When it comes to games, you’ve got your video games, and you’ve got your everything else. Usually when there’s crossover, it’s because a non-video game is crossing over to the digital world, but in a fun little reversal, Tom Scott and friends ported some video games such as Minecraft, Portal, and The Crystal Maze to a classic physical game: Mini golf.

It was only a matter of time, really. Japan seems to have discovered — and embraced — Minecraft in a very Japan sort of way: By giving it what appears to be a theme song that may as well be the title sequence for some kind of Minecraft anime. It’s hard to adequately describe, so you should probably just watch it yourself. And Notch, please start licensing this IP immediately. PLEASE. What could possibly go wrong?

Mojang, indie-superstar turned up-and-coming publisher sweetheart, has just increased its numbers by four after absorbing the main developers of Bukkit, an extremely popular Minecraft server mod. Bukkit sprung up in early 2011 largely because the server implementation in vanilla Minecraft was, and for the moment still is, lacking at best. On top of that, mod implementation (particularly multiplayer mod implementation) is practically impossible in vanilla Minecraft. Minecrafters, your crazy server problems are not long for this world.

Minecraft and LEGO were meant to be together pretty much from the start. After all, how could you have one without the other?That being the case, it was great news when official Minecraft LEGO were announced to be on the way through LEGO’s CUUSOO system. They’re not here quite yet, but pre-orders have opened, and you can pick up a 480 piece chunk (4 chunklets) complete with Steve and a creeper for $34.99.

Creating obsessively elaborate models of things is a major draw of Minecraft. With that in mind, it’s not surprising that a mod group is working towards completing an entire reconstruction of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in the popular mining and crafting game. The project, aptly called Hyrulecraft, has just completed the entire above-ground portion of the game and is now open for testing. And that’s only the beginning for this ambitious project.

Chanukah has already started and Christmas is in the offing, so there are no doubt many of you realizing that you lack the necessary wrappings to conceal the festive season’s gifts. Fortunately, the folks over at J!NX have developed Minecraft wrapping paper, to give your gifts that addictive, yet weirdly constructive feeling.

Despite stepping down as the lead developer, Notch just can’t seem to get away from Minecraft. As a participant in the latest Ludum Dare, Notch found himself creating Minicraft – a familiar but unique 2D take on Minecraft. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Ludum Dare is a great little recurring competition in which game developers create a game from scratch in 48 hours based on the theme of that particular event. This event’s theme was “Alone,” something Notch obviously has some experience with in Minecraft, and continues to explore in Minicraft.

Minecraft is basically cyber-LEGOs in spirit. Granted, there have been plenty of other attempts at creating cyber-LEGOs, all of which were questionably successful. However, none of them took off the way Minecraft did. Now, it seems like Minecraft might have a chance to retcon its history, so to speak, and get its own, official LEGO playsets. Mojang is working with LEGO through the CUUSOO system to get several different models made and hopefully open the door to more Minecraft LEGOs down the road.

Minecraft has already proven itself to be a surprisingly robust platform for tinkerers to create computers and even games within the game world itself. Now, Minecraft experts Rezz and Psycho_ewt have brought us Gem Collector, a shockingly robust maze game built entirely inside Minecraft. In the game, the player moves around an enormous NES-style controller, which moves the player on the screen. Gems are collected, lives are lost, and sound effects are played. It’s amazing to watch, but it will surely make all of your own Minecraft creations seem a little lacking.

Read on after the break for a full list of the components behind this gargantuan game.

What you see above is a graph of the mouse movements of redditor ValTM playing Minecraft for around 3.9 hours. The map was made by the program IOGraph, which I promptly downloaded and installed. The java app tracks user mouse movement (as lines) and stops (as dots that increase in size with duration of the stop). The result is a neat little piece of abstract art that ostensibly contains some level of information about mouse movement, but does a better job of looking cool. Apparently, there’s a bit of a tradition of using IOGraph while gaming. Check out a few more from different games after the jump.