GG: Little Big Planet

Little Big Planet’s ‘conflict’ is abstract. The players are far more likely to remember a particularly tricky jumping sequence or some timed explosives rather than any character. The plot is blissfully unexplained until the very last levels of the game. It may come as a surprise to the player that the Story Mode has a plot, or an overarching villain.

The game is balanced in that being a platform based game in which the players all control identical avatars, all players experience the same game. The difficulty of the game isn’t ‘equal’ throughout the entire game. The first stage of the Story Mode is very easy and the last stage consists of gigantic rotating platforms that hurl the player into electrical death traps, but this is to be expected for a platform game – in an RTS or FPS it is expected that the difficulty of the game remains the same (mining resources does not become any easier and rockets do not do any extra damage). In a platform game, it is expected that the levels become far more complex to allow the player to become accustomed to the quirks of the control system and the physics of the game.

On the subject of the camera and the control system, Little Big Planet’s interface is simple, grok-able and exceptionally functional. The camera is always directed at the characters on screen at the appropriate angle for a side-scrolling platform game. The player is able to run (by moving the left control stick) jump (by pressing ‘X’) and grab on to objects (by holding ‘R1’) in order to manoeuvre through the levels. Some cosmetic actions can be made by placing stickers and decorations (the menu for this is brought up pressing ‘Square’) and the character’s avatar is fully pose-able (pressing ‘L2’ and ‘R2’ and the directional pad). In contrast, a contemporary console FPS would be expected to use each and every button and then possibly have some buttons work differently in certain contexts.

Lastly, Little Big Planet has exceptional emergent play value in that it is possible to create your own content for the game and experience other people’s vision of the game, which as might be expected alternates between new and innovative developments in the platform genre and crude pictures of naughty bits.