EGM Review: Minecraft

Minecraft is one of those games that it’s easy to hate, even if you’ve never played it.

There was a point in time where you couldn’t go anywhere on the
internet without running into somebody gushing over the game. So
wonderful! Utterly amazing! Best game of the year! Revolution in the
gaming industry!

When a game gets built up that high, it isn’t hard to become a little jaded. The thing is, Minecraft actually is pretty damn amazing. Started as a project by Markus “Notch” Persson inspired by other releases such as Infiniminer and Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft
was a very simple game that allowed players to destroy or build square
blocks of material in order to create structures or mine into the
ground.

In that form, Minecraft was more promise than practice—but its promise was what turned it into the phenomenon that it became. Many have called Minecraft
the video game incarnation of LEGO, and that’s a good way to explain
the game’s growth. At first, we were given a smattering of basic
building blocks, and that was good enough. After a while, we wanted
more—and suddenly, here came an update, which introduced two new pieces
that expanded the scope of what could be built. Another update, another
new selection of additional crafting parts, each of which let our
imaginations run even wilder thinking about what we could now create.

With so many games, it doesn’t take long for us as gamers to come to understand what we can expect from the experience. Minecraft, however, has never stopped us from dreaming. A new update could bring us nearly anything, and that’s why it’s so exciting. Minecraft a
year ago was nothing like it is today, and a year from now it’ll be far
more than what we have offered up now. It’s hard to think of things
that Minecraft couldn’t end up being. There could be a
day when you could basically build your own RPG world—brick by
brick—and then play out adventures in it just as fun as any other
offering–and that’s just one of thousands of ways the game could go.

When it was announced that Minecraft would be coming to the
Xbox 360, I had mixed feelings. Playing the game on my big HDTV while
sitting on my comfy couch sounded like a great opportunity—but would the
game actually work on the console? Microsoft’s rules for game updates
are notoriously strict; for a game that is so based around constant free
updates and expansions, those rules could cripple the project right
from the start. And what about mods? Minecraft has grown to
feature deep built-in support for expansions and modifications, which
would be hard–or impossible—to bring to the Xbox 360.

Concerns or not, Minecraft has finally seen release as an
Xbox Live Arcade title—and the result both calms fears and validates
them at the exact same time.

Minecraft on the Xbox 360 feels weird at first. Initially, it was a hard feeling to explain—it was, well, just weird.
Part of it are the controls. Even while I’m long used to playing
first-person experiences via analog stick-sporting controllers, Minecraft
was just so perfectly tailored to the mouse & keyboard set-up. It
takes a little getting used to—but it works, and works very well.
Another part of it is the framerate. Not that it’s bad; in fact, it’s
extremely good. Coming from the PC version, I wasn’t used to that. Here
was Minecraft; big, beautiful (in its own special way), fullscreen, and running smooth as butter framerate-wise. This was Minecraft, but it wasn’t Minecraft, and for that reason it was both strange yet satisfying.

As a game, Minecraft has always been centered around three
things—survival, exploration, and creation—and the latter was where I
found my first point of contention with the XBLA version. One of Minecraft’s
trademarks has been that the game drops you into a world, and you’re
told to survive—with no real explanation on how exactly you’re supposed
to accomplish that. Bringing up your inventory, you see that you can
craft items in some regard, but lord knows how that works. So, you run
around until you start to wonder if that’s all the game is, and
then—either purposefully or by accident—you punch something. Punching
things rewards you with items you can pick up, either whatever the thing
you punched enough to break was, or some new form of material. Back to
your inventory you go, where you try mixing and matching combination of
items in the simple crafting interface you’re given, where suddenly
you’re finding entirely new items that can be made.

There’s a part in every Minecraft player’s lives when they
decided to go online and cheat by hunting down a full list of everything
that’s possible to be created in the game. Still, that initial
excitement of uncertainty replaced by discovery is a huge step in
creating an emotion bond with the game—and that step is gone here. For Minecraft’s
XBLA debut, the crafting system has been entirely reworked. You’re
presented an interface which outright spoils you not only as to what you
can make in the game, but the exact combination of materials you’ll
need to do so.

When I first saw this new interface, I was utterly baffled. How could you take one of Minecraft’s
core learning experiences, and just completely destroy it like that? I
understood some of the arguments that were made in defense of this
method of handling crafting—switching from a mouse & keyboard set-up
to using a controller means direct item manipulation could get tedious
after a while—but I still find it borderline offensive to the Minecraft
experience. If you’re going to put in such a system, then give the
player options. For example: Why couldn’t this new interface obscure the
presented items and their materials until you’ve made them at least
once on your own? Had you gone that route, players could still have
enjoyed the experience of discovering things on their own, and then the
quick, easier new crafting system could have been appreciated for all of
its finer points without ruining that sense of discovery.



Even as I cursed under my breath about how stupid of a decision the
new crafting interface was, I admitted to myself that it wasn’t enough
to kill the great experience that I was having. By this point, Minecraft
XBLA had stopped feeling weird, and instead now felt awesome. For good
or bad I had come to terms with the crafting situation, playing the game
with a controller was now second nature, and I was starting to heed the
true calling of the game: Gathering materials and making plans so that
the little cave I had dug in the side of a hill to protect myself from
the creatures of the night could be turned into a full-blown fortress. I
had ended up finding a spot extremely close to my starting point in the
world I had generated, so for now, I was sticking close to home and
just doing my thing there.

