One of the first things we did the moment E3 started was head over to the Sony Ericsson booth to get a hands-on with Minecraft (and numerous other games) on the Xperia Play. After playing around with it for awhile, we came to realize one thing. If you already like Minecraft, you will be in trouble.
Taking advantage of pretty much every button on the Xperia Play’s slide out controller, Minecraft Pocket Edition is essentially the PC game ported right to the Xperia Play. It features everything that you would find in the PC version and everything is accessible with one button or another. Digging and placing blocks is done by using the shoulder buttons while flipping through your hotbar items and inventory, jumping and other little actions are done by pushing the front four buttons. Your direction of view is controlled by the right touch pad while movement is done using either the left touch pad or the d-pad. You can also switch from third-person to first-person point of view.
Graphically, Minecraft on the Xperia Play looks great and while everything is functioning and looks great, as with the PC version of Minecraft, this one is currently in Beta as well. Perhaps the greatest news that Minecraft players could hear though is that this will be multiplayer enabled as well just like the PC version. You will be able to connect to servers (once they are up of course) and be able to play with your friends online. This would mean that a mobile version of the serve software may very well be available at some point as well to the public just like the PC server software is.
Minecraft Pocket Edition, from what we are hearing, will be exclusive to only the Xperia Play. This does conflict with the fact that is was stated it would come to other devices after a short temporary exclusive on the Xperia Play. We will try to confirm that with someone else.
