I’ll admit. When I first heard the announcement that Minecraft was moving to the Xbox 360 I wasn’t that impressed. I figured it would be very limited. After playing with it for a week, my impressions have changed.

Every gamer nowadays knows what Minecraft is all about, but if you aren’t in the know I’ll give you a quick overview. Minecraft is a survival game in a world that is made of bricks. You can cut trees to get wood, make tools and mine minerals to make better tools and the circle continues. It doesn’t SOUND that compelling, but its addictiveness is on the same level as crack. The ability to make tools and housing items is very intuitive and the creative level has no limit. I’ve had extensive time playing and managing my own PC server of this game, so my curiosity to see how well this version stacks up was very…curious.

The Xbox version is not any different. The biggest change is instead of having to guess at the crafting recipe of whatever you want to create, you can pick from a list of items and if you have the materials then it will allow you to make the item. This made the exploration of new tools and furniture very intuitive. Best example is while scrolling through the different lighting methods, me and my buddy learned we could make torches with CHARCOAL (which can be made by burning wood) as well as COAL (which is found in ore form inside mines). That changes the start of the survival aspect of the game drastically, even though we learned this fact three nights too late.

The best selling point for me in this version was the ability to have splitscreen multiplayer, when I read about this I had flashbacks to Goldeneye matches from my youth. So I grabbed my Xbox and headed over to my buddy Dylan’s house to start the adventure.

We started our first world and the first appeal was to see what our character models were. (WARNING: My screen capture device was not working, so the only few screen shots I got came from my cellphone, please bear with me)

I was the default skin, Minecraft Steve, but Dylan (Station1337) appeared to be some fancy tennis instructor. We dubbed him “Tanner”.

Being the Minecraft veterans we are, we knew that the first thing to do was find some Coal and create torches to keep the monsters at bay during the first night. That didn’t go so well. We dug out two fairly large hills looking for Coal…we found absolutely none. The first night was spent dug into 1X2 sized holes in pure darkness, with the sounds of monsters just outside. We weren’t even in the same hole! It was a lonely hole the first night.  As soon as the sun rose, we went  on the Coal hunt again…with zero yield. Again, we slept in our shallow graves while Zombies and Skeleton Archers clawed at the dirt trying to kill us.  As the sun came up, which would ultimately burn our enemies into dust and give us a relatively safe gathering area, it began to rain. Blotting out the sun. The absurdity of how dire and depressing our situation was palpable.

We proceeded to delete this world and create another one. That one didn’t turn out so well, the resources weren’t very abundant either. So third times a charm, and this created world ended up being the one we played for over 12 hours.

Upon spawn, in a giant rain forest, we found some pumpkins and a decent mountain on the water for us to carve out and begin our underground journey.

Now we really started to get into the meat of the game. Creating a wheat farm underground for baking bread. Creating a bedroom so we could move our respawn location.  Creating the first of many strip mines in order to get some raw materials so we could create weapons and gear in order to survive the ultimate test, venturing into the Nether Realm.

We soon realized the game was way too dark right off the bat. Upping the gamma and the brightness on the TV did the trick. We also felt that the torches in this version had a slightly less powerful radius. We believe that this weaker light radius allowed some monsters to spawn on the outside walls of our bedroom which let them spawn MORE monsters near them which ended up in our bedroom, whom quickly attacked us. It took a few tries to get a full sleep cycle in (which would move our respawn location indoors), this may or may not be just a glitch for our world. I was unable to recreate this situation so I do not feel the monsters-through-the-wall-spawn to be something the every player should expect.

Once that issue was sorted, Steve and Tanner were able to have some alone time…

About four hours later we had a sizable mine dug out and we started stock piling materials to gear up for our trip into hell. Our next session playing we brought two more players with us, our friends Josh and Dan, with us. Josh being another veteran Minecraft player and Dan who was fairly n00b at it. Their character models were just as interesting as the tennis instructor. Josh was a man in a tux with a nice flower on his lapel and Dan was a black man in a wife beater with a large gold chain with a blingy medallion on it. Our new group of miners started on the goal of adventuring into the Nether Realm to get a few rare and valuable minerals. It was nice to see how quickly Dan picked up the Xbox 360 version. The included crafting guide made his first few hours in the game to be smooth. With little instruction he crafted a few tools and wandered into a natural cave and preceded to get murdered by a Skeleton.

