A few quickies:  LittleBigPlanet advertizing in PlayStation Home.  Penny Arcade impatient for the game’s release.  2P Start! thinks Mm > Sega.

There’s [...]]]> A lot of people are concerned about the first week DLC, what with the delay and all.  Rest assured, “All the limited time DLC will still be available when the game is released.”

A few quickies:  LittleBigPlanet advertizing in PlayStation Home.  Penny Arcade impatient for the game’s release.  2P Start! thinks Mm > Sega.

There’s another article talking about Sackboy as PlayStations new icon, this one in The Times.

A PlayStation official said: “We’ve never really had an icon before. That was a deliberate policy of the early days because we did not want to be pigeonholed. It’s psychologically telling that this, arguably our first mascot, is fully customisable. You can make him anything you want him to be.”

Still don’t have a PS3?  Unhappy with the weather in the northern hemisphere this time of year?  Head to Australia, and get a free copy of LittleBigPlanet with your PS3 purchase this holiday season.

News of the LittleBigPlanet marriage proposal has spread far and wide.  Kids these days, huh?  In my day, we had to resort to making WIL, YOU, MRY, and ME the four high scores on the Berzerk machine at the local arcade.

Finally found some pics of the Sackpeople who were shown on the Jonathon Ross show recently (kudos to LittleBIGPlanetoid).  Certainly an interesting piece of publicity.

+10 for making a Sackboy Kratos figurine for sale on eBay.  -10 for including “Wii” in the description.

Those of you experiencing withdrawal can pour salt in your wounds by watching some Beta levels you may not have had an opportunity to play.  Wired has a top 10, Media Molecule has their Mmonday picks (1st Monday, 2nd Monday).

Anything you believe is unsuitable or inappropriate for the game should be reported immediately. By posting it here the only thing you’ll do is encourage more people to look for it and insodoing encourage more people to create levels that people will take offense at. Content such as [...]]]> First, some wise words from Sam Protagonist:

Anything you believe is unsuitable or inappropriate for the game should be reported immediately. By posting it here the only thing you’ll do is encourage more people to look for it and insodoing encourage more people to create levels that people will take offense at. Content such as this will be moderated when it’s reported, so make good use of the reporting tool.

Please stop using forums and comments to tell the world about offensive levels.  Just report them, and then deny the creator the attention they’re looking for.

Over on the EU PlayStation forums they’re taking a vote on whether to keep the already-created content when the Beta ends.  I have no preference myself, but a lot of people are quite bent out of shape about losing their work; I expect that we’ll be seeing the published levels retained.  To make it clear:

Please bear in mind that what we’re talking about here are levels that have been uploaded already, any save game data, offline creations or progress cannot be transferred into the full game.

So yes, we will have to go through the tutorials again, and you can’t keep any of those naughty levels that you’re afraid to publish.

MusterBuster also gives confirmation of the Beta end time: October 12th at 23:59 GMT.

Over here in the States, USA Today is giving away 15,000 Beta keys.  I personally don’t think this is a good idea.  If most Eurogamer and GameSpot readers don’t seem to be able to understand what a Beta is, what are the chances that USA Today‘s readership won’t be completely turned off by any flaws they encounter?

The article there has some nice quotes from familiar faces, but nothing too ground-breaking.

With the recent giveaways, it seems that just about all of the core fanbase is in the Beta now.  Are any of our US readers still out in the cold?  Due to entering most of the contests, we actually have a few extra, so just leave us a comment!

Fanart/Craftiness

This one is still my favourite parody boxart.

One of many, I assume: A Sackboy in Spore.

For Mac OS X users, Little BIG Folders can give a crafty look to your desktop.

If you have an iPhone, you might [...]]]> My “stuff to blog” list is getting too long, so here goes:

Fanart/Craftiness

This one is still my favourite parody boxart.

One of many, I assume: A Sackboy in Spore.

For Mac OS X users, Little BIG Folders can give a crafty look to your desktop.

If you have an iPhone, you might like this theme.

More Sackboy papercraft – A relatively realistic dragon-masked Sackboy this time.

A great custom Sackboy t-shirt.

Crafty people seem to really be fond of Sackboy.

