LittleBigPlanet Catch-all

sa7an7 wrote:

The graphics are impressive, however gameplay looks painfully slow and boring. From the GDC demo, they stated that the game's entire mechanic is simply running and jumping. In the video with the Super Mario Bros 1-1 recreation, look how floaty and imprecise the controls seem to be compared to something like the real SMB which is precise and elegant in comparison.

Other than a build-your-own-platformer-with-physics, I don't see what the game actually is. In regards to user content, creating quality levels is terribly difficult for any game. There may be a number of good ones, but I foresee an amazing flood of horrifically broken levels.

Couldn't a very similar version of this criticism be leveled at, say, Team Fortress 2?

Distilled to it's essence, TF2 is just a multiplayer shooter with character classes. And users can create levels if they download the tools to do it, so I'm sure there are some lousy levels to play around in.

Further, if I were to play it (or if I'd played it in beta) I'm sure it would look horribly hokey and imprecise, because I'd suck at it.

If you reduce anything far enough, it can look silly or inconsequential. A Lotus Elise is just four wheels and a motor-- no different from a Ford Focus in theory. Love is just the firing of chemicals in your brain telling you that you feel good in the presence of pheremones-- not appreciably different from eating chocolate. It's the specifics and the variations that make some things more worthwhile than other things.

I don't know if LBP will be another TF2 in terms of popularity, but I don't think it's fair to criticize the game for not being something it's not trying to be. The game may not lend itself well to mario-style levels, but it could still be a very interesting platformer.

sa7an7 wrote:

So yea. Its cute and looks nice but I fail to see what the big deal is. Pixel Junk Eden and LocoRoco as platformers are far more impressive from a gameplay standpoint.

I haven't played the beta, so I can't really comment on that. I know I liked LocoRoco, and the Pixeljunk Eden demo was certainly interesting, but I can't definitively say they're better than LBP. If you've played it and that's your conclusion, that's fine-- I'm interested to get the thoughts of people who played the game because it will help me decide whether to get it.

But if you're just going by a few crude user-created movies, well that's something else again. The difference, as I said, is in the details.

I actually had a chance to play it at PAX. People seemed to love it, but I found the controls aggravatingly floaty. Of course if you boil anything down enough you get to something simple, however at its simplistic core, TF2 does what it does well. Other than physics and a level editor, LBP doesn't really add any new types of gameplay mechanics to expand the genre (from what i've seen sofar) and I personally don't feel it does its most simple job, running and jumping, particularly well.

But like I said, people at PAX seemed to love it and other people seem geeked, so maybe I'm just not the audience for it.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say you aren't the audience for LBP, because the level editor, the style and the physics are all exactly why I want it.

AmazingZoidberg wrote:

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say you aren't the audience for LBP, because the level editor, the style and the physics are all exactly why I want it.

Yeah, really. That's why team "La Migra" wants it.

sa7an7 wrote:

I actually had a chance to play it at PAX. People seemed to love it, but I found the controls aggravatingly floaty. Of course if you boil anything down enough you get to something simple, however at its simplistic core, TF2 does what it does well. Other than physics and a level editor, LBP doesn't really add any new types of gameplay mechanics to expand the genre (from what i've seen sofar) and I personally don't feel it does its most simple job, running and jumping, particularly well.

But like I said, people at PAX seemed to love it and other people seem geeked, so maybe I'm just not the audience for it.

Fair enough. Tastes vary, which is why I like coming to these forums where people can have different tastes without flaming each other.

I'll be waiting and seeing on this one, because I almost never make day 1 purchases, but if it's as good as I think it's going to be I'll be getting it before Christmas.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

Fair enough. Tastes vary, which is why I like coming to these forums where people can have different tastes without flaming each other.

I'll be waiting and seeing on this one, because I almost never make day 1 purchases, but if it's as good as I think it's going to be I'll be getting it before Christmas.

