Player’s Club: LittleBigPlanet and Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise reviewed
October 29, 2008 at 5:10 pm by Garrett Martin in A&E
LittleBigPlanet
Released Oct. 27
PlayStation 3
Developed by Media Molecule
Published by Sony Computer Entertainment
Earlier this month, I wrote down some thoughts after poking around in LittleBigPlanet’s online beta testing period. Newsflash: I liked it, a lot. The beta revealed how far the game’s potential reached, as user-created levels both fantastic and mundane continually sprouted up. It didn’t give a good impression of the single-player mode, though, as only the first few tutorial stages were available. Well, after months of hype, and a last-minute one-week delay, the game has finally arrived, along with the 50 or so levels designed by the developer. They didn’t change my mind about the game one iota. Although fundamentally an old-school 2-D platformer, LittleBigPlanet transcends its limited run-jump-and-grab game play via a comprehensive suite of editing tools and an irrepressibly adorable design aesthetic. It may not be the best game of 2008, but it’s hard to think there’ll be one memorable and important than LittleBigPlanet.
Still, I have a few genuine issues and concerns, so let’s temper this raging river of praise for just a moment. The controls remain a bit inexact. The distance and arc of a jump can be somewhat unpredictable. Worse yet are the problems that plague the z-axis. Despite the game’s 2-D perspective, the environments exist on a tri-planed z-axis, meaning every piece of ground in a level has a front, middle, and rear layer to stand on or interact with as necessary. This gives the levels a physical depth beyond their 2-D nature, and theoretically that’s great. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to move back or forth on the z-axis with precision, particularly when trying to jump from one to another. The sickeningly cute playable character, Sackboy, most likely will face numerous untimely and unnecessary deaths due to incorrectly gauged perspectives. It’s a true bummer, and the game’s biggest drawback. Still, it doesn’t come close to derailing the excellent overall experience.
The game’s online components largely define the experience, but that doesn’t mean a dude can’t enjoy it on his lonesome. LittleBigPlanet features some of the finest level design this side of a Super Mario game. It continuously exploits the few available actions in novel and unexpected ways, as in the early stage where the player has to drag a straying meerkat groom back to his wedding. Levels regularly introduce new settings and environments while providing professional examples of what can be accomplished with the level creator. The single-player campaign also lets players unlock countless items to use when creating levels or editing a character’s appearance. The single-player mode gets by on charm and clever level design, but it mostly acts as a complement to the robust online offering and an introduction to the objects and tools available in the level creator.
That level creator is the main reason to play LittleBigPlanet. Even if you don’t have time to mess around with this deep and somewhat complex feature, you’ll still be alternately amazed and dismayed by the efforts uploaded by amateurs and unprofessionals. Ingenious users have already created levels that are less traditional gaming experiences than interactive stories, musical performances, or even impressive (if useless) applications such as the “LittleBigCalculator”. And of course there are dozens of user-made levels as fun and inventive as any found in the game itself. Indeed, LittleBigPlanet would be a really good game without the creative tools, but that feature, and the community that has developed around it, has elevated the game to seminal status.
Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise
Released Sept. 2
Xbox 360
Developed by Rare Ltd
Published by Microsoft Game Studios
Viva Piñata is a slightly confounding series. When it first came out, it looked like Microsoft’s half-hearted attempt at ripping off Nintendo’s Pokemon franchise. There are definitely some minor similarities, but Viva Pinata quickly established itself as a fundamentally different and more complex creature. The original game set the standard in piñata-based gardening simulations, a genre with a long and storied history (or, you know, no prior history at all). With the arrival of sequel Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise, there are now at least two games filed under that subheading.
The goal remains the same in Viva Piñata: TIP. Players cultivate their gardens in order to attract and collect various cuddly piñata animals such as fudgehogs and fizzlybears. This ain’t easy, as the candy-filled critters are ridiculously demanding. You can keep them happy by growing their favorite foods in your garden, even if that food is another adorable piñata animal. Treat them right, and eventually the animals will procreate, enriching the player’s garden and sense of self-worth. The sequel adds two new gardens to tend, one in a desert, the other in the arctic. The addition amps up the already steep learning curve and becomes potentially prohibitive to the kids the game targets. I’m not joking when I say that Viva Piñata is complex: Even adept gamers will struggle to keep its plates spinning.
November 21st, 2008 at 10:43 am
[...] just less realistically violent games. But as awesome as Super Mario Galaxy, Animal Crossing and Viva Piñata are, an adult can’t survive entirely on child-friendly games. So thank the maker for EA’s [...]