LittleBigPlanet

Platformer Construction Kit
10/10/2008 6:39 PM | 1 Comments | Page 2 of 2

While the tools lower the barriers to entry for budding level designers, that same lowered barrier could easily have let loose a barrage of low-quality, poorly thought-out content. In practice, though, the opposite seems to be the case, with the player-created levels currently on display in the limited public beta showing an amazing range of content and a surprising level of general polish.

It's not surprising to see that a lot of levels ape popular games -- Super Mario Bros., Grand Theft Auto, Shadow of the Colossus -- and bits of pop culture -- Batman, Ninja Warrior -- with varying degrees of seriousness and authenticity. What's more surprising is that aspiring level designers have already created some amazingly detailed and original worlds out of whole cloth. Sure, there's a fair share of gimmicky levels that seem overrun with flashy rocket-propelled vehicles or pedestrian platforming challenges. But there are also plenty of exciting creations involving everything from tricky spinning-pinwheel jumps to tight jetpack mazes. Some levels, like the grin-inducing "Dino-land," show an impressive level of artistic cohesion, and a few, like a rope-skipping level created by Media Molecule, create totally new gameplay experiences from the level-design building blocks.

A simple, intuitive tagging system helps users separate the good from the bad -- just cruising through the creations labeled as "Brilliant" by a critical mass of people is a good way to waste an entire evening. The game makes it easy for other creators to copy from levels they like, taking the best parts and repurposing them for their own creations. This is already leading to a lot of copycat content (there are an amazing amount of dinosaurs and waterwheels in LittleBigPlanet), but in the long run it could lead to progress as the community builds on its successes and learns from the failures.

There are a few problems with LittleBigPlanet as it stand now. Online play was near-unworkable in my beta testing -- my cooperative play partner and I kept falling out of sync with each other, leading to some comically unplayable situations. I ran into a few random, unexplained Sackboy deaths that seemed to come out of nowhere, and a few additional cases in which my little guy got permanently stuck in between two pieces of scenery. None of these problems are unfixable, though, and none of them do much to obscure the truly revolutionary nature of LittleBigPlanet. Here we have an ur-platformer -- a pared-down, largely empty palette ready to accept the imaginings of a public that's hopefully hungry to create. If it works, the flood of constantly refreshed content could create a game that never goes stale. If it doesn't, well, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

This preview is based on a limited public beta version of the game.