http://minecraft.net/
We have an official SpecialAttack Server:
SpecialAttack.net Freebuild
On and on my little game blogging goes on. =)
This one, unlike BLC and Plain Sight, might be more of an acquired taste but for me it took all of like one hour to fall in love with.
I've been aware of the existence of Minecraft for like a year but I never really got into it until some buddies of mine decided to explore some servers out of pure boredom.
So what is it? Weeell - it's a multiplayer sandbox building/survival game written in Java. You may play survival mode, which isn't finished yet, so I'm not gonna go into much depth about it, or the ever so popular freebuild mode, where you literally can do whatever you like using 1 m^3 blocks. Yes, there have been games where you could build environments for yourself but none of them offered such elegant simplicity. People create AMAZING stuff out of these voxel-like elements, making pixel art, 3D sculptures, giant castles, underwater bases - just whatever.
And everybody is free to add to or subtract from the created content!
Initially I was like any new Minecraft player, destroying other people's stuff because it's fun (most servers make backups of maps and have dedicated admins, so it's not always possible) and drawing giant cocks everywhere. It wasn't until I realized how poor my vandalism looked compared to the mind numbingly cool structures everybody else was making, so I decided to make an artistic and sophisticated mega-grief by building a 100x200 giant 3D cock on one of the servers. I created plans in Paint.net and such but I didn't realize how big my project was in reality - a 100x200 m penis, basically. I managed to lay down the basic grid for the coordinates and the first layer but then gave up but it still gave me a lot of joy. ;-)
From then on I discovered how cool it is to create stuff other people can see, walk inside or even expand upon. It's like a builder's Wikipedia!
For now the game is free to play but prepurchasing it (which I did) gives you access to custom skins and a much more feature-rich development client. There are already dozens of third-party applications out, like map editors, custom servers and clients although I create reference structures mostly in the awful performance wise but very intuitive to use Paint3D.
Anyways - once you start building you literally can't stop until you finish your project and then it's ready for everyone to admire. Here's a sample of the stuff I made (many things got wiped in server resets):
And here's some pixel art I took a picture of because it was close to my Pedobear (yeah, it's relatively easy to build it using sprites as reference):
Ah, and here's my custom Pedobear skin:
http://minecraft.net/skin/skin.jsp?user=Lim_Dul
Once I read more about running servers and see how many resources they use (well, a map is like 5KB, so I guess not much :-P) I'll probably ask for a SpA Servers where the more creative minds like i.e. McMoist will surely manage to create some epic stuff. ^^
Go and play it while it's in beta!
http://minecraft.net/
On my fifht flag 
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