Minecraft for the Vita is mostly what you would expect – It's Minecraft… But it's in your hand.
A demo of Minecraft PlayStation Vita Edition has been made available at the Sony booth at this year's Tokyo Game Show, and I got a chance to give it a whirl.
Sadly, the allotted play time was 10 minutes, and honestly, what can you do in Minecraft in only 10 minutes. You can't build a fortress, or mine a massive cavern, or develop a self-sustaining farm. All you can do is explore. The game was in creative mode, so I set about doing what I usually do in creative mode: I dug down to bedrock, built a pillar of TNT up to the clouds, and blew the whole thing up.
As expected, the framerate chugged a bit trying to handle all the debris. Seeing that, I then attempted to see if I could crash the game, but sadly ran out of time before I could build a large enough explosive structure.
Minecraft has been ported to several consoles, and the Vita version simply feels like a hand-held version of console Minecraft. As a PC player, the button assignment takes a little bit of getting used to, but otherwise, there are no major surprises other than the fact that it's in your hand.
Players will be able to carry over their save data between the PS3 and the Vita for mining on the go. While save data can be upgraded from the PS3 or Vita to the PS4, due to change in world size, the reverse is not possible, which does give me pause to consider which version(s) to get. That and the fact that it's now a Microsoft game on a Sony platform…
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