End-of-July Inbox Cleaning –Part One

Lots of stuff piling up,so here goes…

Where to Play

In case you haven’t noticed,I added a “Where to Play”page.  I’ll be updating this often as I get more info.  I just added the All Points West festival,where VIP tickets get you “Access to the LittleBigPlanet tent to be the first to play the hottest unreleased game for PLAYSTATION®3 and see exclusive performances”.

Competing Strategy Guides?

Over at GameStop,we see that Penguin Putnam Books will apparently be releasing the Little Big Planet[sic] Official Strategy Guide on October 14th.

But at Amazon,we have BradyGames publishing the LittleBigPlanet Signature Series Guide on October 29th.  (Thanks to Oxoc for pointing this out!)

I’m not a big strategy guide consumer usually,but I wonder what these books will bring to the table.  If they can help me get past the Hard version of that castle climbing level,they’ll be worth their weight in gold.

More Awards

In the GameTrailers Best of E3 2008 Awards,LittleBigPlanet was nominated for Best Online Game (Resistance 2 won),Best PlayStation 3 Game (Resident Evil 5 won),and Best of Show (LPB?) (Resident Evil 5 won).  And of course,LittleBigPlanet won Most Innovative Game.  The GameTrailerians may be addicted to shooting aliens and zombies,but at least Sackboy gets some recognition.

This year LittleBigPlanet is nominated for the most Game Critics Awards of any game (Best Original Game,Best Console Game,Best Social/Casual Game,Best Online Multiplayer Game,and Best of Show).  We’ll know the winners on Tuesday.

LittleBigPlanet also wins the VideoGamer.com E308 award of genius innovation.

GamePro gives LittleBigPlanet a silver medal in their Best of E3 Awards,but still seems to think there’ll be a downloadable version.  Sony needs to set the record straight.

In an effort to split from the pack and stir up some controversy (and pageviews),DailyGame.net opted to designate LittleBigPlanet as one of its “Most Disappointing Games of E3 2008″.  They take up the “professional game developers are paid for a reason”approach,and disagree with every other E3 attendee by declaring the gameplay not fun.  As a reference point,Resident Evil 5 was on the list too.

Comic-Con

It’s hard to keep track of the Comic-Con videos,so here’s a few links:  Popping Sackboys and the sticker challenge (3:15),Electric spikes and brainy enemies and the giant wheel (4:01),Dressing up (0:09),Controlling your emotions and arms (1:07),Humpty dumpty and the waterwheel (2:43),and Too far away (0:15).  Are there any others?

LBPCentral FTW

The LBPCentral fansite‘s been around longer than LiBiPl.net,but did get rather quiet for a while.  With LittleBigFan gone,and with the help of some great Comic-Con coverage,it’s now become a very active hub of LittleBigPlanet fandom again.  They’re even interviewing Media Molecule with questions from the forum users.

News from Sony’s Australian “Pause”Event

GamePlayer caused quite a stir in reporting that better levels designers will get more storage space:

If their scheme works,users who upload the most popular levels will be rewarded with more space. It’s common sense,really — when lurking on YouTube,do you look for the videos with five stars,or with one?

On the other hand,if you wanted to play Devil’s Advocate,you could accuse Sony of some subtle social engineering here. After all,server space is so cheap these days that it’s effectively free. Just think of GMail,and Flikr[sic],and all those sites that let you upload files that are hundreds of megabytes in size — for free.

I have to argue with the “server space is so cheap”part,considering that Sony will most likely have to coordinate multiple regional level databases,synchronization,redundancy,etc.  Gmail is ad-supported,Flickr is a subscription service (if you intend to upload a lot);do we want LittleBigPlanet to be either of these?

If this sort of more-space-for-the-popular scheme is put into place,I can only hope that everyone will have enough space to have a chance to become popular.  And that anyone who is popular for all the wrong reasons (offensive content,bait-and-switch descriptions,etc) will have their extra space revoked.

IGN Australia gives us some more detail on the creation tools:

Objects themselves are comprised of a good number of what the game calls “basic materials”. These include all the raw elements that comprise the single-player game,specifically:cardboard,metal,sponge,stone,wood,glass,rubber and the immovable and gravity-free dark matter. These,as well as more than 2000 other objects,are selectable through the Popit menu’s Tools option. You can flick between vertically scrolling screens filled with a huge variety of these level-making essentials. All have their own real-world physical properties —something you’ve no doubt heard and seen in action in video form. Thankfully,it’s just as much fun to toy around with the physics as you’d imagine.

The whole article’s worth a read for us aspiring level designers.

The Age’s Screen Play blog has quite a comprehensive article,with lots of old and new info:

There are also a few more fantastical but easily understandable additions like “bubble”material that floats,and “dissolvable”material which is great for attaching to proximity-based triggers or physical switches to activate exciting events such as prizes falling from the sky.

A thermometer style gauge on the side of the screen acts as a simple gauge representing each level’s memory restriction.

Levels can be almost as wide as you like and infinitely high,but there obviously needs to be a limit on the amount of elements in each stage to keep file sizes reasonable for uploading and sharing online. Adding hundreds of objects seemed to have little impact on the gauge,but items like music made it jump appreciably.

He says Sony is extremely unlikely to ever charge for additional levels because of the huge amount of free levels that will be available (some of which will be created by Media Molecule as both “official”and “unofficial”creations.

But of course the game has plenty of scope for other downloadable content allowing Sony to extract more money from players and to drastically change the experience. Things like gravity changes allowing space-themed levels and weapons or tools for Sackboy to have deeper interaction with his environment immediately spring to mind.

“One of the things that Media Molecule are very keen on is seeing what the community
wants,”says Nick.