Mike Bantick
Monday, 22 December 2008 09:04
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 4
Here in Australia, the advertising is heavy, and the PS3 can be purchased in a bundle with LittleBigPlanet.
LBP starts off innocently enough, but beware; danger lurks for the unwary further beyond, more on that shortly.
The photo realistic graphics present a world in miniature, a toy scale world of the bizarre. Here your Sackperson can bounce around to his/her emotional abandonment. Your Sack guy or gal is a hessian bag humanoid that can show expressions, wave his/her little arms around and is basically ‘very cute’(tm).
Sackboy/girl starts out pretty well naked, with just a strategically placed zipper protecting modesty. The player get’s to grip with the simple commands over the first few levels. Here you will learn that Sackboy has a nice annoying way of floating when he jumps and that the game will decide the best way it thinks you want to go in the 3D plane’s Z axis.
On the Z axis, LBP presents it’s platforming world with three levels of depth and with a dynamic camera that zooms in and out, up and down as appropriate to the problem presented. This works okay, though the controls are a little loose, and the automated depth selection the game does sometimes overrides your intentions.
The levels themselves are rooted in real world physics by enlarge, incorporating familiar materials such as polystyrene, cloth, rubber, glass and so on, into geometric, and non geometric shapes. There are springboards, explosives, poison gas, spikes, switches and more to be negotiated by Sacklad.
Some levels playout in a normal 2D platform style, some require a little exploring, some tangential puzzles can only be solved by 2 or more Sackfolk working in concert, some are time trial or race like in their nature and others require a frustrating amount of dexterity to get to the end level goal. Here Sackkid will have a score allocated, and if you are online, compared to the leader boards.
