EndOfLevelBoss

LittleBigPlanet — the reason to buy a PS3

In March 2007 I wrote an article entitled “LittleBigPlanet – the reason to buy a PS3?” which contained the following:

[…] I really want to like the PlayStation 3, but I feel like every time I start to get interested in it Sony have to go and ruin it for me. There isn’t a single game being released on 23rd of March in Europe that I would spend £40 on, let alone £425.

And so it is with extreme caution that I must express my interest in LittleBigPlanet. Let me summarise the game for you: tiny rag-doll characters running about in a fully furnished, user created world with realistic physics. And I really think it’s the user created part that’s important. […]

While it still might not justify the £425 price tag, a few more games like this might convert me.

Today I was fortunate enough to play a preview of LittleBigPlanet at the Edinburgh Games Festival Edinburgh Interactive Festival.

To cut a long story short, LittleBigPlanet is worth buying a PS3 for.

I was guided through the game by a graphic designer working for Media Molecule, the company behind LittleBigPlanet.

At first we played around with the regular gameplay, running through the level originally seen in the first LittleBigPlanet demo at the 2007 Game Developers Conference, although there were a few changes, such as ghosts made out of toast. The left analogue stick controls left and right movement, and also controls forwards and backwards movement — pushing up makes the character step further away from the observer, and pushing down makes the character step closer — the X button jumps and R1 grabs onto the nearest object. In the level that I played through these were the only controls that I needed, but I don’t know whether you’ll need any other controls for later levels.

After going halfway through the first level we jumped from the game, or “the LittleBigPlanet”, to the creation area, or “My Moon”. Co-operating to build things is really straightforward. Within a couple of minutes we had built a rocket-powered car, complete with bottle-cap wheels and a tennis ball steering wheel. The rocket turned out to be quite powerful, and propelled us across the level at break-neck speeds until we crashed into the wall at the other end, at which point my colleague was catapulted from the car. From this point it didn’t take much effort to reattach the rocket onto the other side of the car and drive us back to the start of the level. And then attach the rocket to the bottom of the car causing it to shoot straight up into the air before it came tumbling down onto my character’s head. The ability to take things apart (including content provided alongside the game) and stick them back together in a different order will appeal to anyone that used to love lego when they were a kid.

Finally my co-pilot built a metal statue and affixed a photo of myself to its head, thanks to the PlayStation Eye. While he was doing that I attached a giant rotating cog, and a menacing looking rotating arm. Jay has a photo of this monstrosity so I will have to get a copy off him. It’s freaking terrifying.

Having only played the game for thirty minutes I don’t feel qualified to say whether anyone else should be buying a PS3 for this game or not. What I can say is that, after about 14 months of anticipation and about thirty minutes of gameplay, I have been converted.