If you like games like SimCity, you might like Minecraft. Although SimCity has much deeper game mechanics, Minecraft focuses on exploration. (HN crowd: bear with me, they're b both exploratory world-building games to a certain extent with terraforming. For me personally, my enjoyment of them is the same for similar reasons.)
There are a large variety of clones out there, and "inspired" titles, but Minecraft got a lot right as far as a sense of exploration is concerned.
There's a fairly advanced open source "Minecraft-inspired" game called terasology I found this weekend:
It's not as polished as Minecraft, but if you just want to get a feel for the basic mechanics and tinker without having to pay anything, it's worth a look.
Notch doesn't maintain Minecraft himself these days; Jeb at Mojang does. But they're doing a great job.
I no longer have the time to play Minecraft regularly, but I revisit it from time to time, just like Simcity.
There are a large variety of clones out there, and "inspired" titles, but Minecraft got a lot right as far as a sense of exploration is concerned.
There's a fairly advanced open source "Minecraft-inspired" game called terasology I found this weekend:
http://terasology.org/
It's not as polished as Minecraft, but if you just want to get a feel for the basic mechanics and tinker without having to pay anything, it's worth a look.
Notch doesn't maintain Minecraft himself these days; Jeb at Mojang does. But they're doing a great job.
I no longer have the time to play Minecraft regularly, but I revisit it from time to time, just like Simcity.