Minecraft: 360 Edition

 By: B-Rad G From Malibu

Have you ever seen yourself excited or anxious to get off of a long day of working hard, only to go home and dig up some dirt to build a house or suspension bridge? Me neither. But with Minecraft: 360 edition, you'll never be more stoked to do just that!

Minecraft 360 is part of the XBLA “Next” series. At 1600 MSP ($20 USD) it's defiantly one of the higher priced games on XBLA, but if your a fan of Minecraft or just burnt out on FPS's then a great way to spend a hard earned twenty bucks.

This game only released with the 1.6.6 version of the game but updates are promised soon. This version does have a few bugs in it but most are minor. For example, the sugar canes are solid when you should be able to walk through them. A few with the tall grass in the game like spiders being immovable when hit in tall grass or mobs taking no damage in tall grass. Minor problems with the bucket not actually placing water when you empty it (this happens with Lava, too). But the glitches are few and far between with fixes being worked on now.

They have simplified the crafting in this game over the computer version. Now instead of having to know where to place your raw materials in the crafting table, all you have to do is just pick what you want to make and it adds everything into the crafting table, in the correct location, for you. This is a much better and quicker system over the computer version. Allowing for more time for actually building an amazing world instead of researching how to build single building blocks.

They did limit the size of the maps from the PC version. Giving you only the area that's the size of the map that you carry around. But even on this condensed map size, the playing area is still pretty huge. Giving you more than enough room to build a great sized castle or even a decent sized city.

They did add a lot of very cool features when it comes to Minecraft 360. You can have up to 8 players online in one game. Hopefully this will go up to something like 16 or even 32 players as game updates come out for it in the future. But for now, 8 is a nice number of players, especially cause the maps are huge yet. They have also added 4-player split-screen. This is a very nice thing over PC because chances are that your friends or girlfriends aren't going to want to sit around the tiny computer screen to watch you move around blocks. But, in general, when your buddys come over, you all gather around the tube and play some games. This is a fun way to have everyone get involed in the game but you should never turn down free labor when building your empire! Please note that if you do not have an HDTV you will not be able to play split-screen. This is currently nothing in the works to fix this problem and probably never will be. If you bought this game for this feature in the first week or so of release, Microsoft is offering a full refund of the game if you only have a SDTV.

All-in-all, I really enjoyed this game. I had never played Minecraft before it come out on XBLA, and with everyone telling me it was a game where you dug out a block then put that block somewhere else, I was seriously considering getting new friends because they kept saying the were addicted to this game. After playing the demo for half an hour, I spent the 1600 MSP and was immediately addicted! I promise that you will enjoy this game if you are a gamer.

I'm giving Minecraft 360 a 9.5 out of 10.

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