The funny the thing is my wife, who is obsessed with cute things, is ecstatic about it so I'll probably end up getting it for her anyway =)

I just got a beta code and am in the process of downloading the beta. Anyone else in on the beta? When I go on a hunt for other people's creations, I'd like to get a big ol' faceful of GWJism.

MechaSlinky wrote:

I just got a beta code and am in the process of downloading the beta. Anyone else in on the beta? When I go on a hunt for other people's creations, I'd like to get a big ol' faceful of GWJism.

I want in...lucky...

Holy crap, it's awesome! I mean, really awesome. Like, as good if not better than I was hoping for! And I was hoping it would be awesome. I was sort of expecting it to be pretty good, but I was hoping it would be awesome, and it's awesome!

This is sort of a spoiler but not really because nobody cares about the story and also this is how the game is introduced. The story of the game is that you're in a dream world where you can make whatever you want. Last night, when I finally went to bed, all of my dreams (I remember three of them, which is very rare for me as I almost never remember dreams) were of LittleBigPlanet. Life imitating art...

So, onto the meat. The beta makes you play a handful of levels and slowly introduces the different things you can do with the Poppit (editing menu) while playing other people's creations. As you go, you unlock various stickers and objects and things to dress Sackboy up with. The running and jumping are a little floaty, but not quite as floaty as the videos made it all look. In fact, it all feels really good when you get into it.

Finally, it unlocks the level editor. You jump in and it throws a tutorial at you. The tutorials are all simple and quick, but there are a lot of them. Every time you finish one, you unlock a lot more stuff to play with. I decided to go through all the main tutorials all at once, and that seemed to take over an hour! I started to create a level where you run and jump across rooftops in a city and blow up stuff with rockets. I call it Sackdown.

The level editor is super easy to use. It's sort of like Flash minus the ActionScript. I haven't really done a whole lot with it. I made a desk with a receptionist who asks you if you have an appointment. Made a bathroom that plays a fart noise as you run past. Made a staircase with a hidden compartment behind it with some point bubbles to collect. Made a working elevator with a switch that you pull you make it go up and down. Tried to make a button to call the elevator in case it was in the up position and you were below it, but couldn't get it to work every time so I scrapped it. Made a dude at the edge of the building's roof who says, "You'll never take me alive!" Then you push him off the building. If you follow him, by the time you get down there he'll already have been destroyed so there will be nothing left. Made some rockets that you use to climb the outside of the next building, meant to simulate the way you can jump-climb the buildings in Crackdown. Not perfect, obviously, but it works. Made a drum beat kick in when you get to the top of the building. As you go through the level, more bits of music will be layered on top until it's a big, full happy song!

Judging just from the tutorials and the tools I already have, there is an insane number of things you can do! You've probably seen some of the videos out there. Giant walking level and such. There's a Tetris level. I played a pretty crappy pinball machine, and a terrible Donkey Kong clone, both of which I know could be done way better. In fact, I already know how to do such things, and I just played it for a few hours last night! I could see people making puzzle games, simple strategy games, competitive games where you destroy each others' castles, games where you much navigate a submarine through a treacherous cave full of explosives, games where you must create a path through a mountain using explosives, side and vertical-scrolling shooters, board games and even simple Metroidvania clones! I am actually amazed at the amount of stuff that you could create with this, given you're willing to put the time in. A lot of the stuff I've played online so far is super simple and is not at all indicative of just how much can really be achieved. The Super Mario Bros. level is even more ass when you realize just how little work it took and how few of the tools were actually used to make it.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to be such a shill for the game, but I'm already blown away by it! The only complaints I have are that there isn't a simple way to make Sackboy jump higher that I've seen (something that would've been perfect for Sackdown) and that when I buy the game later this month, I'll probably have to sit through all of the tutorials all over again.

