LittleBigLevels

LittleBigPlanet is about a year old now, and I feel like I haven’t given the game its due. True, it’s got some control issues. And 90% of the community levels are unplayable garbage. And the construction kit has some quirks that tend to get in the way. But the game remains fun, and people have made some pretty sublime levels. Every once in a while you’ll find that sparkling gem that gives you the energy you need to push through the next 100 levels of mediocrity.

Heck, I played a trophy level earlier today that I thought was really inventive.

My favorite levels are the obstacle courses. It’s easy, though, to make such a level way-too-hard; anyone can throw a bunch of spikes or death traps in a level, but it takes real talent to craft a level that is challenging, innovative and fun to play. Unfortunately, thanks to aformentioned control issues, the set of things a sackboy can reasonably accomplish is smaller than the set of things a level can be built to do. So you get a lot of challenge levels with really cool ideas that have a soggy execution.

My own levels are like that: ideas that are kind of too big for their britches but took hours to build so I just left them the way they were. Picking the game back up last night and playing through my old stuff gave me a very jarring sense of “how did I ever think people were going to play these!?”, but with some practice I got back into my groove and all was well. I even put the finishing touches off of an unfinished level that had been sitting around since last year.

Actually I didn’t quit playing because of some lack of enthusiasm with the game. After we moved into our new place in February I just couldn’t get my PS3 online for some reason. I eventually got fed up and stopped trying until Fat Princess came around, after which I could get back into PSN having changed absolutely nothing about my router or network whatsoever.

That’s a good thing, though! They added a paintball gun to the game, see, that I never really got to play with until now. And the community has grown up quite a bit in the past year. There’s still a lot of mediocrity out there, but not nearly as much complete shit, which tells me either folks are committed to putting more effort into their levels or the mods are more committed to keeping things tidy. Or maybe I’m just tricking myself into believing that because I want to fall back in love with the game.

Anyway my two crazy-hard challenge level obstacle courses of death are called Baby, Right Round and That Sinking Feeling. They’re both massively gimmicky and bitch hard! While you’re at it, check out everything I’ve got hearted, because there’s some real good gameplay to be had in there. Just don’t get too attached to the Mario or Sonic levels; I hear Sony flushes those.