Interviews and Previews and Reviews and such

Kenny did a nice write-up on all things audio in the EU PlayStation Forums.

Geekdad was looking forward to LittleBigPlanet.  Experience with the Beta seems to have only increased the desire.  “Stop hogging the controller, Daddy!”

TheSixthAxis wondered what could make LittleBigPlanet a failure.  Then they gave away the swag they picked up in Manchester.

Part Two of GameIndustry.biz’s LittleBigAmbition interview with Alex talks a lot about community features.

Peter Molyneux thinks LBP could be a game which appeals to non-gamers as well.

Marketing

Mark Valledor spilled a little info on the LBP marketing campaign on the PlayStation Blog.  “Start watching TV in the beginning of October,” he says, then “what if I tell you we’ll have multiple TV spots running in Oct-Dec, Print advertising in Sep-Dec, Online advertising in Sep-Dec, and Viral activity in Sept-Dec”.

IGN now has a LittleBigPlanet Launch Center.

Playing in Public

Our Swedish readers can go play LittleBigPlanet at “2 New Days of HipHop”; dates and locations here.

I think that’s enough for now.. more soon(ish).

This appears to be the animation in the winning creation’s creature’s brain..?

MTV’s Multiplayer blog did a time-lapse of Team Awesome building their level.  Team Awesome co-won “Most Innovative”; the lighting, the crazy platforms, the high jumps.. can’t [...]]]> While the internet’s going Beta crazy, some more has come out of the Game Jam at Parsons:

This appears to be the animation in the winning creation’s creature’s brain..?

MTV’s Multiplayer blog did a time-lapse of Team Awesome building their level.  Team Awesome co-won “Most Innovative”; the lighting, the crazy platforms, the high jumps.. can’t wait to die a hundred times on it.

On the official PlayStation blog, they have a nice interview with Kenny and Kareem.

VentureBeat talked to Kareem as well.

Destructoid gives us a short look at each of the finalists.

Reuters even put up an article about LittleBigPlanet mentioning the contest.

But GameSpot really delivers with a bunch of playthrough videos.  Team Rocket did not disappoint me.

GamesIndustry.biz has a two-part interview with Sony Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida was named as his successor as president of Worldwide Studios (part one, part two).  LittleBigPlanet still seems to be on Yoshida-san’s mind:

I can’t wait to see how consumer [...]]]> First, ScrewAttack spent just a couple of minutes with Kyle Shubel at PAX08.

GamesIndustry.biz has a two-part interview with Sony Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida was named as his successor as president of Worldwide Studios (part one, part two).  LittleBigPlanet still seems to be on Yoshida-san’s mind:

I can’t wait to see how consumer will create stuff using the tools. It’s great to play many different levels that Media Molecule has been creating, and you can spend hours finishing this game – but there’s the possibility of hundreds of thousands of interesting things for consumers, and people will spend that time. When we were kids we’d spend lots and lots of time, just because we were motivated.

One challenge is getting the support from all parts of the company, getting them behind the titles. Something like LittleBigPlanet is brilliant, but it’s such a new concept, it takes a lot of effort to communicate it. That’s something that has to be done in each region, but in each region consumers have different sensibilities, so sometimes the message has to be catered to each region.

But we really want to make it successful globally, so what we’re trying to do is communicate much earlier in the process of development with the marketing partners within the company, not just in the region where the game’s made.

Yes – LittleBigPlanet is unique in the sense that it defies cultural differences, and will hopefully be accepted in Asia as well as Europe and the US.

IGN also talked to Shuhei Yoshida, and the topic of LittleBigPlanet came up there as well:

We are totally focussed on making it successful from worldwide marketing. From a company standpoint we totally believe in the premise that it brings to the table – not just for the game but for the future and where we’re heading. It is just going to take a concerted effort from all parts of the company. So from a marketing standpoint it’s going to be huge campaign that you’ll see.

LittleBigPlanet even came up in an interview Joystiq did with Spore Producer Caryl Shaw:

Now that Spore is done – and reviewers continue to make of it what they will – we asked Shaw what she’s most looking forward to. The answer didn’t surprise us in the least. “I’m really interested in LittleBigPlanet, and I think the rest of the team is, too,” she said with genuine excitement in her voice. “I really want to see their tool set and how easy it is to share [content] with other people. There’s huge potential there if they do it right.”

