How much creativity have you got stored away in your tiny sacks?It's a whole new world out there
Tackling the review of something as potentially massive as LittleBigPlanet is a daunting task indeed. Having already extolled the virtues of creative gaming in the preview (covering the recent closed beta), a lot of water has trickled under the old bridge since then and what was potentially the Playstation 3's killer app has been dogged with last-minute release schedule nightmares, server problems and now harsh moderation of anything potentially copyright-infringing.
What MediaMolecule set out to create was a utopian vision of a mass-gaming-community-fuelled imagination mindsplurt, giving gamers enough inspiration in a handful of MediaMolecule penned levels to spur them on to create their own.
The Beta was very much like that. No harsh moderation, no instructions, not much to play with on the official side of things just a small handful of initial levels. Now the full game has been released, MediaMolecule's vision feels like it's been crushed under a large jackboot-clad foot.
You're sacked
LittleBigPlanet pays homage to classic platform gaming, given a hybrid 2D/3D slant and a serious injection of real-world physics and kinetics. At its heart, the main "quest" concerns your character, Sackboy (or Sackgirl of course) and a race to complete several challenges laid down by the weird and wonderful characters inhabiting LittleBigPlanet - a world created by the various brainfarts of imaginative creative types all over the world.
Controlling Sackboy is quite simple. It's a platformer so you jump a lot (and you'd better get used to the way Sackboy moves otherwise you are going to get nowhere in the main platform quest). Each level has three main "layers" which allow you to move into and out of the screen. This has caused much consternation and irritation amongst early players who have found the Z-Axis shift to be a constant pain in the bum but once you've gone through a few levels, you'll start to get a feel for how it works.
The main thrust of the whole LittleBigPlanet experience is creativity. Once you start to complete a few levels, and start to pick up various materials, objects, clothing and stickers throughout the game world you can eventually start to create your own content, you can dress your sackboy in whatever outrageous get-up you fancy, or you can decorate your pod (the hub of the game and your own little slice of Sackboy heaven). Not only that but you can start to use all the goodies and materials in the game to create your own levels and publish them to the official MediaMolecule servers.
Here's where the real-world creeps in and spoils things a tad. In the Beta, you could pretty much create whatever you wanted and very quickly hundreds of parody levels popped up spoofing everything from Sonic, Mario through to Gears of War and of course various anti Microsoft / Xbox 360 levels.
Now the game's been properly released, all that content has been mercilessly hacked out and moderated to bits. Basically even something as inoffensive as a photo of game character-shaped alarm clock (I speak from personal experience here) will mean that your level will be brutally chopped never to be seen again. Not great news if you're someone who carried stuff over from the Beta and doesn't have a copy of the original level. All your hard work will be flushed and will go swirly. Harsh but in today's litigation-obsessed society you can sort of see why this has happened, it's just a shame that MediaMolecule didn't tell everyone a lot earlier and make it public knowledge that copyright-infringing levels would be culled without notice.
So in some ways you have to really have a mind that's in tune with what MediaMolecule have tried to achieve here, and you need to spend a fair amount of time coming up with an original idea, planning it, creating it and playtesting it - which as you can imagine is a massive gigantic gaping time-sink. If you're a multi-platform-owning gamer, it could be that your gaming schedule is so packed that you really won't have the time or the inclination to devote to something that demands such a huge commitment so be warned, LittleBigPlanet isn't for you if you're not prepared to put the hours in.
Whatever happened to the Doozers?
Now I've gone over the negative side of things, it's time to examine exactly what LittleBigPlanet offers in terms of a potential purchase. For all my niggles and gripes about it, it's an intensely addictive experience. Though the main quest levels are nowhere near the "80 or so levels" that MediaMolecule promised (more like 15 with a whole bunch of challenge levels and minigames), you can forgive all that when you realise that you could spend a year just wading through other people's published stuff online (and one good thing about the new harsh moderation regime is that the majority of "cool" levels on offer really are cool and not just some mongtard stringing rockets to a plank and slamming you straight into a wall).
Amusingly, a lot of the levels are perfect for Trophy whores and now that the game fully supports 'em, you'll find countless levels that are designed to instantly max out your LBP Trophy scores. Pointless I know, but there are people who put a lot of stock in their virtual competitive cyber-willy measuring so they'll be all over these levels like flies on a cat-turd.
