LittleBigPlanet (PS3)
Those are some big shoes to fill.
10/28/2008 5:26 PM | 23 Comments | Page 1 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.
Ah,
LittleBigPlanet. Alas, we finally meet.
After spending what felt like an eternity in development, after being rolled out to oohs and ahhs at GDC, Leipzig, TGS and countless E3s, the once-humble little game that somehow, someway grew into a triple-A holiday season behemoth finally makes the scene.
I still remember the first time I saw
LittleBigPlanet in action. It was like having candy shoved into my eyes. I was so overwhelmed that I could barely speak coherently about it.
"Hey everyone! Let's all go collect stickers! Yay!"
Maybe I've got a cold heart, but each successive time I saw the game over the last two years -- and I've seen it many, many times at this point -- it seemed increasingly less special to me. All of the smiling and waving that the Sackboys (and Sackgirls) did during demos began to seem like cheap mugging for the cameras, lame bids for more of those oohs and ahhs. And all the promises of so-easy-a-monkey-can-do-it level creation seemed fairly dubious to me.
So I kept digging. Beneath the burlap textures and Rube Goldberg-esque level designs, beneath the skateboards and stickers and hummable ditties, beneath the near-overwhelming preciousness -- has there ever been a more precious game than this one? -- I kept looking, kept searching, with one question in mind:
Where, underneath all the precious graphics and dubious promises, is the game?
It's "Pixar Mario," according to fellow Game Truster and all-around clever bastard Scott Alexander. He's right. It is Pixar Mario. You'll hop and bop your way from left to right across levels that range thematically from earthy gardens to African Savannahs; from dynamite-filled canyons to Hindu temples; and even a descent into a volcano.
The overall production still impresses.
LittleBigPlanet makes one of the great first impressions of all time. The entire game appears to be cobbled together from someone's junk drawer: bits of string, a button or two, an old coin, a pair of scissors, etc. It comes off as an intentionally lo-fi platformer. Think of it as the equivalent of a high school drama club production of
Super Mario Bros.
BFFs.
At the game's start, you're introduced to your Sackboy (or Sackgirl), the big-headed, burlap-and-stuffing creature that's prominently displayed on the box cover. He is, if you think about it, Sony's antidote to its poster-boy Kratos: the company's first big-budget-but-still-casual bid to take a bite out of the Wii's fanbase.
But after you've been hustled through a series of well-crafted tutorials that teach you the basics of running and jumping and character customization, this warm, fuzzy, friendly game suddenly becomes surprisingly difficult.
I died. A lot. When you die, the game ports you back to a previous checkpoint. You get four lives per checkpoint, and once they're gone, poof, it's Game Over.* It's this cruel, Old Testament-caliber spirit that feels incongruous with
LittleBigPlanet's fuzzy, friendly exterior.
At least some of the blame must be attributed to the game's loose controls. Sackboy seems to have a bit too much momentum, meaning that once he starts moving in a particular direction, it always takes him a few steps to stop. This becomes painfully apparent during moments when precise jumps are required. Countless pained cries of "Nooooo!" rang out through my apartment building over the last two weeks.