The four of us started prepping for the hell trip. Dylan created the most efficient strip mine possible, alternating 1X2 tunnels which yielded copious amounts of diamond and iron ore. Josh created a large tree and wheat farm so that we could harvest raw wood and bake bread to heal our characters. Me and Dan started exploring the natural cave we stumbled upon in search of interesting times.

I feel that this was the best feature of this version. Being able to sit on a couch with your friends, share a few drinks and share mine ideas was ideal. It removed the slight level of loneliness we all felt while playing the PC version. Yeah, we always played on Skype together but being in the same room brought back memories of Halo 2 LAN parties from high school. The robust features from the PC version were still around. We all had our own missions but were able to work as a team together. Josh was farming wood so that Dylan could build check point throughout our mine. Hours flew buy while we gathered minerals to arm our characters for the adventure into the inferno, armor and weapons to take on the monsters while we gathered the valuable materials.

During this prep time I took the opportunity to get in a boat and sail about exploring the various islands. This is when I ran into the biggest disappointment of the game. The size of the playable area is very limited in comparison to the PC version. The starting map you get, that is as big as it gets. I literally hit an invisible wall. This small play area made us realize there are only so many mineral blocks available. On the PC version when your mine was almost completely dry, you could pack up some gear and walk a few miles and start a new camp gathering minerals. The upside to this limited area was the high amount of natural cave formations. These are usually filled with monsters and veins of the high value minerals. Me and Dan explored a few and filled up our inventory with Iron Ore to arm ourselves.

Hours continued to tick by, which seemed like minutes. The pizza I had heated up with the intention to eat HOT was ice cold by the time I got to it. The addictive nature of the game wasn’t impeded by the limited size. When 2 A.M rolled around we knew it was time to armor up. We forged iron weapons and armor and started the Nether Portal which would bring us to Hell.

We stood around the portal, and jumped in one at a time. As soon as the group was on the other side we made a makeshift base. Carving out a hole and putting up some doors. The doors would keep the Zombie Pig Men but not the giant fireball spitting Ghasts. A good 45 minutes was spent venturing in the hellish Nether Realm. Killing pig men, hiding from Ghasts and getting lightstones to create powerful lighting back at the main mine. Afterwards we jumped back and decided it was time to be moderately responsible adults  and stop playing Minecraft at 3 A.M.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Nursing our sore tired eyes over a quick smoke we four discussed our experience. We all agreed that the controls for the console were very well done. Everything was labeled properly and the “Quick Move” option in menus made moving large amounts of items around very easy. The lack of cheats, which forced us all to actually play the role properly, made all of our achievements much more rewarding. There was a slight chugging felt when all four players were moving at once, but it did not affect game play that much. Everyone in the group enjoyed the splitscreen mode. Being able to sit around the TV and hangout in person made the mining and crafting fun. It was like playing LEGOS after school with your best friend, but with booze! Dylan felt the size restriction was a big mark AGAINST the Xbox 360 version, he wasn’t able to make a judgement call on how it would affect the end game. Even with a large LCD TV with and HDMI cable, we had to move the couches closer to the screen. The small “pixel text”  was soon illegible  on our individual quarter screens. I didn’t feel the eyestrain on the single player mode. When asked if he would buy it, Dylan said ” I thought I kicked this Minecraft addiction, but it looks like I will be buying the Xbox version”.

We all had reservations, most of them were dissolved quickly in and we were quickly absorbed in the tunnels we were digging. If they are able to keep updates consistent. Possibly offer mod support or content expansion packs, then I feel this version will offer the same Minecraft experience but tuned perfectly on the Xbox 360. If you haven’t already bought Minecraft and the idea of computer gaming and modding scares you do not even hesitate. Buy this version, just don’t let any pigs in.