Just some thoughts on Little Big Planet, Weekend Update!

When I first I heard about Little Big Planet I was really excited about it. I took planned time off of my job to play it. I went into the Gamestop excited to pick up my copy and quickly drove home to play. The first thing I thought after playing it was how nice the game looked. I really enjoyed the art style, the way the levels looked and everything right down to Sackboy. The game is a platformer like any other platformer with the same basic controls. You can move Sackboy around and he can jump and grab and that's it. The game at it's core is very simple to play. But for a platformer the controls to me are a little floaty and can make doing precision jumping difficult. The physics of the world around you are some of the best I've seen in any type of game. I had a few times when something way bigger than Sackboy would get away from me and come close to crushing me to death. For me one thing that was a real surprise to me was the difficulty near the end of the game. Some of the levels were down right sadistic with the amount of stuff they threw at you and getting the trophy for getting through all the levels without dying was a real challenge.

Now the big draw to LBP was the user created levels and the community really came through on this. I played some really impressive levels, a God of War themed one was my favorite. Some were made to just earn trophies which I expected but still thought was lame but seeing my points sky rocket on these levels was fun for a little bit. While a lot of the user levels were interesting in my time with the game I noticed they all seemed to just be other games, like Super Mario Bros levels remade in the LBP editor. Now this was cool at first but then they're everywhere and it just became a little stale. I didn't really play LBP much after completing the single player mode. I tried some online and messed with the created levels but it just didn't have enough to hold on to me after the initial game was over. I did fire it up again when the Metal Gear Solid levels came out but that wasn't for that long and I haven't played the game since. In the end I think the game was an interesting test of amazing things that can come from gaming in the future but right now I feel the limitations of a console can cause on a game like this keep it from being a truly great amazing experience. I didn't try LBP PSP and I really haven't heard a lot about LBP2 but I'm sure it will have the same charm and fun of the first game but I still don't think it will be the true greatness that this series or a series similar to this can accomplish. MOD Nation Racers to me seems to be the evolution of this kind of "let the players create the game" idea of game making. But again I just don't think we're there yet as far as gaming custom content on the consoles.