I recently got my hands on the Xperia Play (thanks, Sony Ericsson!) to have a play with some of the new games that had been announced exclusively for the device. One of those games was Minecraft Pocket Edition. Being a massive fan of Minecraft on the desktop I was interested to see what the mobile edition of the game was offering. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the game is exactly how you see it on the desktop (although the shadowing and lighting effects aren’t as good), it’s not a game the kind of looks like Minecraft and they slapped the title on it (*cough*Bad Company 2*cough*). Hit the break to read a lil’ bit more about my experience with the game.
I’m sorry I didn’t get any screenshots as time was limited, but if you’re interested in the game you’ll know what it looks like anyway.
So I liked that it was exactly like the desktop version in terms of appearance, but then came the limits of using the game on a mobile device. There are only 20 blocks in which you can choose to build from — an infinite supply of said blocks, by the way — so that can be a bummer, but you get over it and have fun creating houses, go mining and all the cool stuff.
What I didn’t like about the game is how it will automatically jump only when you walk up to dirt blocks, so you’re left to keep hitting jump on nearly all the other blocks (stone, leaves, etc) in the game. The controls are also very touchy; I managed to turn sensitivity down a tad and that made the game a bit more playable, but I still didn’t like it. The controls made me feel uncomfortable playing the game, which in turn lead me to not want to play the game at all.
I will be very interested to see how the controls handle on non-Xperia Play devices as I was pretty let down with the Xperience (never again, I swear) on the Xperia Play, which is meant to be the pinnacle on mobile gaming. I certainly regret paying for the application — harsh, but that’s how I feel about it. Anyway, I’m going back to play it on the desktop. We totally need an Ausdroid Minecraft server.
Below is a 3rd party video of the game running on the Xperia Play.
Bummer, I actually kind of liked the control implementation. This is so far the only first person perspective game that I could actually control using the circle pads on the xplay. I agree that the game is extremely limited but seeing as I have not played the pc version, I still managed to get a few good hours out of it before I got bored.
Buy it if you see it for cheap.