A Series of Tubes

Yes, I am writing a third post about LittleBigPlanet. Yes, I promise I’ll keep it short. No, it’s not good news. I just unlocked a mini-game level in the game (no, I’m not quite finished yet, but I’m almost there) called “Spline Rider”. When I saw the title, I died a little on the inside, but when I loaded it up and found myself on a toboggan riding down an environment constructed completely of straight lines, I got angry.

Of course, the level is fun. It’s tricky to get the sled to balance right so you don’t flip over. However, this level is an exact replica of the extremely popular flash game, Line Rider (so popular, in fact, that it has been bastardized into a soulless console game). The hypocrisy is unbelievable, that Sony and MediaMolecule will remove fan-made levels that infringe on copyrights, while there is an official level obviously meant to emulate another commercial game.

On the plus side, I checked the published levels again, and I realized that the Mirror’s Edge and Tetris levels have not been removed (yet), so please, go play them while you still can. I sincerely hope that the Tetris level is not removed, because it is pure genius, and really fun.

So yesterday I posted about the latest addition to my list of all-time favorite games, LittleBigPlanet. After posting that post, I began to brainstorm the game’s possible flaws, and I came up with a few things.

First of all, in the level creator, the first time you try to use a new category of objects (materials, switches, eyes, vehicles, etc.), you are forced to watch a tutorial on how to use it. This would be tolerable if the tutorials were skippable, but they aren’t. At least, not all of them are. The tutorials are really unnecessary, and seem extremely out-of-place in such an intuitive and easy-to-understand game. Forcing users to complete tutorials before allowing them to proceed is one of the biggest problems in modern games, which usually include a ridiculously long tutorial level (usually unskippable, as well) at the beginning of the game, which you are forced to play through every time you play the game. For example, the first half-hour in Kingdom Hearts 2 (Twilight Town) is basically a glorified tutorial level, and the opening level of Knights of the Old Republc 2 was just as bad.

Secondly, and this is not a flaw as much as a trivial gripe, the clothes are not as customizable as I would like. Basically, colors. Some clothes allow you to modify their color, but there is only one color setting for your entire avatar, meaning every customizable article of clothing, and all menus, must be the same color. Certainly not a showstopper, but a complaint nonetheless.

Neither of these complaints were enough to merit posting about, in my opinion. However, then I read about MediaMolecule (the company that created LBP) and Sony “moderating” fan-made levels.

Now, don’t get me wrong here, I can understand the need for some level of censorship on their part, they obviously are going to have to delete anything obscene, and anything illegal. But the amount of level-deleting (and it is just that, permanent deletion of so-called “moderated” levels) that has been happening in the past few days is ridiculous. MediaMolecule is removing levels that could infringe on copyrights, so levels that reference other video games, music, people, movies, etc. are all being removed, irrevocably. This is really bad, a lot of my favorite levels (the Mirror’s Edge levels, as well as Tetris, Galaga, etc) are all being removed. They were really the best levels online, being so ingeniously re-created from the tools offered in the game. I must say, I’m very disappointed in MediaMolecule for being such cowards.