Playing this week's Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition is like stepping into a time machine for fans of the PC game. The console port from 4J Studios faithfully re-creates Mojang's blocky world-building game, but it's an earlier version of that game, and a somewhat stripped-down one as well, in comparison to the original. It's still totally fun and addictive, but fans of the PC version will experience a somewhat unpleasant sense of deja vu the first time they play.
The most important addition that we'd like to see is of course the release of the various updates that would bring this Minecraft alongside the PC version in terms of in-game features. We're talking hunger and experience meters, jungle biomes, ravines, Nether Fortresses, Strongholds, abandoned mine shafts... lots of cool stuff that adds to the experience of exploring the world. This content is supposedly coming in future updates, though no release plan has yet been revealed.
There are other features though, elements from the PC version of the game that don't necessarily fit into one of the capital-U Updates, but are nonetheless essential to delivering a proper Minecraft experience. We're going to take a moment now to highlight those, in the hopes that mentioning these absent features will somehow magically transport them into the Xbox 360 game.
Or, you know, 4J will take notice and do something about it. Magic would be cooler though.
On-The-Fly Difficulty Adjustment
Jumping in and out of Minecraft's Peaceful difficulty -- which stops monsters from coming after you -- is a hallmark of the PC version of the game. Sometimes you just want to explore and not worry about dying 56,015,963,831 miles from your spawn and losing all of your hard-gathered resources in the process. You can adjust the difficulty of a saved world on the Xbox 360 anytime you load it up, but there's no option for doing that in-game, like you can in the PC version.
Rent-A-Server
Players can't rent their own servers in Minecraft on PC, but they can create one using a secondary piece of software. That's not really an option with your Xbox 360 for a variety of reasons, but being able to rent server space and store a persistent Minecraft world somewhere in the cloud would go a long way toward creating the sort of multiplayer community that exists on the PC side. The max player count would also have to be upped from the current eight-player limit on the console side, but it would be cool to see some of the elaborate group construction projects from the PC world find life in the Xbox 360 version as well.
On-Screen Coordinates
In the PC game, you can press F3 at anytime to bring debug information up on the screen. It's a common enough thing in PC games, but it's especially useful in Minecraft since your coordinates within the world along X, Y, and Z axes are listed along with the rest of the info. For those who are serious about Minecraft building, having access to those coordinates is invaluable. Since the world is laid out along a blocky grid, being able to use numbers makes construction planning -- both aboveground and below -- much easier to deal with.
Creative Mode
This is a serious no-brainer. Minecraft didn't start out with the survival elements you see now that turn the experience into more of a "game." It was born as a sort of virtual LEGO set, and that prototypical take lives on in the PC version as Creative Mode. Loading up a new world in this way starts out just like any other. You're deposited at a random spawn point and the world then becomes yours to explore. The difference in Creative Mode is that there's no need for resource management. Your inventory is filled with an infinite supply of every block, resource type, and craftable item in the game. Also, you can fly. Creative Mode strips out the "game" portion of Minecraft and lets you focus squarely on the building.
Bigger Maps
This could simply be a hardware limitation, but you'll quickly learn as you explore your world that the overall map size in the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft is actually quite small compared to what you get in the PC game. Surely we can go bigger, right? Walk for 10 or 15 minutes in one direction in this console release and you're going to hit an invisible wall. Walk for the same amount of time in the PC game, and you'll just have that much distance to cover as you retrace your steps back to wherever you were carving out your piece of the world.
Source : http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/723634/minecraft-360-finding-the-missing-pieces/
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