So, everyone that reads my blog from time to time knows I play Minecraft. Pretty fun I might say, very relaxing, get materials, build stuff, do whatever right... So I made the horrible mistake of reading about Terraria (not pronounced Terra-ria, which could be confused as "runny Terra" as my wife thought). So it plays four player, split screen local multiplayer co-op on the X360 - My kids, who are addicted to Minecraft on the X360, needed a game I wanted to play with them. I see Minecraft on the X360 is the 'undeveloped' Minecraft, the Minecraft that isn't all there, so I only play it on the PC. Which meant I didn't really game with my kids all that much because the two games that support local-multiplayer are kind of gone the way of 'overplayed' (Castle Crashers, Minecraft). Enter Terraria. It has been called the '2D Minecraft', which I guess at a basic level could be true. I found a closer description though to be a 2D Sandbox 'metroid-vania' that allows crafting / building / exploration similar to Minecraft. Did anyone ever play the indie game "Miner Dig Deep"? If you did, take that game and put it on octane, with Minecraft and Metroid mixed in... Interested? You should be. Yeah... bad things happen when you combine the endlessness of Minecraft with the awesomeness of 2D Metroidvania's... Basically you lose a weekend or two, forget to go to sleep, etc. I will admit, it took a little bit to get into. How you craft one thing to the next is horribly explained, and the Wiki and such doesn't help newcomers at all. The cool stuff is all way too advanced to build right away, so it still feels very overwhelming as I'm still looking for my first 10 bars of Demon stone to make an advanced weapon.

We have been playing for a weekend, probably a good 20 hours and are yet to fight a boss because we are still amassing everything we need to build and upgrade stuff so we can actually take on a boss. And when I say 'we' I really mean "me" because once my kids made a grappling hook they built an elevated obstacle course that you had to grapple through like bionic commando and if you fell you died. They spent a good hour trying to get around the course without dying and another good hour racing each other... Maybe they were smarted than me as I only made a super efficient mine to get down from the surface to the core. It took a bit to realize how to switch cursor modes for building (we skipped the tutorial because we just wanted to dive in and play all 3 of us at the same time). The moving things into and out of chests is clunky... but by golly, it is a pretty sweet game. For the days you just want to be lazy you can get in and build, mine, collect resources, for the days you want to kill stuff you can go and kill stuff. You want to adventure? Go find a cave or two and explore... the caves can go on for a very long time. You find all sorts of stuff in them - and basically get lost in them. Luckily the game comes with a map, so you won't get permanently screwed. Your character grows with you as you play. You can find Heart containers (similar to Zelda), new weapons, materials to craft you own armor. Amass wealth to buy stuff off of merchants and NPC's as you play. You have "Piggy Banks", the Minecraft equivalent of an Ender Chest. If you want to play another world guess what? All that stuff on you carries along. Which gives you more chances to earn cool things and find one off hidden goodies.

This works really well with playing with my kids. We can play a shared world with each other and once they go to bed I can play my own world if I choose... or when I'm busy and they want to play they can play their own worlds. When we get together again the wealth comes with you back to the shared map. It is great. No worries about them flubbing up your well crafted world while you are missing. I was thinking about putting the game up on my Linux cloud server next to my Minecraft installation, but alas, it is native to only Windows (and X360). I would get running using virtual machines and such, but I would rather play it than setup all this stuff for right now. If you haven't played Terraria, or thought it was just kind of Minecraft in 2D. It will play that way as you start out, but as you progress further it clearly turns into a Metroidvania game with Minecraft elements instead. It usually is super cheap on Steam, so take a look sometime. Once again, E3 with all its amazing-ness is easily trumped by a $15 XBLA game... go figure.