Well, I’ve been busy with a few projects lately. After I posted that last comic, I’ve been working on another one. It’s fun, and rewarding. I also picked up Pokemon White 2, and have been playing through along with my wife who has Black 2. I’m falling right back into the Pokemon groove after many long years. That’s for another day, though. Now I’ll address Sony’s family-gaming poster child.

When we bought our PS3, we borrowed LBP 1&2 from my brother’s friend, and I’ve finally managed to finish them both to my satisfaction. I’ll mainly talk here about the second, as I see it as mostly an upgrade and evolution over the first. Through both games, what impressed me most was the developers’ willingness to continue updating the game with fixes and content, some of it even free! The other impressive thing was the community levels, which are very often spotlighted by the Media Molecule team. I played some clunkers but some very interesting ones too.

So Little Big Planet is a series that Sony, or at least game journalists, are trying hard to set up as a Mario rival, I feel. I’m not sure if this is accurate, but I gotta say the feeling is very different. It’s a platformer, sure, but the similarity ends there. The focus in LBP is on customising, community, and gimmicks to modify the gameplay beyond run'n'jump. All these are successful to varying degrees. Overall it tries to do a lot of things, and does them fairly well, but it is also flawed.

My main annoyance with the game was with the community aspect. Frankly, I’m not a social person, and much of the game encouraged multiplayer. I did try to play multiplayer for most of LBP2, but was blocked from a truly great experience by the often bad lag (probably my crappy Australian internet), and other players. I’d say half were as good as me or better, but those with much worse skills were frustrating to play with, and some were downright obstructionist. Often I’d just be denied my requests for multi though, so I’d play levels by myself. Many levels are easier this way anyway, as “lives” are too finite and divided among players, so repeating levels from the start was a too common and frustrating experience. The main levels should have taken a page from many of the best community levels, and used infinite life gong checkpoints throughout.

Community levels, as I’ve said, were also hit and miss. Long loading times leading to a very barren and disappointing level discouraged discovery, but going by number of likes gave greater success. I also played a great series of Donkey Kong Country-themed levels with an original plot. These types of levels were amusing as they tried to recreate certain gameplay styles in the not always suitable LBP engine.

Gameplay in the main game itself was servicable, the highlight being interaction with the environments and objects. However, I feel that the heavy momentum made precision platforming difficult, the jump was too short, and the three-plane 2D movement was often poorly implemented. This was disappointing, but the grappling hook sections were very good, and other twists and gimmicks could be interesting. Once I was used to the physics and conventions, the variations often made for fun levels.

The collecting aspect was a big part of the game, and I always enjoy this. Every level is packed full of little prize bubbles, with stickers, costumes, and decorations. I took joy in creating new outfits for my Sack thing often, but didn’t use stickers much except to unlock things in levels (rarely). I also neglected the decorations for the most part. Personally I don’t have a taste for creating content in games, it’s just my nature I suppose. But since that was emphasised here, I felt I was missing out. Still, I liked finding objects to use in that mode, even if I didn’t use them. The other thing with cotumes was the obnoxiously high prices demanded for simple costumes as DLC. I don’t care how cool the IP you’ve licensed is, $10 for some clothes is way too far! *sigh*, that’s just the way the world of gaming is now.

So I feel this game had highs and lows. I had some very nice multiplayer experiences when latency was low, and some of the directions the game went were better than others. But other segments, such as the sidescrolling shooters, were buggy and less fun. The aesthetics of the game were very creative and made for beautiful levels in worlds with strongly cohesive looks. Overall there was an arts-and-crafts theme that carried throughout, and was very effective. Good voice acting too, in the cutscenes, although the plot was necessarily a bit silly. To be expected.

The extensibility of the engine to many gameplay types was definitely a strength, but I feel the basic controls were a little awkward. I think what stopped me playing it more often was the slow menus, lag and loading times. I wonder if people in Amurrica have a much better experience with games with a strong online aspect. Well, it makes me prefer offline games like Nintendo’s stuff, and retro games. They’ll drag me kicking and screaming into modern gaming over my dead body!

Wife’s comment: “It looked cute, but it was too hard.” I tried to play local multi with her, but unfortunately the difficulty ramped a little too quickly and later levels were sometimes downright brutal. Final boss was pretty easy though, just long.