A friend of mine from Texas has always wanted to play MineCraft with me. The only problem is that we couldn't seem to get a small, two-person server working between us. My PC simply couldn't handle it, and he wasn't too keen on port-forwarding or using Hamachi to get around that. When MineCraft for the X-Box 360 was announced, I was somewhat skeptical, at least from the standpoint of "I've already got the game on my PC." But he talked me into getting it, as at the very least it would allow us both to play the game together.
And so, I bought and downloaded the game while I listened to him talking about what he was already doing while playing it. I'll admit (and as you can likely tell), my mood for MineCraft had been waning somewhat, and playing it again on the 360 has returned me to it somewhat. There are good and bad points about it, as there are with any game, and anyone reading this should know that these are entirely my opinions on the matter.
For instance, MC360 (as I've taken to calling it with friends) is based on an older version of the MineCraft Beta that many of us have been playing from the past. There are some things of it that I miss already, such as the greater number of biomes. Every map I've made so far has mostly been the "temperate" version of hills and trees, a desert and shorelines. No sign of winter biomes yet, but I may be wrong.
Also, the map is somewhat limited. On the PC, where players theoretically have potentially unlimited resources to spend on making a map larger and larger, the world is effectively infinite. On the 360, the map has mostly-invisible boundaries, walls that you can't bypass, dig through or place blocks against. This boundary is just slightly inside the size of the game's paper maps; as an interesting turn, every time you start a new map, your character has a paper map in their inventory to start. This also helps, as icons show where other players are in relation to yourself.
With a map that small, there isn't as much urge to do certain things. You never need to make giant structures or landmarks. If you get lost, it's as simple as finding one of the corners and heading diagonally inward, as you're likely to find something familiar in that direction. Rails are implemented, but beyond the "On a Rail" achievement (for riding 500 blocks in a single direction via minecart), there isn't as much use in making them.
The version the 360 uses is also before the hunger update, and thus the only ways to regain health are through porkchops, cakes, bread, fishing, and having your difficulty set to Peaceful. The armor is also the "old style," meaning that the more the armor degrades, the less protection it gives you. Once armor is around halfway degraded, it's almost like there's no reason to wear it any longer, and thus feels like a waste. The "skybox" - the highest point at which a player can legally place blocks in the game - seems a fair bit lower in MC360 than normal, and I do most of my playing before the MCPC updates that doubled that height.
There are some good points to the game, however. The graphics are quite nice, and the game is smoother than it is for me on PC. There isn't as much problem with running "fancy graphics" for me, and with a nice draw-distance. Sometimes the controls are hard to remember, of course, and so I've been known to accidentally throw my equipment across the room when I meant to use a crafting bench.
Now, the main reason I bought MC360 was so I could play it with my friend on X-Box Live. The game still has a fair bit of lag to it, but not as much as I have occasionally noticed on the Wickydoo Modded Server I sometimes play on. Monster fighting can be tricky when there's the tiny pause between your sword-swing and the enemy taking damage. Creepers also seem as if they have a larger "fuse radius," meaning you have to jog backward further to not get caught in the explosion.
All in all, it's an interesting purchase. It has its good points and its bad points, and the game seems to straddle the line between hints and promises of further updates to bring the game closer to what we have available for PC. Quite a few people seem to want the world's limits to be a bit larger.. and I'll admit that I share their sentiment. But like I told my friend, I really don't have much urge to play MC360 alone. If I'm going to play alone, I might as well play on PC, have less limitations and more available, even if I only play vanilla.
One final parting thought: When you make a new world in MC360, you are still able to add a custom seed if you wish. The seed and map generation process seems unchanged from the MineCraft Beta, as the old seed used in the "404 Challenge" still works perfectly.
