Little Big Gabe

At 6 p.m. Sunday Evening, Media Molecule pulled the plug on the Little Big Planet beta. Pulled the plug is a little harsh. It's probably more accurate to say that the beta expired. It still came as a bit of a surprise. I'd kind have hoped I could play until midnight.

I'm still not sure if I'm allowed to talk about it, given the non-negotiated Terms of Service that came with the beta code I was using, but I'm gonna spill anyway.

While the gaming press (as well as SCEA) seem to be hell bent on declaring Little Big Planet as the long-lost Killer App for the PS3, I'm not sold yet. I think another week of beta would have swayed me, but since I only had about a week of solid playing for only an hour or so every night, I've got a few impressions, but haven't yet decided if the game is, as the kids say, "all that."

Discussion about gamestuff, after the break.

The single player game looks solid. They only give you the tutorial levels on the beta (thats all I got to play, anyway,) so it's hard to say, really, what the game will play like as a single-player experience. The tutorial levels were varied and fun, however, they were only as good as any other platformer on the market. Little Big Planet is also as flawed as any other platformer on the market. THe game struggles the same way many two-dimensional games struggle with the conversion to the third dimension. It's not always easy (or even sensical) to see where enemies and platforms line up across the four or so planes of depth that make up the Little Big Planet playspace. This, however, is a nit. Any 3D platformer on rails suffers from this issue, and it's really a player-preference more than a design flaw. I prefer 3D platformers that are immersive and offer true movement from any point on a three-way axis to those that guide a player around on rails on any point in a two-way axis, and a a handful of choices on the third. Think of the difference between the 3D Mario games and the Crash Bandicoot games. There you go.

But where Sony and Media Molecule are really hanging their Little Big Hats, so to speak, are on the games online and multi-player components. It is in this arena that the game's greatest potential and it's most lethal weaknesses do battle. This next bit is so important that I have to put it in its own paragraph.

I have had no greater multi-player experience on the PS3 or Wii than the fun I had in the five days I got to play the Little Big Planet beta.


There are many parallels to draw between Little Big Planet and the much heralded Phantasy Star Online for the dearly departed Sega DreamCast. The first one. Before you had to have those shitty "Hunter's Liscences." Both games presented a kind of massively multiplayer experience on a four-person scale-- and the haphazard way that the game slaps servers and hosts together means that any given online experience is as varied as the next.
But more importantly, the game is much more fun as a multi-player event. Golden and rare multi-player moments are to be had in the multi-player game-- at one point, a guy named snake and I had grabbed onto some kind of rocket-sled and were careening out of control along the level, but some how we managed to crash the sled into a block and flip it up and over on itself, eventually careening into a flaming pile of broken blocks and burning cardboard.
The next thing we knew, Snake and I had re-spawned at the start of the course-- and unsure of what really had just happened, he and I both made our sack-boys giggle and chortle like a virtual Beavis and Buthead. It was goddamn magical.
The game's built in communication is similar, also, to Phantasy Star Online's. Entering text via the controller is painful at best, so instead, most communication between players is relegated to a few simple emotive gestures and the game's fairly open ended "arm swinging" mode.

But it is the online component where the game also stands to risk the biggest failure. I'm not sure if it's by design or because of the limited nature of the beta, but Little Big Planet's "Cool Levels" feature-- where the user-created, internet-stored levels can be accessed-- had a depressingly large number of "bad musical performance" levels. (Where players simply stood on a rolling whatever and listened to a series of chatter boxes bleep out vague renditions of "Sweet Child of Mine" or whatever.) Maybe I'm jaded, or maybe those levels just aren't my thing, but I would like to see a way that they could be filtered. Perhaps that will come with a larger population "tagging" the levels... but then again, it's the internet, right? If there is one thing the internet proves again and again is that if you give someone a tool, someone will find a way to harness the power of stupid. The possibilities of using Little Big Planet as a social engineering component for evil are considerable.

And that's where I get worried for Little Big Planet. Sackboy seems like he wants to be a good guy-- but almost no control over content or interaction is in the hands of the user. Again, remember that I only had a few days of trials on the beta-- and remember, this was a limited group of self-selected fanboys who weren't intent of greifing anyone-- but I had a few experiences where I loaded up a level only to discover that there was some snot-nose in the room hitting people or dragging them around or whatever, and my only recourse was to file an impotent complaint or to reset my own player back to my own home-base. If my two-solid years of daily time in Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates taught me one thing it was that an online game needs a swift and immediate banish tool and it needs to be put in the hands of everyman.
I suspect Penny-Arcade may have really nailed Little Big Planet's biggest weakness when they described Gabe's need for his "dick to stand out in a sea of cocks." Enter the Penisaurous Dix, indeed.
In fact, the overall question of quality over quantity is one that I think Little Big Planet is going to need to sort out quickly. Some of the user-generated content was fantastic, while some of it was horribly broken-- and a lot of it was good, but strictly amatureish. There were some great levels. (The Deamon Head level, for example, was fantastically fun, unusual, and well thought out, and there was a South Park level that was copyright infringtastic, but still beautifully rendered . )

So the question remains. Little Big Planet. Worth a buy? At $60 for the game, probably not. As a free experience, I am willing to forgo the little bumps and jags that come along with a game like Little Big Planet. The fact is, online glitches crashed crashed my PS3 at least three times over the course of last weak, and the player's ability to control his own destiny once sucked into an online match/world is far from complete. I'd rather have seen a free-game stacked with a dual-economy. (Similar to Puzzle Pirate's doubloon-based Oceans-- where players can buy or work for upgrades, depending on how much time/money they have expendable.) But, as a stand-alone platformer, Little Big Planet is probably one of the very best for this generation of systems--- and that's saying a lot. But I'd want to have my hands on some of the "professionally" developed levels before I really make up my mind.