With my mining efforts at that location not panning out as well as I
had hoped, and my restlessness growing after being cooped up in my
still-tiny home for so long, I decided to head out and do a little
adventuring. I packed up some tools, my boat, my map (which, strangely,
the XBLA version of Minecraft provides you from the very
beginning), a bowl of delicious mushroom soup, and I headed off into the
horizon. I wouldn’t be straying far from home—I hadn’t yet made a
compass for finding my way back to home base—but I wanted to at least
get a lay of the nearby land. Just to the east of my shelter was a bay,
so I started there. Sitting snugly in my handmade boat, I pushed off
from shore, eagerly awaiting the new and unexplored land that would soon
stretch out before me.

It wasn’t long before something bizarre happened—the world ended. Not
like in a Michael Bay-esque symphony of fiery explosions, or like as in
the world suddenly cut off and was just darkness beyond that point. The
game simply stopped letting me moving forward, as before me sat nothing
but water for as far as my eyes could see. I was confused. Minecraft’s
world doesn’t end like that—or, at least, the game starts processing so
much that it comes to a screeching halt long before you reach the
theoretical end of your map. Why had I found this point, and why was it
so close to where I started?



The answer is simple: Minecraft XBLA’s maps are small. Really small. Really, really small. For anybody who has played the PC version of Minecraft, you will be in awe of has small the worlds generated here are. (I guess, unless you’ve played the mobile version of Minecraft—which
I’ve heard also had tiny maps. I’ve personally never tried it.) After a
bit more exploring, you come to realize that all of the worlds in this
game will essentially be squared-off islands existing in the middle of
an endless ocean. I decided to time how long it’d take for me to get
from one shore of my world to the other. Without using any kind of
pre-constructed path (for the benefit of speeding up travel), and with
having to maneuver around one mountain and do a quick bit of swimming,
it took me 4 minutes and 12 seconds to complete my trip.

My argument about the game’s new crafting interface seemed like nothing compared to this. Those three tenets of Minecraft—survival,
exploration, and creation? All three have been compromised here. Even
to this day, I sit in awe of the randomized worlds Minecraft
can generation, and doing nothing but exploring them can still provide
wonderment. That sense of being one insignificant being in a gigantic,
living, breathing world is gone here. So too is that pressure for
survival. With the small size of worlds, it’s literally impossible to
get lost. You’ll never be able to have that feeling of fear after having
wardered off too far while also having no clue how to get back home.
You’ll never be able to put yourself into a position where you can’t
recover your items after dying before it’s too late and they disappear.
It won’t take long into a game to even lose the ability to go somewhere
you’ve never been before—without, of course, starting an entirely new
world.



Some will say that Minecraft XBLA can still provide the joys of Minecraft—and
to some degree, they’re right. You can still have fun exploring the
dark expanses of the caves that burrow their way through the ground
under your feet. You can still find the joy of making a home, and then
destroying it to make a bigger and better home, and then destroying that
in order to construct something even grander. And, you can still have
fun getting together with friends to design and build worlds together.
In fact, this is the point at which Minecraft XBLA at times
does an even better job than its PC counterpart. Online-wise, up to
eight Xbox Live friends can join up when a world’s owner is online, but
you can also have up to four people playing together in the same room
(while also being online with others). Minecraft has never had
that support for local multiplayer, and having that ability to sit down
with family or friends and enjoy a gaming experience that’s about
creation—instead of destruction—is quite wonderful.

This isn’t Minecraft though. As much as it does feel like a piece of Minecraft, it’s just that—a piece. Ambitions in Minecraft have always started small, but soon, you want more iron to construct that railway project, or more room to build out the fantastical city you’ve suddenly found yourself building, or more territory to explore when that call to adventure rises up again in your heart. Unfortunately, Minecraft XBLA doesn’t have that more to give. 4J Studios—developer of this version of Minecraft—has
promised regular updates, and that the XBLA version will hopefully soon
have content parity with the PC version (which it currently does not).
They’ve also talked about hopefully expanding the size of maps that are
available in the game. The problem is, for now, that’s nothing but
hope—and even if that does occur, seeing how small the worlds currently
are now makes me understand that there’s no hope for them to ever come
anywhere close to what you get in the PC version.

Minecraft XBLA serves as a perfect introduction to the world of Minecraft,
and for some players who aren’t looking to invest a great deal of time
in the game, it may be all that’s ever needed. And, for those who just
want something fun that they can do with their friends or family, this
can also fit that role quite nicely. When compared to the “true” version
of Minecraft that exists out there, however, this XBLA port is
nothing but disappointment. This version of the game may serve as a fun
companion piece to those who already own the PC version, but in
absolutely no way, shape, or form could it ever serve as a replacement
or substitute for that version.

Minecraft is indeed the LEGO for the video game era—and
here, we’re told to build all of our dreams on one lone baseplate with
only a small quantity of pieces. What a way to shatter our dreams.



SUMMARY: If Minecraft on the PC is the video game equivelent of LEGO, then Minecraft on
XBLA is Duplo. It’s a perfect introduction to the game and its
experience—but it won’t take long for you to outgrow it and want the
real thing.