So, to the crux of what gives LittleBigPlanet its score. The user creation tools and the potential they offer really are what LittleBigPlanet is all about. Without them, this game wouldn't have raised much more than an amused grin or two. With them, if you're of a certain mindset you're going to want to get the single player (and co op) stuff out of the way so you can lock yourself in your room, grab a pen and paper and start to plan out your LBP Magnum Opus. Using materials and tech toys at your disposal, after playing through the excellent Stephen Fry-voiced tutorials, you can really start to let rip with your imagination.
Again, creating anything (even the simplest machine-like stuff) is massively time consuming so be prepared to lose hours of your life to putting together a level that not only plays reasonably well, but doesn't destroy itself in a fit of physics-induced pique. Make sure you glue it all together too, as many many people have complained that their levels have just fallen apart as soon as they've hit the "go" button.
Using your popit cursor you can quickly choose pre-formed shapes and use these as "brushes" to make the structure of your level, or you can just nab a pre-made template and use that as the basis for something cool.
In addition to the materials there are wheels, bolts, pistons, chains, all manner of switches and countless other gadgets that can help you to build components for your levels. The best advice is to build everything separately before bolting it together as more often than not, a bit of careless placement of objects or inept glueing will mean you have to go through the ballache of picking your level apart to find out what went wrong (there are undo and redo tools but sometimes you find yourself getting into such a huge complex mess that it's not always easy to see where you went wrong).
Objects you create can be stored away in your goodie bag for later use, and it's a good idea to get used to doing this as re-using objects and even using stuff that you find littered around the official levels can mean that you can put something playable together in double-quick time. Practice and perseverance are needed and it's a good idea to play through all the official levels and a lot of other people's before tackling this mammoth process yourself. Once you have broken your LBP creative duck, you'll be able to upload your level and let everyone else in the world play it (and criticise it using the built-in rating system. Don't get too downhearted if people are mercilessly cruel!)
This is an amazing experience, and one that really needs to be examined by a lot of other developers. Not just for games like this but for other games where sharing your creations could propel even the most boring and turgid gaming franchise into the creative stratosphere. Let's hope that LBP heralds the start of user-creativity as a selling point.
Don't just sit there playing with yourself!
LittleBigPlanet is multiplayer friendly. In local mode, you can use four controllers to attack levels with multiple sackpeople (in fact some levels will require a bit of co-operation to get at certain objects and materials hidden where only two or more players can work together to get at them). This extends online too and you can hook up with your PSN pals and play too. At times the network lag can get a bit annoying but on a reasonably quick connection the game works pretty well (though sometimes there are serious camera issues if one player lags behind and other players can't quite see where they're going because the camera hasn't caught up).
In essence, it's very difficult to categorise LittleBigPlanet and figure out whether it'll endear itself to the majority of gamers. Those with buckets of time to devote to it will find it a richly rewarding experience. Those just searching for a cute platformer may find the main game quests tough and frustrating (and way too short lived). Younger players might find the controls fiddly and might get put off by the difficulty curve. My guess is that this particular killer app might only be killer to a relatively narrow niche of gamers who will "get it" and understand what's on offer, and wholeheartedly embrace the central idea that MediaMolecule tried to get across, mostly successfully.
All in all though, there's a lot of fine tuning needed now the full product is here, and arguments over that harsh moderation stance are going to rage on and on, as are arguments about whether it's even a game at all. MediaMolecule are already at work on the sequel (an odd thing for a game that could and indeed already is driven by downloadable content, including one of the most ridiculously expensive downloadable items since the Oblivion Horse Armour - a T shirt for your sackboy that costs nearly as much as a real T shirt would!)
Time is the appropriate word to accompany any recommendation for LittleBigPlanet. It takes time to get the most satisfaction from the game, takes oodles of time to create anything with it, and only time will tell whether MediaMolecule's great experiment will ultimately prove to be successful and will gel with enough players to keep this title talked about for years to come.
With a few annoying but relatively minor niggles keeping this from a perfect score, it's still one of the strongest titles on the PS3 and certainly one of the most unique "gaming" experiences you could ever hope to encounter this-gen.
Bungie vows never to follow the Activision route and charge extra for online multiplayer
(1) (30/07) 
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#1 - Tiger_Walts - on 10/11/2008 at 10:11 wrote:
:P
#2 - peej - on 10/11/2008 at 11:29 wrote:
'sides, no one else volunteered!