Banana Scoop

Welcome to the world of Little BIG Planet

Welcome to this weeks edition of Game of the Week. This Week’s title is Little Big Planet. I will cover the initial game, and will hopefully follow up with another article when I get time to play the sequel. Now, as many of you may or may not know, Little Big Planet, or LBP for short, is an incredibly successful platforming game that revolutionized the way we play games. From its quirky character design to its customizable and hilarious level design, LBP has remained a staple of Playstation 3 gaming since its release back in 2008. It has since then received much praise and great ratings across the board from multiple magazines and websites. The game follows the character known as ‘sack boy’ (or sack girl for the female readers/players), essentially a ‘small, anthropomorphic humanoid creature made of fabric’ to quote the wiki. He goes around the world, developed by the 8 Curators, in order to stop the evil Collector. The story is somewhat lacking in bravado, but it definitely makes up for it with hours of creative level design and sharing across the globe.

Sack Boy!

This game is heavily centered around multiplayer gameplay, with many levels featuring side puzzles that can only be solved through the use of multiple sack people…or sack persons. Either way, the amount of fun to be had in this game can be considered endless, with over millions of level designs available daily for anyone to download and play on a whim. That combined with the hilarious shenanigans of ‘accidentally’ tossing your friend into a pit of poison fog or an electrified floor only adds to the amount of fun to be had by exploring LBP.When you aren’t busy torturing your friends or mucking about in the menu screen, the feeling of satisfaction you get from completing a map 100% with a friend or three is amazing. Despite the game having a really fun single player guided storyline and maps, I truly suggest you picking up a couple of friends and spending a night going through the story and top downloaded player made levels to compare just how different an experience it is.

With scenery that spans environments found around the globe from the African Sahara to a secluded Ninja Castle, there are many ways to rediscover old levels and create new ones with the textures alone. In the level editor, one can edit pretty much every single detail of their maps with relative ease. It gets more complicated with buttons, levers, and switches, but those aren’t required to create a fun level to play on. With a variety of different obstacles and even enemies to place, its guaranteed that you have to ability to never play through a single level twice (assuming someone didn’t copy paste from another user). Level design has improved since then, with LBP2 giving players the ability to create games within games (such as Galaga or Centipede essentially), with even more freedom to create their own storylines and characters within the levels. This signals a massive shift in platformers (or at least any platformers similar to LBP) in terms of how much user-generated content certain companies will allow. Giving the creative powers to the gamers shows us that the limits to video games are becoming pretty broad, even infinite in certain cases.

ooooooooooooooooooh. pretty.

Additionally, the ability to customize your own sack person to your desire makes you feel as though this sack person isn’t some generic sac of mesh fabric you picked up at the nearest hobby store. With many outfits built into the game and dozens more available as DLC, the limit to how fashionable your sack is remains endless (or pretty close to it). With DLC still being integrated into the sequel for this game, there are even more styles. I’m not quite sure (someone correct me in the comments), but I’m fairly certain that the outfits you had from LBP 1 could also carry over into LBP 2, but obviously not vice versa.

Bottom line (and I apologize for the short article this week), this game is a must have for anyone interested in a casual game with tons of replay ability. LBP is a great party game, although I’m not quite sure how it will stack up to the Mario Party series, which generally reigns as the top party games of all time. It’s got hours of content to delve into assuming you’re into level building, or even if you arent, you can still download levels made by people who may just be geniuses. Hopefully this has tipped your opinion if you were on the fence and considering getting this game. I know I’ve spent endless hours playing LBP1, and will probably spend endless more playing LBP2 when I can. Thanks for reading!