Where's all this hype for LBP coming from?
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"At this point, everyone knows LittleBigPlanet as "that game with the cute sack-puppet characters where you make your own levels and stuff." Technically, the "game" portion is a 2D platformer with a little bit of spatial depth, and it'll ship with several premade levels. LittleBigPlanet is truly distinguished, though, by its potential for becoming a creative outlet. With its disarmingly cute ****and user-friendly tools that also offer tremendous depth, LittleBigPlanet makes imagination the only real limitation to what you can create. It's the exact opposite of the intimidating complexity of, say, building something in Unreal."
In LittleBigPlanet, players control small characters (nicknamed either "Sackboy" or "Sackgirl", owing to their material and appearance), each of which can jump, move, and grab objects. Players can use their abilities to shape and develop the highly manipulable environment to build custom spaces either individually, collaboratively, and/or competitively. Levels focus on co-operative, physics-based gameplay, and players can use mechanisms such as cogs and blocks to build anything from small level parts to large, complex worlds. The game will also allow opportunities for players to acquire new skills and tools.
A major focus of LittleBigPlanet will be on the global community features through the PlayStation Network for players to interact and share their "patches" - levels and other modifications - as well as online play.
Players can navigate their way through the world by jumping, pushing, grabbing, running and flying to overcome numerous puzzles provided by the game's robust physics engine. The traditional concept of enemies has not been shown but the game will, in fact, have enemies, ranging from the small, to the big and complex.[9] In addition, harmful objects can be placed in the game, such as pits of fire and being "squished" or flattened by an object that cause the player to restart that section of the level; players pop and roll out of restart points nearby.
A scoring system is also in place, in the form of a time trial with a start and end gate and players collecting world items such as sponge. Scoring is based on both time and execution of the level.
At its most simplistic, this is the most flexible and open-ended sandbox game of this generation. It hails back to The Incredible Machine on PCs – a game that took the same DIY mentality to gamers back in the mid-90s. However, the promise of being able to upload, download and display your creations – be them fully-fledged levels, obstacle courses, Rube Goldberg machines, deathtraps or just fun levels to fool around in – just makes us more excited. Surely, as Sony has been touting, LittleBigPlanet will foster a community of eager designers.
Though LBP will come with a full slate of single-player levels built in, it seems like the real treat will be playing through the levels and checking out the objects that the LBP community will create once they get their collective hands on the game. Certainly the toolset for creation looks to be more extensive than that of practically any other console game we've seen before. In addition to creating shapes and objects from scratch, you'll be able to add life and motion to them with gears and the aforementioned switches.
The movement of all the objects in the game relies on real physics. One of the objects we saw in the game was a monster with a retractable jaw that moved up and down automatically. By attaching the lines connected from a switch to each side of the jaw, we could control the movement of the jaws by turning the switch on or off. But, if we connected both lines to one side of elevating jaws and then threw the switch, the entire object would topple over as it became unbalanced. Media Molecule looks to be making things as easy to work with as possible here; in addition to simple building tools, they recently added an undo/redo feature that will wind back through time through your last procedures, letting you start over from scratch or at any point in the creation process.
But the creation doesn't stop there. If you like your monster with the switchable jaws, you'll be able to save the entire object as a "plan," essentially a template you can use later. You can even choose to copyright that plan, so that other people with whom you share your levels and objects won't be able to break down or build upon. In addition, we got a brief glimpse at how to use the PS3 Eye Toy accessory in the game to create stickers. You can take a screenshot at any point, then choose a number of different shapes to wrap around it and then place it anywhere in the world you wish, including your home base, which serves as the game's front end. When playing with friends online, your friends will be able to check out your customized HQ before you move on into the gameplay proper.
I personally have yet to see a preview from anyone that has anything negative to say about the game, and it looks incredibly fun. I don't know why you wouldn't at least be a little excited for this game, unless of course your only reason is a hatred of the PS3 or a desire to dismiss anything with colorful sty1es as "kiddy" to prove your manly-ness.
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