The Republic of Thoronia

If I was 14 I would think that Little Big Planet was the stupidest thing in the world. If I was 8 I would love it. I’m 27 and I think it’s one of the best things to hit this generation of console’s since… well, since Metal Gear Solid 4, but other than MGS4 nothing has it beat. Why? Well, in case the media hasn’t shoved it down your throat yet (or you’re one of the many, many readers that don’t admit to loving video games), Little Big Planet is adorable, it’s girlfriend/wife ready, it’s kid ready and it’s some of the best fun playing a game you’ll have all year.

In description, the game is nothing more than a platformer, you run and jump and grab things. But the design of the game is what carries it over the edge. The entire world is created with fabrics and stitches, cardboard and sharpies, and it looks like a massive art-school student’s final diarama project.

But we’re still not to the part that makes Little Big Planet stand out from the rest. The kicker, the big deal, the shabang is the user-created levels. Hundreds of thousands of levels are already up and available to play online, with a friend or by yourself. The developer’s integrated a full-blown level creation system into the game — something that PC users have had for years with mod’s and source codes — but this is the first time it has hit hard on a console system. Feeling a bit creatively stifled? Or perhaps you just work better as a team? Get your friends together not only just to play, but to create. We’ve all heard of the collective conscious, but a collective creative element is simply unheard of on a console system. If creating your own level sounds a bit too complicated for your taste, or perhaps you’ll argue that you’re “just not that creative” LBP has an answer: Play through the game. By the time you’ve finished the game you are aware of how each lever and pulley works, your creative juices are flowing and lightbulps are exploding over your head. Or not, and that’s okay too, you can rock every one else’s levels any time, and there are hundreds of thousands of them to dig through.

Hardcore platformer dudes will argue that the game’s spotty control scheme might turn off those that spent hours getting through Mario as quickly as possible, but the other side of the argument is that LBP didn’t settle on predetermined physics to base their game. Argue away about the precision of your sackboy, but you can’t argue with the amount of fun you’ll have pulling down a felt cloud or riding high on a piece of cloth attached to some wings.

In the end, it’s difficult to explain all the things that make this game great, but if you’ve had doubts put Little Big Planet on at a party and watch as everyone gathers around the TV, helping each through levels, wanting to get a shot, and gracefully asking, “how much does one of these PS3 things cost anyway?”

It’s a rare event when a video game licences the soundtrack and gets above-average results. Sure, EA Sports will continually drive “whatever the kids are listening to” down your throat while playing NHL or Madden, and at times a random sandbox title will throw down some cleverly chosen classic tunes. Hell, their was a Prince of Persia video floating around a few months ago that had a Sigur Rós song in it. But never in any of my experiences have I seen licensed music in a video game that could have easily been the lineup for day two of the Pitchfork Music Festival. Of course, most people that have seen and played Little Big Planet on the PLAYSTATION 3 will argue that there has never been anything quite like Little Big Planet.

The most noticeable (and some would argue definable) track that indie rockers across the globe will recognize is the Go! Team’s “Get it Together,” which not only perfectly defines the mood and play of the game, but sets the stage for every other licensed track. Sure, as with all video games, the original compositions have their moments, but I would argue that running around as a burlap sackboy and dodging fire while clinging to felt and listening to Battles’ “Atlas” has got to be one of the greatest moments in video game history.

If Go! Team and Battles aren’t surprising enough, then perhaps the rest of the soundtrack is — would, say, DJ Krush’s “Song 2″ surprise you? Or maybe James Pants’ “Rhythm Trax 7?” How about the absolutely adorable “My Patch” by Jim Noir? For the worldy folks we get tracks from Café Tacuba, Ananda Shankar and the Toumani Diabate’s Symmetric Orchestra (who incidentally set back the release date of the game due to some “controversial lyrics”).

The point doesn’t have to be who the bands are, but the fact that these bands are in a VIDEO GAME — not in the title screen, playing in the background, title of a sports game, not in the pattern-copy, glorified Simon Says kind of way of Guitar Hero, not in the “radio” function of a sandbox car thieving of GTA IV — the music is an integral part to the look and feel of how Little Big Planet works. It’s a massive toy for the world to play with and share, and embraces the ideal’s of D.I.Y. with a massive, creative level builder. This is our game, not the developer’s not the publishers — this is your game and mine, we make it what we want.

It might be too early to call whether Little Big Planet will be the video game industries Garden State or its Wes Anderson, but the point is that it gets closer to both than anything before it.

If you asked me what video game’s I’m most excited about right now, I’d probably give you a laundry list of different games (actually just Dead Space, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Endwar, Prince of Persia, Resistance 2, and…). Most of those games would be exciting because of technical prowess, immersion, complexity. Yet one of these games is simple mind blowing in its absolute open-endedness. That game is Little Big Planet for the PS3.

The game itself is a fairly straightforward platformer, you control a little sack-person, having them run from left to right while jumping over obstacles and such. But the games design sets a remarkably interesting tone in that it looks like some magical set piece that you’d order from Etsy. It’s beautiful, to say the least:

I had a chance to play with the beta over the last few days, and I’ve concluded that this is one of the most stylized and remarkable games on the horizon. But the real appeal of LBP, the kicker, the whole shabang… is the fact that you can build your own levels, customize your own characters and turn your level into almost anything that you could possible imagine. The developers of LBP have given the user a complete design experience, which the beta of course doesn’t even begin to touch. You can, essentially, build an entire level (or hell, a whole new game), and subsequently share it with everyone on the game’s servers. Yep, build, share, rebuild, customize, borrow, share, repeat. It is going to be amazing.

It’s going to be amazing because it is one of the first console games ever to not only be full of creativity, but to breed it (yeah yeah yeah, we all know about Quake and Half-Life Mods… but those aren’t console’s now are they? And hell, this is 100X easier than making a Quake level (albeit the last time I tried to make a Quake level was for Quake 2, so it may have gotten easier by this point)). It’s going to showcase what games can do, in all of their good, bad and ugly (we’re all going to assume that yes, there will be at least 1000 user-generated penis based levels). On top of that it boasts a collective creativity in that you and your friends can sit down together (literally or figuratively online)  and create levels with each other. Already, with the beta being live for under a month, a few great levels have been produced…

(video’s after the break)

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But today, I broke the mold. I pre-ordered a game, Fallout 3. I think that I perhaps have stepped into A) A New world of dorkdom B) A new world of isolation or C) A new world where I’m paranoid that the game that I bought a gaming system for, might not be available immediately unless I pre-order — I therefore have to ensure that I won’t have to wait a whole week or something to get it.

The worst part? I thought about pre-ordering others. Like Dead Space, Little Big Planet and… no wait, that was it. Just those two. But at least with Dead Space I would have gotten a 100 page art book — all I got with Fallout was a soundtrack. Which contains songs from the Ink Spots and Bing Crosby — you can read that as “this game is going to fucking rock and change my life.” Remember Morrowind, Mojiferous? Remember the sleepless nights? The dynamics? The coolness? Now drop a nuclear bomb on that shit. O….M….G!

Done dorkin’ out. See you in ‘09.

Ugh. I need friends or something.