Oh, and the gameplay! I forgot! For those a little curious as to how it works exactly, it's a 2D/3D hybrid. There are three planes to stand on. Background, middleground and foreground. When you're on the ground, you can shift between them as you like by pushing up and down on the stick. So, going to the background allows you to run behind objects in the other planes, allowing you to create hidden compartments like the bit behind the second staircase in my Sackdown level. When you're in the air, however, you cannot change position by pushing the stick. If you jump over a platform on another plane, you'll shift to that plane automatically and land on the platform. If you're on a platform and you want to jump down to a lower platform in a plane closer to the screen, you just push down on the stick and the X button. Anything you create can be placed on any plane and be as wide or as thin as you want. R1 grabs stuff made of materials that can be grabbed and there you go. Simple stuff.

Almost forgot! I made a talking vagina.

Almost forgot! I made a talking vagina.

Now that's something worth writing home about!

Man, your write up makes me wish I hadn't been so lazy about getting a beta key this week.

I'm so friggin excited for this game, and platformers usually rank only about a 5 out of 10 on my interest scale.

But my wife's inevitable overflowing enthusiasm for the game will unquestionably crack me.

"Who else is getting this? Who can we get to play with us? Will Logan?" <--- questions already being asked

The sackboys/sackgirls are my wife's personality in game character form. Bubbly, super-expressive, and occasionally mischievous.

Opposites attract and all...

zeroKFE wrote:
Almost forgot! I made a talking vagina.

Now that's something worth writing home about!

Man, your write up makes me wish I hadn't been so lazy about getting a beta key this week. :(

I'm waiting. I'm waiting to open the retail box, take it home and be like a kid on Christmas. A game I've been looking forward to for a LONG time.

I love sackboy. Best character design for a game ever! I am so looking forward to this.

Thanks for the write up mecha, helps me understand what I might be able to do in game.
Also, RAGING GAME BONER!

boogle wrote:

Thanks for the write up mecha, helps me understand what I might be able to do in game.
Also, RAGING GAME BONER!

I'm not comfortable with you talking about boners.

Keep it to yourself or I'll start a discussion on best NCAA 2-point conversions ever.

Sackboy and boners in the same thread? This is getting bad...

1Up Yours has some good conversation about LBP and it sounds as awesome as the game has looked so far. I'm pretty excited, raging game boner just about sums it up.

Asz wrote:

1Up Yours has some good conversation about LBP and it sounds as awesome as the game has looked so far. I'm pretty excited, raging game boner just about sums it up.

I think im gonna go and preorder this now, I wasn't planning to but I am looking forward to it now

plus I want the Kratos sackboy.

I broke it! I was working on Sackdown and froze the PS3. Today, I went back to it, loaded up the level, and noticed that the stand-off with the grenade-launcher-carrying enemies was missing. But I did find pieces of the enemies strewn about. I realized that during earlier testing the day before, something must have come loose with the grenade-launcher used to take out the enemies and exploded everything to pieces while I was working on something farther down the line. That's something I don't like. You can test your level right in the editor, but you then have to undo every change you make during that test or it gets saved in the level. Of course, you can also just jump into Play Mode to test without actually changing the level, which is probably a much better idea. And going between Play and Create is really quick. Plus, since you can move your Start Point around wherever you want, you don't have to play through the whole level just to get to the one thing you're trying to test.

So, anyway, the level had been saved without the first deadly encounter, so I set back to recreating it. Luckily, I had saved the enemies and the grenade launcher machine as their own objects, so I just grabbed them and plopped them down. Tested it out right in create mode, hit undo, made adjustments as needed, repeat. Undo was taking forever, though. It was getting really annoying. Eventually, I hit undo, and waited for a solid two minutes. I quit back to the main menu and decided to load up my last save, but the level wouldn't load. I let it run so long the in-game screen-saver started to play, which is a good ten minutes or so.

In the end, I've decided that Sackdown is dead. I can't load it, I can't play it. It just sits there like a rotting, half-eaten corpse. In the interest of science, I decided to get down to the bottom of what went wrong. See, after the encounter with the enemies, there is a giant maze of metal girders to climb around on. Lots of jumping in and around crazy twisty pieces. It's the worst construction sight ever! But it was obvious that wasn't the problem. After that, a building with a brick wall that you must slap a "timed mine" sticker on to explode, followed by a jump down an elevator shaft and out the other side of the building. That definitely wasn't the problem.

