If you have to ask, then no. There's a lot more crap going on now - new blocks, NPC villages, more items, better biomes, better textures, and so on - but the core game is pretty much the same as it's ever been. If you liked the original premise, then yes definitely give it another go. If you didn't fancy the original premise, well... it's much slicker now, but it's still smashing blocks and building things.

There are horses and potions.
And witches.

We're all kind of waiting for the much anticipated mod update, where we can finally play a lot of mods in multiplayer without all the hassle. A lot of the best content developers have abandoned Minecraft.
Starbound will probably steal all my game time when it's finally out.

Once I get my new PC, X:Rebirth for me. Hopefully by then they'll have ironed out the bugs; otherwise, just gonna go back to Europa Universalis IV.

Starbound beta is out this week! Woooo! There goes my life.

It's Terraria in space, yes?

Quite a bit more advanced. The Terraria team split in two and all the talent jumped onto the Starbound wagon. Everything is dynamically created, with infinite varieties of weapons, monsters, plants, planets, etc. There will likely be a huge amount of interesting narrative and mod content out there. Looking forward to playing with the design tools.

Huh. I might have to check it out! Terraria was good, but it didn't hold my interest for that long - the building and exploring aspects were nowhere near as interesting as Minecraft. I like the idea that you can visit new planets, and the variety of stuff that's being promised sounds neat.

Of course, gamers have been promised a vast galaxy of procedurally generated content before, and we all remember how Spore turned out...

Will I get to make my own mouthanus aliens?

X Rebirth is apparently really, really awful. You might want to wait. Apparently, it was intended to be an Xbox 360 game that Egosoft decided to just release on PC as-is without any optimization and with several beta-version type flaws still present in the game. (for example, all female NPCs in the game are the same model, things like that)

As for Minecraft...hey, once Notch realized he could make millions off of an unfinished game, he just never finished it. I regret having payed the when Minecraft was still in "beta" and about 20 game features were promised that, to date, have still never materialized.

Yeah, I saw the reviews. I don't want to believe them, because I loved me the fuck out of X2 and X3, but I'll wait and brace myself for the worst. What really bothers me is the news that the game world has been "shrunk" - I don't want the game world to be shrunk. That was a big part of what made previous X games so cool - they were so absurdly huge. So what if it takes me fifteen minutes to get from one end of Saturn Sector, even with SETA on? That's immersive, it helps drive home the mindboggling vastness of space. I also liked the way it took for fucking ever to get ships; really made you appreciate that Paranid Nemesis when you finally got it. Sure, leaving my game on overnight only to wake up and discover pirates had snuffed all my beef transports an hour after I went to sleep was always a pain the ass, but that could be fixed with super-SETA and scheduled auto-saves.


Losssst profittsssssssss, arrrrhhhhhh...

Spark for XB1 looks like what Spore was supposed to be, then again Microsoft has a way of shitting all over their flagship titles. I saw some trailers for it and it does look like a horrible\awesome timesink.

Starbound only costs . I have been following their amazing dev blog and feature map for a while. I'm confident you'll at least get your money's worth.

I actually liked it quite a bit, but I ended up feeling like I'd have to devote unhealthy amounts of time to really get the most out of it.

I kind of feel like if I'm going to sink a lot of time into a game, it shouldbe this one:

http://www.sensomusic.org/usine/

That's the same basic reason I've never gotten much out of GMod - not because I don't like it, but because the things that I like most about it are serious time sinks.

Yeah well you can find various musical instruments in Starbound and play them in real time. People are already starting Starbound bands. I'm not kidding.

You can just put all his episodes in a playlist, that's about a day's worth.