E3 2011: Hands-on with Minecraft for Xperia Play

Interesting fact: Mojang's surprise indie hit Minecraft was foreshadowed in 1995 by Douglas Coupland, who devised a Lego-like piece of software called Oop! in his novel Microserfs.

In case you haven't played it, Minecraft is an ostensibly simple world-creation tool in which you can form the landscape however you like using a rudimentary set of building blocks and components.

While the paid Beta version contains traditional gaming elements like health and baddies, there's no goal to speak of in the original Classic version.

And that's the current state of the Xperia Play game Minecraft Pocket Edition. Thankfully, as Mojang is keen to stress with a permanent notice on the screen, the version currently playable at E3 is "not the finished product.”

That means all you can do is build stuff, and multiplayer is limited to local. We don't know what Mojang plans to add, but it's reasonable to assume that there will be more to Minecraft Pocket Edition when it goes on sale.

Of course, Minecraft on PC originally took off in its basic state - the state the mobile version is currently in - thanks largely to the ease with which you can construct your blocky worlds and share them with others.

In Minecraft Pocket Edition, you plonk down blocks with R Shoulder and dig with L Shoulder. Cross lets you jump; Circle and Square scroll left and right through an abbreviated version of your inventory of blocks and objects (you can also select these using the touchscreen); and Triangle takes you to your full inventory. You move using the D-pad and look around using the right-hand touchpad.

It's a sensible, intuitive setup, but the DualShock-like controls undoubtedly lack the easy fluidity of a mouse and keyboard. We're keen to see how well it works on an iPhone or iPad, and what new input methods Mojang might come up with.

While we wait for that, the Xperia Play version of Minecraft Pocket Edition is perfectly serviceable in its unfinished state – more or less as we'd expect given the simplicity of the graphics and gameplay.

If Mojang can come up with some new ways to bring fluidity to the building process on a smartphone and bulk up the game with the features now available in the Beta version of the PC game, it'll be hard to fault.