LittleBigPlanet (PS3)
Those are some big shoes to fill.
10/28/2008 5:26 PM | 23 Comments | Page 2 of 3
What's Hot: Looks great; Helpful storybook-like tutorials; Great music; Casual vibe will appeal to non-gamers; Sophisticated level-design tools...
What's Not: ...that are probably far too sophisticated for most gamers; Too difficult; Sketchy controls; Collecting stickers = not especially exciting to a grown man.
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
Look out! It's a giant skull-faced thing!
What I was looking at on-screen was still terribly cute -- jaded old soul that I am, even I uttered an "aw" or two on occasion -- but what I was feeling was white-knuckle, controller-hurling frustration.
Which brings me to my core complaint about
LittleBigPlanet: If you're going to make a Mario clone, it better be a goddamn good Mario clone. And
LittleBigPlanet is not a very good Mario clone.
During the game, I quite literally pinned a tail on a donkey. I was challenged to see how many times I could jump over a whirling necktie. I drove a hotrod, rode a skateboard, braved photorealistic flames and scenery-chewing Skulldozers. I scoured tea cups for stickers.
These things sound fun. But they're not.
The problem is, the whole enterprise -- whirling neckties, skateboard riding, tail-pinning, etc. -- never really comes together; it never really congeals into an experience. There's no motivation for any of this, no overriding goal
à la "save the Princess." Despite the game's precious graphics, it's merely a series of disparate ideas, themes and gameplay variations, all cobbled together for no clear reason. There's too much style and not enough substance, ultimately leaving you with a Franken-game aesthetic.
Not pictured: The six hours of work that went into creating this.
Of course, there's also the whole make-your-own-level aspect of the package. Does it work? The answer: It does. Open up the "My Moon" option from your "Pod" (the precious little house where your Sackboy resides), and you're free to build your own level either using either an existing level template (which you'll recognize from the campaign) or entirely from scratch. Your first attempt at level creation will set off a string of unskippable tutorials designed to help you figure out how to use your Popit menu (Hit the square button, and a cartoonish thought-balloon thing literally pops up). While the tutorials are useful, they're far from short. In fact, to get through them all -- the game basically strong-arms you into watching them -- you've already committed more than an hour of your time. All the narrator's warm, cutesy banter during the tutorials? It becomes decidedly less warm and cutesy very quickly, trust me.
Here's a quick and crude explanation for how the level creator works: Select an item from your Popit menu -- a big, fat mushroom will do -- adjust the size and angle of your mushroom (right analog stick), then place it on the blank canvas of your world with a press of the X button. It's easy enough to scatter a few objects here and there. But to build a cohesive level that even approximates a fraction of the quality shown in the levels created by Media Molecule? For the majority of us, that would take days, weeks, even months.
Not pictured: The 12 hours, four sandwiches, eight Frescas and two naps that went into creating this.
My guess is that 95 percent of the people who buy the game won't bother to put in the effort to figure out how this aspect of the game works. Part of the problem is that, as I've said, it's a relatively difficult and time-consuming process. The tools are powerful, but learning how to use them properly is a real commitment. As I recently said to fellow writer Evan Narcisse: "I don't have six hours to spend creating a giraffe neck that goes up and down."
