happen, because one of the key elements to Minecraft is that its deviously complex. (Pro-Tip: If you're not having even the tiniest bit of fun, can't survive your first night(s) and can only "feel" out the most remedial of crafting recipes on your own, perhaps swallowing your pride and using the homepage's generous "How To Play" feature might be a good course of action.) After dying to nightfall a few dozen times, scarcely putting together an outhouse to sleep in (with no bed, so enduring nighttime was plodding and boring), and mucking around in caves not entirely sure what I was looking for, I gave up and didn't touch it for weeks.

When I did finally revisit it I made sure to watch some “Let's Play” videos first, visiting everything from silly "Tobuscus" to the eternally respected "Yogbox". This helped me come to terms with another huge roadblock for me, and the new 360 Edition, with its new and well crafted tutorial stage, actually helps address this: The Vanilla PC Minecraft Product? From this gamer's point of view, was way, way too vanilla.

Generally if I have the option of playing a game on PC or console (mind you, Minecraft on a console was still months away at this point), and my PC can run it well? PC usually wins. One of the main reasons for this is mods, and that's what I figured out I'd need if I was really ever going to take Minecraft seriously. Nearly any Minecraft vlogger or commentator worth looking at had at least 3 different mods visually apparent from their FRAPS feed, at an untold amount running in the background.

The hurdles of figuring out mods for Minecraft are really worthy of their own article, so I won't stretch out this already long article. Like most other things relating to Minecraft, it's certainly not handed to you on a silver platter. There are literally hundreds of mods, many of which do not play nicely together, many of which are installed in one of maybe three different ways, and.. you get the idea. One good thing I'll say about PC Minecraft's JAVA application format: when you ruin your Minecraft install a good two dozen times trying to finagle these mods into working right, nuking your work and resurrecting a virginal install is as easy as deleting a config folder and restarting the app. The game is self contained and there is no "installation", so the risk and time factors usually associated with messing with mods is greatly reduced (assuming you back up any existing generated worlds that you care about, of course).

To speak crudely, I was better enabled to embrace the glory of Minecraft after spending an entire weekend beating the snot out of it with my shoe, building an experience with mods until I got something that clicked - something that was welcoming as a game first, a hardcore camping and crafting sim second.

I've now logged about 50-60 hours in my randomly generated world, have a great house next to a substantial epic-class mining network, and obtained a better understanding of what all the hype was about.  My biggest hope for the game is that Mojang takes a Valve/Blizzard type approach to its modding community, and actually obtain outright and integrate the more popular ones into the base product - or at least come up with a seamless customization engine at first that lets you select which ones to add upon first loading the game.   Playing around with fan created HD texture packs has also been a treat, and is something I'd like to see have its learning curve slightly lessened.

The biggest piece of advice I can give to anyone who finds themselves in the same situation I was in was: don't let the fandom at large tell you how to play the game.  Even now, I have a hard time playing with enemies turned on simply because I'm generally not in it for the combat, and the added difficulty there doesn't really do anything for me for the crafting and exploration elements.  Every time I try to switch back, I find myself going “Ugh, not now, creeper, I'm busy.” The Peaceful and Creative modes are there for a reason!

Hopefully the rest of 2012 and future years will see even bigger things for this pet-project turned phenomenon, and I hope other likeminded gamers who may have passed it up the first few times around are willing to revisit it, as I did, and not passover one of gaming's greatest innovations.