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ZOMG LittleBigPlanet!
17 years ago
General
Yeah, so I'm more than a little addicted to this game.
It's all mad crazy physics engine. And it really gets you into building your own levels and such. There's so much you can do with it. I love building crazy contraptions.
The game itself is a very advanced platformer. But it sets a new mark in almost every aspect. Even people who aren't typically into platformer titles get sucked into LBP.
The professionally made story levels that come with the game are top notch platforming. The community made levels are a rather different experience. They're rather like FA where if you just bring up a completely random submission, chances are it's a poorly done one. Buuuut... just a little searching starts revealing the gems. And, much like FA, you can favorite creators you like and find other levels by them... as well as find the good stuff by looking at what other's have favorited... etc etc.
You never know what to expect when you load up a community level. People come up with wicked crazy stuff that utilizes the physics engine to do things entirely out of the ordinary. Like having big robots fight controlled by levers and buttons jumped on by sackboys. Or one we played today where the entire level is slowly spinning on a bolt. Or heck, one level isn't any sort of game at all... someone made a working multidigit calculator using a huge series of pistons and sensor switches... an enormous contraption built out of the physics engine.
This is definately a game to play with friends. If you just play alone, you're missing out. Those friends can be local or remote or combinations thereof.
I just published my first level today. I put a lot of time into it. It's called 'Hot Foot Challenge', and it does have some unique features. I'm hoping it will become popular.
Anyone that wants to be friends on the Playstation Network... I'm 'Skant' there, too. Send me an invite! Please do introduce yourself as being from FA, though. I don't accept random friend invites which are blank.
It's all mad crazy physics engine. And it really gets you into building your own levels and such. There's so much you can do with it. I love building crazy contraptions.
The game itself is a very advanced platformer. But it sets a new mark in almost every aspect. Even people who aren't typically into platformer titles get sucked into LBP.
The professionally made story levels that come with the game are top notch platforming. The community made levels are a rather different experience. They're rather like FA where if you just bring up a completely random submission, chances are it's a poorly done one. Buuuut... just a little searching starts revealing the gems. And, much like FA, you can favorite creators you like and find other levels by them... as well as find the good stuff by looking at what other's have favorited... etc etc.
You never know what to expect when you load up a community level. People come up with wicked crazy stuff that utilizes the physics engine to do things entirely out of the ordinary. Like having big robots fight controlled by levers and buttons jumped on by sackboys. Or one we played today where the entire level is slowly spinning on a bolt. Or heck, one level isn't any sort of game at all... someone made a working multidigit calculator using a huge series of pistons and sensor switches... an enormous contraption built out of the physics engine.
This is definately a game to play with friends. If you just play alone, you're missing out. Those friends can be local or remote or combinations thereof.
I just published my first level today. I put a lot of time into it. It's called 'Hot Foot Challenge', and it does have some unique features. I'm hoping it will become popular.
Anyone that wants to be friends on the Playstation Network... I'm 'Skant' there, too. Send me an invite! Please do introduce yourself as being from FA, though. I don't accept random friend invites which are blank.
Noone near me has a PS3 though so it may be a while ^^'
If it comes to PC and doesn't have bananas for requirements, then maybe. Other next-gen consoles is fine, too.
The ability to make emotes with the little sackboy was a pretty neat idea, I wonder if anyone uses it though. :P
I've had a PS3 since shortly after launch, and early on, there was (naturally for a new console) not a whole lot of games available. I think some people have kept just repeating that outdated news. For a long time now, there's been more freaking awesome games for the thing than I've even been able to keep up with.
It actually bugs me a bit that people are missing out on a lot of the games I love the most because of that. I want to share that experience with more people. It's like how I feel about sleeper movies like the 'Long Kiss Good Night'... that movie is incredibly awesome, yet almost no one has heard of it. So many people miss out on experiencing it just because it lost out in marketting.
