(This post also appears on my website (cireer.ca))

You'd think I needed to prove my obsession with Minecraft or something.

It's not like I didn't buy every version of the game I could get my hands on (I don't have an XBox; that's the only version I didn't buy). It's not like I didn't buy a book, and then a magazine, and then a boxed set of books. It's not like I didn't take out server space on MC Pro Hosting's servers.

I did all of those things. But apparently it wasn't enough. Because last week I bought a Gameband.

I'd been wanting one ever since I'd first heard mention of it. I think I came across it whilst doing a Google search for something else Minecraft-related. Once I stumbled upon their site, however, I was beyond intrigued. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, obsessed.

Geez. Me and obsession. What gives?

Anyway, it took me a rather long time to actually get hold of one. You see, I live in Canada, and none of the Canadian websites for the big retailers (e.g. Amazon, BestBuy) had the Gameband available. None of my local gaming stores had it in stock, and I'd be damned if I was going to pay customs duties by ordering it from the U.S.

The Gameband website itself is based in Europe, and they sell to European countries and not to North America. So that was not an option.

So, what was an obsessed Canadian Minecraft afficionado to do?

Well, I wrote to the company. That's what I was to do. I asked them where a Canadian gamer might obtain this rarest of all devices. And they gave me an answer I hadn't thought of.

The Microsoft store. Yes, the Canadian version of the Microsoft store. No customs duties. Pretty quick delivery. I was as happy as a pig with a carrot.

They Fedexed it to me, and it only took about three business days. I was impressed by that, and I'm also impressed with the Gameband itself.

Not only does it come loaded with Minecraft (yes, you can run Minecraft right off the band's MLC drive); it also contains eleven (count 'em) world saves, all by well-known Minecraft YouTubers. Six are by SethBling, three are by Hypixel, and two are by Dragnoz. That's cool.

The first time you run the Gameband application (it contains versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux) it asks if you want to copy your game worlds to the band (it has 8GB of storage). Now, I have a lot of world saves---many of them downloaded creations from other crafters, some of them quite large---so Gameband wasn't able to do the copy. No problem, though. The device mounts as an external drive on your computer, and you can simply copy over the worlds you want to the Gameband's Minecraft "saves" directory.

The notion of running Minecraft anywhere, even on a computer that doesn't have the game istalled, is absolutely brilliant. And, according to the Gameband website, constant reads and writes to the device's storage are not going to cause it to die young. It's designed to give ten times the lifespan of a "normal" MLC USB flash drive.

And then there's the customization. The Gameband has an LED display that can show you the time, the date, the amount of remaining storage, and animations!! The device is also preloaded with an application called Pixel Furnace, which allows you to customize the animations on your Gameband. I don't know the maximum number of displays you can store at any one time, but I have six on mine at the moment: The time, the default redstone animation that comes pre-loaded, the date, scrolling text that reads "MC Cireer", the remaining storage, and some diagonal lines that I progammed myself using Pixel Furnace. Pressing the red button on the Gameband allows me to toggle through the six displays.

Oh, and by the way, Gameband also stores backups of your worlds to the cloud. If you run Minecraft using the Gameband app, it backs up any changes you made once you quit the game.

The Gameband is a very cool way to both protect all the work you've done in your worlds and to show your love of the game. I wear mine all the time now, and it's quite comfortable. It also looks great.

Thanks for reading, and keep digging