Minecraft came out on the 360 and it’s worth checking out.

I managed to get a solid bit of the game in since my classes ended this week. Whether you still play Minecraft on the regular or you have never in your life, it’s worth a look.

The benefits of buying the 360 version quickly come to light: the split screen multiplayer is fun and the ease in which you can join a friends world turns you into a sight seer. In Minecraft for the PC, you have to set up and use servers outside of the player client to keep a multiplayer game world up and running. You don’t ever join a friend’s single player world unless he inhabited his own multiplayer server. You join via entering an IP address to the server. Now, I’m not complaining, and that works just fine, but in the 360 version if you have a friend who has the game and he’s playing at that time, you can join immediately with no hassles.

Split screen make for some fun times, too. This is the perfect way to get some game time in with a loved one or a kid. It’s an immersive and creative world that’s easy to get into. It strokes non-gaming sensibilities: build tools, get shelter, thrive. (Why does Chrome mark “immersive” as incorrectly spelled? Doesn’t it play video games?)

But, it is in many ways inferior to the PC game, just so you know. The latest update to Minecraft is one of the biggest since the launch. It adds: a hunger meter, bigger and more diverse terrain and cave structures, and much more. The 360 version plays like the PC version did a year ago and that’s a bummer. To go with the lack of being fully updated comes with it the bugs of old, too. You’ll see bugs in this version that’s been fixed in the PC version for quite some time. There’s a limit to the map size (a glaring fault!) and a few other annoyances. This doesn’t mean that these features won’t be added later on or that the bugs will go unfixed. (These problems are only so glaring to me since I am currently involved in playing the PC version every so often.)

If this ends up your first experience with Minecraft, and for many strictly console players it will be, you won’t even know the differences anyways.  Is the PC version better? Most definitely. Should this stop you from getting this on your 360? Nope.

For your fun and enjoyment I present the PERSONAL COMPUTER version of Minecraft.