No, after extensive testing (meaning I created another level with just this last bit) I have no confirmed the problem (meaning this new level also won't load). The final piece of my level was another grenade launcher on a cart that you could push and pull into position before firing. With this grenade launcher, you were to explode your way through a mountain. Sort of like a level in Worms, except that all the pieces of the mountain were still affected by physics so pieces could come lose and fly around from the explosions or fall into your path and clutter the way. Never managed to get all the way through the mountain, though. I had nothing to prevent the entire thing from falling on top of Sackboy and crushing him, so I assume that would've happened.

Anyway, from this I have concluded that having a section where you explode your way through large amounts of terrain bit by bit is possibly a bad idea unless you like one of your level slots being taken up by a level that no longer loads.

--SPECIAL NEWS BULLETIN UPDATE!!!--

I think I broke the entire game, actually. Nothing loads. My own levels won't load, creating new levels won't load, other people's levels won't load, and even the default levels you go through at the beginning won't load! Sometime, though, Sackdown will load when I first start up the game and I can do small edits and playtest it. However, I can't create new stuff because none of the materials will load. Stickers won't load, and if they do, it takes forever! A few times, it wouldn't even connect to the beta servers. Therefore, either I broke the entire game, or the servers are being molested so bad that the game is basically unplayable. Considering how relatively small the download for the beta was (906mb, if I remember correctly), I'm thinking the majority of the stuff found in the game is actually found on the servers and loaded from it the first time you access something.

In other news, I got through that mountain with the grenade launcher. Since the destructible parts were glued to the non-destructible ground, they stayed in place until the final piece was exploded. Then the entire giant mountain chunk fell down on top of me. Luckily, the grenade launcher held the mountain up enough for me to safely reside in a little compartment. Then I simply jumped down to the platform that I had put at the end of it that you could only reach by jumping down to it from where I was when I jumped down to it.

Good times! I just wish it was working right now.

And that's why its a beta.

Yeah. I was hoping for more interesting bugs, though. Oh well.

It worked flawlessly today. Turns out it was just server problems and such that made everything craptacular the other day. I loaded up Sackdown and worked on it like crazy almost without any problems. I managed to freeze the PS3 once, but other than that, there hasn't been a single problem. I was wrong about the whole "huge chunk of destructible terrain will kill your level" thing. It was apparently just coincidence that every time I created that particular scenario the entire thing stopped working, as today it worked flawlessly.

I've moved on to bigger and better things. I recently created a suspension bridge with cars on it. The underside of the bridge is covered in explosives. When a lever is pulled at the far end of the bridge, it triggers the explosive nearest the lever. That explosion triggers each other bomb down the line, and they all explode one after another in rapid succession. As the bridge is destroyed, the suspension cables and other metal-works collapse. It's pretty fun to watch, but I'm having trouble rigging up a camera system that can capture it all the way I'd like. There's no way to pull the camera back far enough to get it all in the frame outside of create mode, unfortunately, and so far I've been unable to rig something that will cause the camera to follow the explosions along the bridge, so I'm sort of at a loss for what to do. I'm also not entirely sure how this section of the level will play out, exactly. I want more than just running across a bridge and then exploding it for no reason. Oh well.

The whole bridge area as it stands now took just over one hour to create. Considering how it all works, that I had no idea if it was even possible when I started, and that it turned out exactly as I wanted without any sort of compromise or changes to the plan (other than the camera), that's not bad. Actually, just now, I thought of a way I can get the camera to follow the explosions! I'm going to go try it and see if it works. I love this game!

EXTRA!

Someone created a level where you jump on a little car and as it drives, it plays the opening to Sweet Child O' Mine! I never would've thought to do something like that in a million years!

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Mechaslinky for his in-depth coverage of the game. It's better than any review I could have read.

Based just on this, I think I'll be getting LBP next month for my birthday. It looks like I'll also have to finally get a second controller as well, because I've finally found a game my wife is interested in enough to warrant dropping an additional $40.

