Nintendo today announced a surprise launch of Minecraft for the 3DS handheld during one of its Nintendo Direct live streams. The game is available starting today on the Nintendo 3DS eShop, as soon as the company’s stream ends at around 7PM ET. Developer Mojang’s seminal pixel-art sandbox game has made its way to pretty much every other gaming platform out there, from Windows Phones to Oculus Rift headsets to even single-board Raspberry Pi computers. So a 3DS port of the game is well overdue at this point.

Nintendo says Minecraft for 3DS will come both a survival and creative mode, five skin packs, and two texture packs. We don’t know how much Nintendo and Microsoft, which owns the Minecraft property, plan on charging for the handheld…

Continue reading…