It's a frightening, hardscrabble existence. The potency of those first few days in Minecraft cannot be overstated. If you die, you respawn, but you've dropped everything you were holding - and where was that, anyway? Shelter and light are imperative, and at the beginning you build - or dig out and reinforce a cave - not because you want to but because you have to. The other is the game of survival that provides the context and motivation for your efforts.Īt night, monsters come out and attack you relentlessly, and you can't see because it's dark. One is the extreme simplicity of the interface, even though the underlying simulation systems are complex. There are two reasons that this game has been far more successful than so many before it, the Spores and LittleBigPlanets of this world, at encouraging players to create stuff. The Lego-like appeal of putting all this together to build your own world is clear and powerful, but Minecraft's brilliance goes deeper than that. You can make doors, beds, torches, powered rails, boats, clocks, mushroom stew sandstone, glass, brick, obsidian and diamond. By making a crafting bench and a furnace you can refine materials and make armour, weapons, tools, food, devices and equipment as well as structures and building materials. The space between these two interactions is filled with a crafting system - the habitual sideshow attraction of role-playing games, here placed firmly centre stage. However basic the building blocks, this game is not short on awe and spectacle - whether it's the work of man or Minecraft's algorithmic God. But don't expect updates to be as free-flowing as they are on the unrestricted PC when they have Microsoft's lengthy and expensive Xbox certification process to contend with. Mojang and 4J are determined to patch Kinect features in, as well as bring the game version up to speed with the PC original. You're unlikely to miss Minecraft's promised Kinect support, which has been withheld for now certainly the controller interface is well thought out and doesn't seem to lack anything. Use the left trigger to place items from your inventory in the world and build - the only limit to your imagination being your capacity to produce materials and ability to physically navigate to where you want to place them. Use the right trigger to gather (or attack) with whatever you have equipped, hammering away with a comically speedy and repetitive motion, consuming the world around you as voraciously as Pac-Man. You start with nothing, absolutely nothing, gathering wood with your bare hands to make tools to gather more materials to make more and better tools and materials. The goal of the game is both simple and ineffable: survive, prosper and build in a randomly generated block-world. It's no great loss this is arguably a purer version of the game, and certainly a great point at which to start playing. That's about it, especially in this earlier and simpler version of the game that doesn't feature the grind-heavy combat advancement and levelling which made it into the "final" "release" version of the PC game (the one we reviewed last year). "It will never eclipse the one true Minecraft, but Xbox 360 Edition is as close to an untamed sandbox as you can get in one shiny, sugared pellet of console gaming." It will never eclipse the one true Minecraft - for some pretty simple reasons, this is a phenomenon that could only ever have happened on computers - but Xbox 360 Edition is as close to an untamed sandbox as you can get in one shiny, sugared pellet of console gaming. The blocky graphics have a naïve charm, especially the funny and characterful monsters and wildlife that roam the world. Mojang, the company formed by Minecraft's affable creator Markus "Notch" Persson, has worked with Microsoft and port specialist 4J Studios to build a Minecraft that's slightly less advanced, much easier to get to grips with and perfectly tuned for its slick and friendly platform, while preserving almost all of the original game's unquestioned genius. Well happy day, because this excellent new version for Xbox Live Arcade is made just for me. Like so many of the great online PC games, from Counter-Strike to League of Legends, it became a cult that I didn't know how to join. Somehow I never played it - perhaps because I was foolishly waiting for it to come out of its endless alpha test - and all of a sudden it was a thing that I wasn't part of and didn't get, even though I understood it. It's been pretty hard to ignore.īut Minecraft did happen without me. I can't say that Minecraft passed me by - how could it? It's a full-blown 21st century sensation, a hit indie game that changed all the rules, a perfect storm of internet fame.
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