Arts and Crafts Gone Wild

By Thomas Hodgson

At conception, I played with an egg. For months, I played with a cord. For years, I played with my thumb. When I was 6, I played with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Ghost Busters. At 9, a baseball glove. At 12, a snowboard. At 14, a paintball gun. At 16, it was a Chevy Lumina. At 18, it was fireworks, scratch tickets, and smut. At 21, it was Crown Royal. And at 24, it was… LittleBigPlanet.

This is merely an example of evolution. Video games have evolved much like myself, velociraptors, Prince, the McNugget, and the Coke brand. LittleBigPlanet is the 21st century Super Mario Bros. Juxtaposed with the classic that started it all, it’s a testament to just how far gaming has evolved both in sensory and substance. It has revived a platform genre yawning from Lara Croft stereotypes and Sonic clones and taken it into the pinnacle of its existence.

Truth be told, the story isn’t integral in LittleBigPlanet, nor really ever is in a platformer in general. A fat Italian plumber trying to save a princess? A coked up hedgehog trying to stop a mad scientist? A gun-wielding archaeological adventuress with double Ds? Maneuvering from left to right on a screen tells itself to you like flipping through the pages of a book.

Each player has a pod. A pod is your personal space, which you can decorate and where you can check your stats, user levels, created levels, friends, and your progress as you move across the LittleBigPlanet. As you do, each continent presents a new level theme unique to that country’s region in stunning fashion, whether it be hopping across construction beams over the city streets of New York or swinging along vines and monkeys in Africa.

Levels are comprised of three different plains: a foreground, a middle, and a background. It is a 2D game with a 3D feel, as you are constantly hopping amongst the three to navigate across obstacles to the finish line. Some levels place emphasis on teamwork and require 2-4 players to complete certain challenges together. The actual design itself is very organic, simple, and absolutely stunning, as environments are made out of fabrics, cardboards, wood, metals, and other everyday materials. Other decorations seemingly came from a child’s toy cabinet, a final product that can only be described as an explosive mix between an I Spy book and your local Michael’s.

Applying pressure to the analogue joysticks determines how fast or how slowly you run, jump, hang, push, and pull your way across distant lands. With the directional pad, you can emote your character, changing the expression between varying degrees of happiness, sadness, fear, and rage. And by using the motion-sensing functionality of your controller, you can also make your character dance. So when the camera zooms in on you and your friends after you complete a level, pop the Cristal cause it’s time to wiggle, Baby.

Along the way, you string together point combinations collecting score bubbles and traverse through the scenery to collect hard-to-reach prize bubbles, which contain stickers and other collectables, and keys, which unlock mini-levels. The previously mentioned stickers can be used to unlock further prize bubbles in future levels and are essential to 100% completion of your travels. From top to bottom, from start to finish, LittleBigPlanet does not disappoint in its function and substance as a platformer.

But while LittleBigPlanet may seem childish, ejecting from spinning windmills to grab on to rotating wheels of fabric over a pit of fire is far from it. Don’t let the art direction fool you ~ this game has the potential to frustrate children and send them on junk food benders to forget the pain. There is an understated difficulty to certain parts of the game, as one should come to expect, and takes nothing away from the experience.

Above and beyond the physics and graphics this game possesses, the genius to LittleBigPlanet’s levity is the design, which is a fresh, cheery, wholesome arts and crafts project with a pulse. Players control their Sackboy/Sackgirl, a character constructed of fabric, and can dress them to their liking with choices spanning the space between their imagination and the sky at their disposal.

Yet this is only half of the experience and expansive awesomeness to this game. Its second, and arguably more important, aspect is the sense of community this game encompasses and has constructed and the infinite potential in the user-created maps it safely assumed would expand the canvas on which this game paints.

What developers Media Molecule did was include the very same software they used to create all their levels. In doing so, they have opened up the floodgates to the already thousands of user-created levels, solidifying an experience with infinite potential and replayability. And at its core, that is the true purpose of this game: to play, create, and share.

LittleBigPlanet has received massive media acclaim and rightfully so. Media Molecule has gone and done it with their creation and reinvented the wheel. The sheer genius behind the appeal and approach to this game reaches audiences of all levels. The seemingly perfect experience is a universal language and speaks to anyone who plays it across all planets, big or small.

Metal Gear Solid 4 now has a partner in crime. If ever there was a reason to own the PS3, LittleBigPlanet is it.

PROS: The 21st century’s Super Mario Bros.; one of the most ingenious games to be released this decade.

CONS: Learning to time jumps is a trial and error process like the raptors learning to jump the fences in Jurassic Park. But hey, they went on to open doors.

Rating: 5/5 Stars