No Small Feat
LittleBigPlanet does the impossible: it lives up to the hype.
Published: October 27, 2008
As polished and gorgeous as everything is (seriously, some of the textures in the game are absolutely stunning in their clarity and detail), there are the odd bits of technical slip-up here and there. Clipping is something of a problem -- particularly if your sackperson has things attached to their head or limbs, as they'll pop through objects above them -- though it rarely, if ever, actually impacts the gameplay. Physics issues, however, can, though it's almost always relegated to user-created levels where something has gone wrong.
Actually creating the levels is a fairly involved process, so much so that you'll likely spend well over an hour just going through all the tutorials and video lessons. It's a necessary evil, though, as learning the guidelines and rules of how LittleBigPlanet levels are made is paramount when letting your imagination run wild. Much was done to simplify things as much as possible (to make an enemy for instance, you need only give them a brain and a means of locomotion, though you can tweak almost everything about their movement and behavior with a few sliders and switches at your leisure), and for the most part, even a newcomer can go from bare canvas to an interactive experience in just a few minutes. It may not be especially complex, but it'll at least work -- provided you spent the necessary time going through the tutorials.
Your own levels are stored separately from the single-player "planet" (as is all the community/online stuff), and you're given plenty of control here too. You can take an existing level and copy it, allowing you to build in a base construct and tweak things to accommodate everything from exploration to races to just making something more involved, but you can also set up a name, give it a description and effectively duplicate the process that Media Molecule went through for their own levels, even if most will likely pale in comparison to the execution of the game's original concepts.
Even in the beta, I could see users creating levels with the same ideas as some of the stuff found in the later single-player levels, and the difference was, not surprisingly, rather pronounced. That's not to say some of the levels weren't brilliant in their own right, and at times the ways they executed those concepts in unorthodox ways that were utterly fascinating, but the final product was almost always bettered by the handiwork of the developers, which certainly makes sense.
Actually taking everything online is where things get even more messy, in both good and bad ways. Users that play your level can comment on it, tag it with a handful of different descriptors, heart it for easy replaying later and/or heart the author of the level to see more of his or her stuff. It's a fairly easy process, but the tags are sometimes way, way off, and the whole process starts to seem a little pointless when you see just how much content goes up on an hourly basis -- and that was just the beta. Sorting through all the user-generated content takes quite a bit of filtering, and moving around from one little patch on the online planet to another can be a klutzy, slightly frustrating exercise. Still, like the platforming, once you learn the particular quirks of the interface, it's quite manageable.
As good as all that single-player content is (and I'll refrain from spoiling anything, because half the awe that crept over me as I played was in just seeing how imaginative the levels really were), the user-generated stuff is where this game will live or die. Media Molecule was incredibly smart in how they handled things here, strongly encouraging players to experience the single-player stuff and unlock all the little stickers, objects, sounds and backgrounds bit by bit first, then allowing them to be used however the user sees fit. Better still, just about any object created by the users can be shared (usually as an end-level gift), allowing the progress of just one or a few players to fuel everyone else's creative juices. So long as the community continues to support newcomers and other creators, the possibilities truly are endless, and I can't wait to see how the game looks in a year's time.
