Minecraft Free To Play Because of Server Crash

One man's agony becomes a feeding frenzy?

Hot on the heels of Chase's online banking system going kablooey, the much more humble Minecraft infrastructure has partially collapsed. But in this case, users are not only gettting regular updates on the situation, they are also getting a bonus.

It seems that only part of the site functionality is affected by server problems, so the powers that be have declared a free-to-play weekend. Since the game works but the purchase, registration, and user verification systems do not, you can play for free for the short term. A new server has been ordered and other steps have been taken, so the freeplay is probably only going to last until Monday.

What is Minecraft? Well, it's a sandbox game that lets you build and destroy collections of blocks in three dimensions. Players have gotten very elaborate in their designs, with gigantic castles, humongous video game characters, and even entire cities.

Head over to http://www.minecraft.net/ to download the software and thank us later.

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