Minecraft has just landed for 1600 points on the Xbox Marketplace. If you’re a big Minecraft fan you’ll want to scoop it up. It’s the same content as version 1.6.6 so that means there are no pistons, but Jeb has stated that 1.7.3 will be released sometime this summer for no charge.

So we haven’t really featured a texture pack since we did the Sphax Pure BD pack a while back and that post is still hugely popular. I’ve been running with the default vanilla texture pack for a few patches now because Optifine got behind and I never bothered to download MCPatcher even though it’s available right here on JOB.

This texture pack was featured on Minecraft Forums a few days ago so I picked it up to play with it some. It’s a pretty fun texture pack but like most it has it’s pros and cons.

Right off the bat you’ll see that the texture pack has really great icons and looks very NES’ish. In the screenshot above you’ll notice that the blocks look great from a certain distance and beyond, but up close can be very annoying and noisy.

The trees might be my favorite part of the texture pack. They look very 8-bit while retaining some pretty easy to recognize texture and coloring. The downside is that if you have a good enough computer to run “fancy” graphics – the trees aren’t very transparent.

Creepers look somewhat the same and sand is very repetitive to the eyes as is the ocean/large bodies of water. The sun and moon are round instead of square but fit well with Minecraft’s blocky feel.

The inventory and crafting screen is an eye burning green but is true to old Nintendo games that made a lot of use out of green backdrops to menus and selection screens. The background behind the character in the inventory window is very NES’ish and almost looks straight out of Duck Hunt or Super Mario.

Grass is very smooth and tiles really well. Sand looked fine on the beach but looks a wee bit out of place when you see it in random spots like on top of the stone as seen here. Mobs and animals look good and they did as good of a job as I’d imagine possible to give them a NES type feel to them even though there’s only so much you can do to keep them from looking like normal cows/pigs.

Altogether the texture pack does what it’s set out to do – give Minecraft some retro-Nintendo style graphics. It’s a very novel and fun texture pack but as much time as I spend in caves and in buildings I’ve built I’d have a hard time getting over the noisiness of the textures up close. I did play with it for a while and enjoyed it, so if it’s something you’d be interested in – check out the official Minecraft thread for the texture pack and give it a whirl.

Jeb has stated that Minecraft 1.2.5 will be pushed out on April 4th but he’s releasing a “prerelease” of it today. The game will not automatically update itself when you run it until the 4th, but you can choose to go ahead and update today to the exact version that will be pushed out later. Here’s a list of the changes:

Changelog:

• Added shift clicking support in furnaces
• Added method to easily acquire blocks you have selected in the world in Creative mode using the ‘pick block’ key
• Made the Direct Connect dialog remember the last IP for the current session
• Fixed issues detected certain links in chat
• Fixed wild ocelots behaving like tamed cats
• Fixed various chat crashes
• Made cats less eager to sit on things
• Made cats less patient
• Fixed world generation failing under certain circumstances
• Fixed issues turning off sound under certain circumstances
• Removed all ghost entities under the command of Lord Herobrine
• Fixed crash when pasting certain characters in chat
• Fixed slash ‘/’ key not behaving correctly in certain environments
• Fixed command matching being too greedy (for example: typing ‘/stophammertime’ no longer stops your server)
• Fixed not being able to click coloured links
• Fixed potential issue with village door detection (which could cause too many villagers)
• Made using a stack of bowls on Mooshrooms not consume the whole stack of bowls
• Made punching a TNT block with flint and steel in hand destroy and drop a TNT block (right-clicking will activate the TNT)

The two big benefits to this patch that I can see are the issues where people’s game would crash upon certain world generation and the pick-block key for creative mode.

The JOB server will remain running 1.2.4 until the patch is officially pushed out, though. If you’d like to update your client anyway and check out 1.2.5 or if you’re frustrated with some crashes you’re experiencing and just want a more stable release you can check out the Minecraft Blog post and download it!