Oh, and it also means we'll probably be getting Pixeljunk Eden as well.

So you've just costed me $110 plus tax.

...

Maybe I should be thanking you on behalf of Sony. :p

I don't have much interest in the level-creator stuff, does the beta include any of the Sony-created levels? I buy games to play, not work

I'm divided on LBP, really. Most user-created levels in most games are crap, you only have to look at TF2 for that. Arstechnica is describing it as "45 minutes of boredom, the the awesome", which is not a good advert IMHO.

Yeah, that's very much the experience when you're browsing for other people's levels to play. I haven't actually spent a long time playing levels. I've played maybe 30 or 40. There's a thing you can do where you give a level a Heart. I think it's basically a way of simultaneously bookmarking it and letting people know that you love the level enough to bookmark it. This is one of those rare moments where I don't have LBP turned on, but I've probably Hearted about 25% of the levels I've played because they were just so damn good.

If I had to break it all up, I'd have to say that another 25% would be levels I really enjoyed, one of which is that level of that "featured bright swaths of primary colors, and included a series of progressively harder jumps from platform to platform." Seriously great levels that for whatever reason I didn't bother to Heart. Another 25% would be levels that weren't great, but were still pretty fun and another 25% of pure crap. I love platformers and I like the basic platforming mechanics in LBP, so I found even some of the crap pretty fun.

Plus, there's no way making a level for LBP is as hard as for TF2. LBP doesn't have 9 classes on 2 teams with different needs. You could throw a series of blocks on a blank background and have a fun level in LBP. Plus, you don't even have to use the creator the create a level. You could simply jump into it with some friends and play right in the creator. Like a 2D Garry's Mod.

The beta comes with 4 Media Molecule levels, one of which is just a jump-rope style mini-game. They're pretty simple, as they're the first few tutorial levels that ease you into the game, but they're fun. The final game apparently has over 60 Media Molecule levels included, according to a preview I read on 1up a while back.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Mechaslinky for his in-depth coverage of the game. It's better than any review I could have read.

Thanks. I have this compulsive habit of writing way too much, so I was worried that my posts were obnoxious. I'm having so much fun, though, that it's hard to contain my excitement and I need to let everything out.

In other news, I created a Super Action Death Balloon!

MechaSlinky wrote:

Thanks. I have this compulsive habit of writing way too much, so I was worried that my posts were obnoxious. I'm having so much fun, though, that it's hard to contain my excitement and I need to let everything out.

Any game that can draw more out of you than one line non-sequentors has got to have some merit. It's a day one purchase in my book.

MechaSlinky wrote:

In other news, I created a Super Action Death Balloon!

Well I guess no game is perfect.

Yeah man, thanks for the coverage.
Its almost as good as getting a beta code myself. Almost...

I'm a big fan of user created content in games, and machinima. So I'm now on the bandwagon and have just assessed my budget to buy a PS3.
Lets be honest, I love MGS and Final Fantasy, so it was going to happen eventually...

I loved Gmod, but it depressed me with just how amazingly open it was and how it would have consumed me if I kept at it, I see LBP as a cute and fuzzy Gmod yet, more
approachable limited to just the right amount freedom.

Bring it on.

By the way, how much does a PS3 cost in the states? Because its looking like the cheapest i can get here in Aus is Au$700 for an 80Gb model...

"Save game is corrupt, please quit the game. If you continue we will delete your existing save and create a new one."

I only had one more small step before Sackdown was complete and ready to be shared with the world. I'm so sad right now...

Just a question for those of you in the Beta: Isn't there supposed to be some kind of feature that lets you upload videos of your levels directly to youtube? I seem to recall that being part of the buzz surrounding the game.

The reason I ask is there seem to be a lot of shaky-cam video of people pointing their camcorders at the TV while they play LBP.

Is there a direct upload feature in the beta, and is it supposed to be in the final version?

This is so awesome: A mechanical calculator! (Adds and subtracts)
Some French guy has got way too much time on his hands.