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 James Wallis
WDS Article Author, Frontiers Nerd, Star Trek Geek, Console Inventer Wannabee...
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Get our game guide for: LittleBigPlanet. This precise WALKTHROUGH GAME STRATEGY GUIDE is now available for you right in your members area and compatable for the Sony Playstation 3 (PS3) Platform. GameGuideDog.Com is dedicated to helping gamers through games. We are confident our support and guides are absolutely the best gaming resource anywhere!
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It was the little game with big ideas. A compact, cute PS3 platform game from a tiny indie studio that wanted the world to muck in with its making, using level and object creation tools. But with time (and not very much of it at that), LittleBigPlanet became a very big game indeed.
Sony got giddy with all the reflected glory and love. First it promoted the game's Sackboy avatar to platform mascot and ubiquitous totem of cool, and then elevated LittleBigPlanet itself to the status of a triple-A, blockbuster tent-pole of its entire platform strategy. It as good as said that this was the game that would save PS3, and even those who'd loved it at first sight had to wonder whether Media Molecule's funky experiment could take the strain.
Amidst all this big talk though, one of the game's big ideas got lost in the chatter: an idea that will probably mean more to more people than any of the Game 3.0 posturing and theorising, or the daringly ambitious online features, or the astonishing freedom of the creative tools. LittleBigPlanet sets out to resurrect the simple fun of a game you control with left, right and jump. It sets out to make the side-scrolling platform game relevant and exciting again. And it succeeds.
The Tudor gardens of Britain; the African savannah; a haunted Tim Burton wedding in some spooky alternative South America; and on through Mexican badlands, American cities, mystical interludes in Japan and India, and a devious parody of a Siberian villain's lair. The conceit is that every themed stop on the way is curated by a creator, a king or magician who sets the scene and the challenges, the way players are later invited to themselves.
It's a marvel: a high-res, low-fi animated sketchbook that never fails to delight and astonish, even if the art in some stages has less charm than in others (the Japanese and Indian stages being the swoonsome highlight). Drinking in every detail is a compelling enough reason for several playthroughs of this fairly short Story mode. The vast number of hidden collectables is another: all of them are valuable and useful, being stickers, materials, machines, objects, tools or decorations to use in the game's Create mode, or costume pieces for dressing up the Sackboys (an addictive diversion in itself), or mini-game levels.
You'll also want to return to play as much of the game as you can in multiplayer. The levels and goals are identical - with the exception of a few optional puzzles for multiple players only - but with more than one Sackboy running around, LittleBigPlanet becomes a loosely-structured scrum of competition, collaboration and sheer, joyful mucking around. There are mini-races, and the scramble to collect bubbles of stuff for your score - those bubbles add a score multiplier if you chain them, and pop with a deliciously moreish sound. The camera scales competently for four players on a single machine, and it's played this way that LittleBigPlanet is at its absolute best: an irresistible, riotous, social and totally accessible entertainment.
The game's physics have a huge part to play in this. In keeping with the theme of conjuring fantasy from the realistic and mundane, the physics are consistent but also exaggerated and slightly slowed, and the PS3's processing power taxed to the point of slowdown in a couple of places by the sheer amount of bouncing, collapsing, pinwheeling chaos, as well as the blistering speeds achieved in some vehicle sections. It's slapstick of the highest order, and again, adding extra players just adds to the feedback-loop of fun.
With physics as the basic building block, Media Molecule has designed levels around momentum and mechanical ingenuity more than taxing puzzles or acrobatic challenges. The quality isn't totally consistent - the game drags a little in the finicky and generic Mexican section, about halfway through. The mini-game levels seem rather arbitrary and pointless solo, although if you use the Quick Play option to chain them in multiplayer, they can sustain an uproarious hour or two. But the second half of Story mode is mostly fantastic, and at their most ingenious and surprising, the systems of cogs and tunnels and traps that the Sackboys tumble through are worthy of Nintendo's best designs.
Then there's the checkpoint lives system, which gives you an infinite number of lives for a level, but only three (or on too-rare occasions, six) for any given checkpoint. Although checkpoints are generously and well placed, three lives just aren't enough for some of the harder sections, and if you lose them all, it's back to the start of the level. Abandoning lives completely would have stripped all the tension out of the game, but this inflexible system creates half a dozen chokepoints of almost unbearable, teeth-grinding irritation that simply didn't need to be there.
LittleBigPlanet is a great platform game. It's not a perfect one. It doesn't need to be, though, because its creative tools turn it into something else entirely, a unique, hilarious, endless entertainment. Even - and this is an absolutely crucial point - if you never use them.
Go to Cool Levels, and LittleBigPlanet presents you with an alternative world of stages created by other players, scattered around randomly to encourage you to browse and take punts on things. A genius tagging system - where you're asked to pick one of a random selection of words to describe a level after you've played it - combined with "heart" scores (hearting is LittleBigPlanet's equivalent of digg.com's digging, and also works as a bookmark for favourite items in Create mode) makes it easy to get a feel for what's worth trying. Levels download very quickly, too, and can be saved to the hard drive for posterity, or to edit yourself later. The review copy of the game could have done with more powerful and flexible search features, but we understand this will be addressed in the final version.
And the levels themselves, based on those generated by the game's beta test alone, are simply extraordinary. You haven't seen anything like this in videogames before. Finely-tuned pieces of platform-game design are understandably rare, and attempts to recreate others, like Super Mario Bros' first level, don't even remotely work. But these are replaced by a wild creativity and anarchic humour that no organised development studio could ever hope to create, and a sort of gleeful ignorance of the need to have a point or be a challenge or submit to any kind of traditional concept of what a videogame level should be.
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GDC: LittleBigPlanet Online features
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Posted by GameGuideDog.com Member on November 28, 2008