games: LittleBigPlanet

If you’re humming and hahing about buying a Playstation 3 for the kids this Christmas, LittleBigPlanetcould well be the reason to go for it, hell it’s a good reason to buy a PS3 for yourself!

First off the presentation will blow your mind. It has an original and charming homemade aesthetic with everything made of cardboard, fabric, bits of sponge and other household scraps. This is all enhanced by a mechanical or stop-motion animation feel to a lot of the background movement. At the same time, it’s a vision of high res beauty and the textures of the different materials making up the world are astounding. The whole thing is just so tangible. Add to that some gorgeously catchy and happy music, teamed with Stephen Fry’s avuncular narration, and you’ve got a world you will want to spend a lot of time in. It’s also suitably pitched for both adults and children, and both hardcore and casual gamers, being encouraging and clear in instruction without patronising and always keeping a good sense of humour.

There are 2 main elements to LittleBigPlanet: gaming and customizing.

From the gaming side, LittleBigPlanet is at heart a 2d side scrolling platformer, and I love it for being that. Yes, it’s had some modern updates and is physics based and allows you to move between 3 planes, but the simplicity of the core gameplay concept and the controls, which are basically just running, jumping and grabbing on to stuff, mean you can concentrate on other things, like the dazzling array of eye candy or the fantastic ingenuity and variety of the level design, both of which continually keep you engaged and keep the game feeling fresh. There’s also a large collection element, with points bubbles, decorative items like stickers and costumes, and creation tools liberally scattered around. It also encourages co-operative play with some areas only accessible if you have at least 2 people playing.

Delightful and moreish as this is, I do have a few criticisms. As well as being able to manually control movement between background, mid and foreground, the game will automatically move you from plane to plane depending on context, but this doesn’t always match your intentions. Also, the control is just a shade less precise than is ideal, which is generally not a problem, but can be frustrating in some of the trickier platforming sections. It’s also annoying that the try again feature, which lets you blow up your sackboy and return to your last checkpoint if you get stuck, doesn’t reset that section of the level. So if you’ve somehow irreparably blocked your own path, while you’ll move back, your mistake will stay and you’ll need to restart the level.

But LittleBigPlanet is more than just a well-crafted and fun platformer. Its concept of playing around in a world made up of the creative energy from our dreams is absolutely delightful. With the games’ emphasis on creative imagination from being able to decorate and customize everything with stickers and whatnot, to full on level creation, it’s actually an accurate description.

The level creator is incredibly detailed and you can put together some really wonderful stuff. I think it’s easiness has been exaggerated by Sony somewhat, but it’s not impossible, not too hard for kids, and is incredibly comprehensive, you just have to put a little time in, but this is fun in itself. If full on level creation is not your thing, then you can still get creative by customizing your sackboy, and decorating anything and everything you like. You can even put your own photos into the game if you have a Playstation eye.

Even if you only want to play and can’t be arsed with stickers, then as well as a great story mode, you benefit from the creation aspect by getting access to all of the user generated levels out there, which are organized really well, so it’s easy to find the best quality levels based on ratings and favourites.

All in all this is a great outing for Playstation and should be a family favourite for a long while to come. 5 stars.

For the best of the rest:

Game Spot:
Although Little Big Planet could be described as a platforming game, its dedication to creativity in every area takes it far beyond the confines of the genre. Everything from your character to the environment is geared towards user creation and adaptation, via stickers and costumes right up to a full-blown level creator. Each level of the story mode is an unforgettable trip through the wild imagination of the designers, and it would be difficult to find a game that’s as much fun to play with friends co-operatively.

IGN:
It’s been a good while since we saw the first GDC demo of LittleBigPlanet, and pretty much everyone in attendance was blown away by what we witnessed. The promise of an original platformer that would allow us to create our own levels, practically on the fly, was immense, and the game quickly became one of the PlayStation 3’s marquee titles and a good reason to pick up a system. We all figured it would be good, so the question was, just how good would it be?

Game Trailers:
A community-based game where players meet on a planet scattered with individual plots and use their character’s abilities to play, create and share what they build with other gamers throughout the world.