28 November 2009

The workers control the means of production
SCE Studio Cambridge has done a great job with the PSP version of LittleBigPlanet. Before this game got shoved through my letterbox my PSP was just sitting around looking attractive and attracting dust. What impresses me most about the game is that it *feels* like playing LittleBigPlanet on the mightly PS3 super-computer device.

Back when the centre of my digital world was my beautiful GameGear I waited months and months for a port of Robocod (AKA James Pond 2) to come out. I'd played it on my mates Mega Drive and was blown away by the vivid colours, zingy music and the general wackyness of it all.

When it did come out I did enjoy it, but if lost some of the magic in the transition. Don't get me wrong is was a good conversion, but something got stripped away when they shaved away from 16 bits to 8. Which is why I'm all the more impressed by the job done own LBP PSP which captures the feel of the original!

ZZT
What really sets LBP apart it's the built in editing and sharing system for levels. More games offer built in editors these days, but that's not enough. Operation Flashpoint 2 has got a built in editor, but it's still an armed conflict simulator.It's like trying to come up with a new game by re-using a chess board and pieces, but just changing the starting positions.

The first game to really allow people to change the rules was ZZT which was created back in 1991 by Tim Sweeney who went on to create Unreal and friends. You see the tools provided in ZZT let people truely create their own games, with their own themes, storylines and little machine-like devices. One of the best of breed user created games was Code Red created by Gregory Janson who pushed ZZT to it's limits. There's much more to this story and a whole community to explore, which I really recommend looking into if you're a fan of the classics :)

LBP continues the legacy of ZZT by being more than a simple level editor, but a device to creating experiences that are about to make the player think "Wow, how'd they make that happen?"

Mav

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