LittleBigPlanet is big fun

Playing with others is both a blessing and a curse, as the game is more fun with other people in the room, but it can also become more frustrating, depending on how talented your friends are. If they are the kind of person who struggles to make every jump and can never keep up, you will regret inviting them over to play, as going off screen starts a timer that will kill off your Sackboy. If you are either too far ahead or behind, or play with someone who refuses to go back to get that sticker you just can’t quite reach yet, expect to develop a twitch. Overall though, playing with others is more fun and adds to the experience, and you can always get your revenge simply by attaching an object or sticker to the face of your friend’s avatar.

“LittleBigPlanet” would be more fun if the controls were up to par with the rest of the game’s quality. The mechanics themselves are easy to pick up on, and the control scheme is intuitive enough, but jumping-the most important part of non-Bionic Commando platformers-feels floaty, especially when moving from the foreground to the background, or somewhere in between.

In the levels made by Media Molecule, this is not always a problem, though it is noticeable. This is because the game almost never puts jumps in that are of a difficulty the player cannot handle, and the issue of jumping from background to foreground or the reverse does not crop up often. Most of the sighs of frustration are from user created content, where things that should be simple take on original “Mega Man”-esque levels of agony as you try to time the same jump over, and over, and over again.

Given Media Molecule handled their own design well enough, they should not be penalized too harshly for this problem, but it is an issue that appears sometimes, and if you are easily frustrated by faulty jumping mechanics, you will probably notice. There are things we can point to the developer for though, such as the online multiplayer-the game tends to slow down on occasion, and loading times take forever even with high-speed connections.

Thankfully, some of the loading issues have been taken care of thanks to improvements to the servers and the Playstation 2.52 update, which was meant to improve the performance of the game’s discs-given the issues “LittleBigPlanet” had at the time, that was a thinly veiled attempt to say, “We’re fixing it.”

There are times when I feel like “LittleBigPlanet” is some of the most fun I have had with a game in a long time, as it exudes the kind of quality in a platformer that you rarely see outside of the hallowed grounds of Nintendo products. There are other times where I want to smack my Sackboy with my Dualshock 3 in much the same way you can smack other players around in co-op mode, thanks to frustrating control mechanics and the occasional hiccup with getting stuck under objects and being forced to waste a life.

Thankfully, due to the excellent presentation, the already well-established and fun-filled user created content, and the replay value inherent in a game filled with as many unlockables as this, “LittleBigPlanet” ends up as a “can’t miss” kind of game, in spite of its flaws. You would be missing out if you failed to pick up a copy of this game, especially now that many of the issues on the technical side of things have been ironed out.