You and I have very different tastes in games. Jace has told me all the games you guys have and love, and that's fine and dandy. They're definitely not my cup of tea though. So far the only games that have my interest are LBP and a couple downloadable games, which seems to be the dilemma a lot of folks are having.
People aren't repeating outdated news. The PS3 just appeals to a different type of gamer with its current library.
It hasn't been uncommon for me to get the reaction from people I've shown my PS3 that they had no idea it had such good games on it and could do all this stuff. Why? Because they hadn't really looked into it because they'd heard it sucked.
There definately is an anti-PS3 marketting effort. And a lot of misleading or false comments and rumors about the system out there. And it takes its toll.
Each of the platforms has a different feel and different gamers that they appeal to. It's not my goal to try to convince people that simply aren't into the PS3's style to get one. Rather, I hope to appeal to misinformed people who would totally dig on the PS3 if they'd just give it a real chance in spite of whatever they may have heard.
This generation has really been demonstrating the power of cut throat marketting. It's more hostile than ever in gamer land. And I hate to see how much it has deranged gaming. That's not just in terms of what it does to sales of my personal favorite platform, but at every level across the board for everyone. Ultimately, it leads to works of love on all sides being destroyed by politics.
And what's the worst is how it has turned gamers against eachother. Like how you and I seem to keep butting heads over this any time I shoot my mouth off about what games I enjoy and urge others to try, too.
There is a lot of misinformation on both sides. My experience has been Sony and Sonyfans blowing their own horn out of proportion and making themselves sound better than they are, especially with sales numbers and following. It's really difficult to dig up unbiased information with "truth" to it with all the muddled crap from both fanboys and haters.
Yeah, I'm rather disgusted with the current gaming generation. Everyone from kids to adults are cutthroat and generally nasty. Everyone bitches and moans over the pettiest things, biases and horrid fanboyism are rampant, and everyone seems to be angry not only with the systems they don't like, but the ones they DO like! Like you said, games have become politics and it almost stripped the fun out of it for me until I started becoming more scarce in the net.
Wait what? We're still butting heads? Over what? I don't see how a difference in taste is butting heads.
Instead of hatign the current genration why noet jsut enjoy gamin ing genral instead of becoemign in bittered we shoudl play paly together paly apart but not get our collective panties ian wad and jsut enjoy games. and Im talking omyself too cause ive ebenw ell know toaba fanboy
Like you describe there with the gamestop thing. I don't care what the console is, that's just bullshit right there.
I'm only bitter against the haters (of ANY console) now. I just want to play some fun games, not get caught up in some bullshit gaming politics, ya know?
You're right though, along with LBP, I also liked Echochrome, and the Mirror's Edge demo looked absolutely outstanding (but it's also coming out on 360, which I do have). However, out of all the people I know, only one or two of them actually have a PS3, and they're usually either playing some other system when I'm with them, or they use it for watching blu-ray discs, so I don't really get much exposure to the games it has. :S
However, LBP did put me on the edge of getting a PS3, and I'm still on the edge, bias or not. :P Maybe I'll just swallow my pride and get one, though another price drop would be very beneficial. :S If I do though, I'd love to add you for LBP. :D
Maybe I'll give it a try.
I take comfort in the fact that mine at least had some unique challenges to it. Lots more emphasis on figuring out how to get to places, rather than simply being a maze or making a fast-moving platform level out of it.
It'd be funny if that turned out to be your level. It was called 'Twisted Temple' I believe.
I think I've played the "Twisted Temple". It's got a caterpillar in the beginning that complains when you start turning the wheel, right? I hate mazes, so I couldn't bother to finish it :)
And no, Twisted Temple doesn't have a caterpillar, and it's not a maze. So I guess we're talking about different levels entirely on all marks.
Sheesh, the game has been out only a couple of weeks, but there must be thousands of community levels already.
And yeah. I rather wish that there was a way to view recently published levels: It's near-impossible to find a level few people have played without a random word search turning up lucky.
I would rate it as having a much higher difficulty than any of the story levels.
