Mojang's crown jewel of indie game development will soon be making its way over to the console universe. A special 360 rendition of Minecraft will hit the Xbox Live Arcade next year, for those of us who prefer to play with virtual legos via wireless controllers instead of the traditional mouse and keyboard rig.

Rumor has it that the new Xbox version of the game will come with Kinect support, though I'm not entirely sure to what degree the technology will be implemented in gameplay. It's not a particularly body-oriented experience, given that you're driving around a little blocky avatar in a little blocky world, but maybe there will be some voice recognition features that could be fun for those of you who have gotten secret spy cameras installed on the tops of your entertainment centers. The rest of us console gamers will have to make do with a mostly unchanged version of the original building toy. 

The crafting mechanism will be made slightly easier for us unclever stick-swivelers; instead of the guess-and-check drag-and-drop method of the PC edition, we'll be able to choose an item from a list of available combinations. While dragging and dropping is a bit of a pain with the dual joysticks and the menu scroll will save players a good deal of mechanical frustration, the change does remove some of the challenge--and thrill--of discovery inherent in the original gameplay. You won't have to guess at combinations; you'll know them as soon as you have all the requisite materials. Granted, you won't know all possible craftable items until you have all possible combinable materials in your inventory, but you still won't be required to think of new ways to put things together. It's a slight jump in ease that might appeal to first-time players who have never tried the original Minecraft, though purists might feel differently about the new console-only easy route. 

Besides the crafting variance and the alleged Kinect features, Minecraft seems to be its same old self--just transported to a new audience. The Xbox arrival will be perfect for gamers like me, who dig on weird indie games and would totally play them on PC all the time if only we had a powerful enough machine to run them. I've gotten by on Minecraft's 2D cousin Terraria, but it will be nice to finally join the ranks of tri-dimensional crafters once I can download the game onto my only device powerful enough to handle even the most basic 3D rendering.