It’s pretty rare for me to really like a video game, or at least it’s rare for me to like it enough to actually want to play the game all the time. I usually only discover such an addictive game about once a year. The last time that it happened was with Rock Band back in the spring, Kingdom Hearts a few years that, and way back when, the Myst series.
However, last friday (Halloween), one of my friends lent me LittleBigPlanet for the week, and I’ve been been spending most of my free time since then playing the amazing thing (I actually gave my friend back his copy on thursday, and went out yesterday to purchase my own). The game is beautiful, creative, addictive, unique, intuitive, and above all else, fun. Of course, I’ve known about LittleBigPlanet for more than a year. The trailers and gameplay videos for it during the summer of 2007 were big factors in my purchasing of a Playstation 3 in the first place, so one could say I actually spend $500 to play this game (or, if you consider the fact that I bought my HDTV to go with the PS3 around the same time, one could actually say that I spent over $1000 to play it).
In LittleBigPlanet, you play as Sackboy (above), a character made out of cloth (hence his name), and run around LittleBigPlanet (a physical manifestation of all of the dreams and imaginative energies of the people of Earth), exploring and collecting items. Items include stickers (which can be stuck anywhere in the game, even on other characters), decorations (which are like 3-dimensional stickers, and can also be stuck on anything in the game), and costumes, among other things. The costumes are a very fun part of the game, because you can really customize your Sackboy a lot using them (see below).
Besides the story mode (the main levels of the game, tied together into some sort of loose, disjointed story), there’s also the “MyMoon” area, where you can create your own levels. As you play through the official levels of LittleBigPlanet, you collect the objects from the official levels as items, allowing you to (in theory) re-create the official levels entirely, or build your own worlds. When you’ve created a level that you like, you can publish it, so other people can download and play in it themselves. You can also download and play levels that other people have made, some of which are really amazing.
Perhaps one of the best features of this already amazing game is the multiplayer gameplay. Up to 4 people can play at the same time, working cooperatively to finish the levels together. In my opinion, this is the best form of multiplayer gameplay (that is, 4 people in the same room working together, while the second best is online cooperative, then real-life competitive, and online competitive being the worst form of multiplayer), because it really feels like a group effort, and you’re playing with people you really know, and having fun together. LittleBigPlanet is a very social game, it’s actually impossible to complete it 100% on your own, there are a lot of two-player puzzles to get secret items and such.
LittleBigPlanet is definitely my favorite PS3 game thus far. I would strongly recommend it to anybody and everybody.