On my own level, it also started out ruthless in spots. But I kept beta testing it with other folks and seeing what areas were just murdering them. A creator runs the risk of making a level designed around their own skills and habits which they can pass through fairly easily, but nobody else can.
I love the idea of what you've done. It's got a different feel than any of the other spinning levels we've mentioned. But I think you'd do well to open up the difficulty in some spots. Some of the jumps are almost impossibly narrow.
Unless it really is your goal to make a ruthlessly difficult level that few can survive. :)
Granted, the second wheel in the first part requires you to be very precise, but that at least doesn't kill you instantly if you should miss.
Oh, by the way: Did you find the shortcut/secret in the first part?
We could go through the level together, and I'll point out to you which elements I found to be frustrating. I'm not necessarily the best choice though, as I'm generally a top rated player in most games I play. Maybe you can get Jace to run through it with you. His skill level in the game is more typical, and he's a very useful meter.
I can tell you right now that he wouldn't be able to get past the first couple of challenges, much less the later ones.
Several of the dangers are blind and impossible to foresee, so they are only traversible by dying a lot and memorizing the level. For instance, there are pits with long drops into aweful gas which are blind... a player doesn't know whether they are meant to go down into it or to avoid it except by experimentally jumping down into the pit and dying... which spawns them back where they have to run through difficult parts again just to get back.
I'm not saying your level sucks. Far from it. I really like the thinking puzzles you've got in it and the overall design. But I think a few tweaks here and there could improve its playability for most players substantially.
I had to do the same thing with mine. I did a lot of watching other players of various skill levels run through my level, and it was very enlightening. Some parts I thought I'd designed to be fairly easy were just murder for most players. I went through many iterations of loosening the difficult spots. And even after that, my level is still considered to be almost too difficult. There's one part (the gears section) I'm still trying to figure out how to ease a little without just killing the whole idea of it.
My reaction to having a pit I can easily jump over is generally to jump over the pit, but then that's just me. But, if people ARE blindly jumping in there (I guess the gas seen at the very beginning of the level might be forgotten), I need to add a restart point or something there.
I don't think every level should be able to be completed by every player, either: In mine, I tried to signal the right walking path by attaching bubbles to certain sections, and keeping the camera panned out enough that careful players should see the coming dangers easily enough. But upon playing it with some random players I ran into, I found that first they were charging blindly into everything everywhere, going so far as to try to squeeze between the electrified glass and wheel THRICE before understanding that "wait for the entrance" means "don't kill yourself". At one point, rather than going for the bubble-marked path to the right, they decided to jump into the very visible spikes on the left. One's gotta be able to put some challenge into it :)
As for the gear section in your level, I actually found it to be pretty easy after a couple of tries... Especially as you can walk on top of the lowest gear :) The only part that didn't quite gel was the very last gear, which felt awkward to get past. I'd put the pins a teeeeensy bit further counterclockwise on the last gear, to allow the player to feel like he's dropping onto the pin, rather than trying to grab something that's a bit too far up.
And yeah, you can't really use bubbles to lead people around to the right path. The story levels put bubbles in all sorts of corners and everything. There's no established 'bubbles point the right way' expectation.
Per your comments on my gear section... yes, you are supposed to be able to walk on that bottom gear. It's a faster alternative route... there are actually quite a few inobvious faster ways around obstacles to get through to the finish line.
I altered that final big gear to make it much less awkward and republished the level. I was already concerned about it because it was a pretty iffy grab to get onto it, since you're pretty much trying to swing upwards. But I hadn't thought of a way to make it more playable before, so I finally just published it as it was. The new configuration is much more playable now, and I'm feeling pleased with it.
Anyway, I added some visible gas there. Much as I think that no level should make you take a blind leap of faith if it's optional, or at least provide a hint that the leap might give you something good, there are enough blind leaps elsewhere in the user-created levels that I guess it's necessary :)
I love some of the levels people are making. Have you seen the Tetris game someone made?
--Shadow