On the complete opposite pole of existence from Archibald's Adventures is Blockland, which is definitely something unusual. It is, essentially, an online multiplayer cooperative environment in which you create structures made of Legos -- without actually being connected to the Lego brand.

Now, before I go on, full disclosure: I only played as much as the tutorial, so I can't vouch for the rest of the experience. The reason for this is two-fold: 1) I'm not a big "plays well with others" type, so I didn't wanna go find other people to build things with, and 2) The tutorial made me crazy simulation sick. You'll see why in just a bit.

Having said that, here's what the game does. It's like a first person shooter, in that the camera is your viewpoint, and you never see your own body, except in shadow -- and it looks like you are, in fact, a Minifig of some sort. The rest of the time you have the standard FPS controls, down to a jump and a crouch-walk. There's even a gun to be used at some point, but the tutorial didn't make it clear when, where, or how. It just walks you through a building of many rooms and introduces the game's mechanics one at a time. To wit:

You start off with a selection of bricks of various lengths, widths, and shapes. There are specialty bricks like bridges, fences, and the like. You have an inventory bar that you fill up with ten different brick types, and you can use these to build structures with. There is quite a wide range of brick types, so you are only limited to your imagination.

With a brick selected, you click the left mouse button to place a "ghost" brick, which you can then use the numeric keypad keys to rotate, position, and place. This takes a lot of getting used to. The keys aren't the most intuitive, but they're reassignable, so you can work out what feels right to you. There are a couple of caveats: you can't place a brick within another brick, and it can't be free-floating. Other than that, you can build whatever you want.

After showing you how to build, the tutorial goes on to show the other features of the game. You can pick up a hammer, which destroys bricks, but only from the top-most on down. There is a wrench, which can spawn vehicles like a jeep, a horse, a ball, and other conveyances. Incidentally, the jeep is where I lost my cookies; it has the most out of control physics I've ever seen, and it had me queasy and nauseated within seconds of play.

There is a wand that destroys all bricks, regardless of placement.There is a printer, which shoots letters onto objects. There is a paint can to color bricks -- and there are more than just solid colors, as well; you can paint with animated textures.

You can also assign lights to bricks, as well as emitters and items (like a bow, a gun, a "horse ray", and others -- I don't know what a horse ray is either, but I'm dying to find out). It seems like there's a lot you can do with these tools if you take the time to master their use.

I may return to Blockland and try my hand at building, but for now, I'll just say that the demo is available right here on Big Download, for both Mac and PC.