The big news, however, was GamesIndustry.biz’s interview with Alex Evans.  You know, the “LittleBigPlanet Couldn’t Have Been Made on 360” [sic] and “LittleBigPlanet fills up Blu-Ray disc” [sic] one.  My initial headline was “MM Praises 360, Says Cell Processor is Weird, Confirms Possible Sega Mega Drive Port”.  Unfortunately the internet is knee-jerking based on headlines, but let us look at what was actually said.

Alex first gives a behind-the-scenes explanation of the E3 presentation that went a little awry, which is worth a read if you don’t know the story.  He also talks about the difficulty in explaining the game to people.  I keep hearing industry insiders saying “Of course we get it, but what about The Casuals?”  Alex seems to see it another way:

If I’m talking to someone who doesn’t have all these preconceptions of what a game is, it’s actually a lot easier to explain – it’s something that you play and enjoy, and you make things with it. That’s what it is. They don’t know what a game is anyway, they wouldn’t know what an FPS was, so they have fewer preconceptions – like kids: “Oh, it’s fun, oh it’s got a cute character.” They see things a bit differently, they’re less worried about this elevator pitch.

The comes the controversial bit about it being 40gb:

Q: And it weighs in at about 40GB?

Alex Evans: Erm, yes – I believe a Blu-ray single layer is 20GB and a dual layer is 40GB, but we’re filling up the Blu-ray. One of the things on there is we’re having a lot of tutorial content – basically there are two paths through the game, the player’s route and the creator’s route.

[ . . . ]

So one of the things we’re filling the Blu-ray up with is tutorials, and a lot of video stuff showing exactly how it’s done, it’s narrated by Stephen Fry and so on. It’s really useful that thanks to Blu-ray we haven’t needed to worry about file size, it’s never crossed my mind. We’ll check in another gigabyte file… it’s a bit slow on our network but beyond that…

But the game itself and the levels you produce are relatively compact.

To me this sounds like they’re putting all sorts of stuff on the Blu-Ray because they don’t have to worry about space.  It doesn’t sounds like “We have a double-layer Blu-Ray’s worth of data”.  Given the space that’s available, I’d expect we’ll see uncompressed files where it speeds loading, and perhaps all languages on every disc to simplify distribution.  If they were limited to DVDs, or CDs, or floppies, various compromises would be made.  Also:

So we have a huge library of thousands of different objects, and they’re not just textures – we worry about the bump-mapping and the specular… all the HD, next-gen stuff happens and it’s sitting there on the Blu-ray for you to use without having to worry about it. And that’s really how we’re using the space up.

I wonder if we’ll ever see a procedural material editor for LBP, or if they’ll keep new materials as DLC-fodder.  Now on to the big-time fanboy incitement:

Q: So clearly you couldn’t make LBP for the Xbox 360?

Alex Evans: No. Somebody asked “Could you have made it on the Megadrive?” and there’s one answer that’s yes, and one answer that’s no. With LBP as it is, we couldn’t have made it on the Xbox 360 and the reason for that is actually because we designed it around the PS3′s strengths.

In other words, if you’re a game designer, from day one you know your platform, and you just cane it on that platform. You’re not worrying about cross-platform, you’re not worrying about anyone else’s hardware design.

The 360 is an incredibly capable machine, and you could make a user-generated content game on it, no question – just as you could make one on the PS2 or the Megadrive, or any platform. But because we picked our platform, you go and you use every available bit of space, every little processor cycle.

For example, the Cell – which is unique to PlayStation – we really enjoyed using it because rather than coming at it from the “Oh my god, we’ve got to port to a 360 engine for this” or “We’ve got to do an engine that’s on both,” we were instead: “Fine, it’s idiosyncratic, it’s weird, it’s not anywhere else – let’s go use it.”

And that’s been the reason I think that it really plays to the PS3′s strengths. I don’t want people to say “You could do this game on the 360″ – well, you could do any game on any platform, it’s just that you have to design around it. Just the design decisions on the PS3 are huge, and I’m sure you realize that having a hard drive on every unit makes a difference.

That’s another thing – if we didn’t have a hard drive on every unit, we’d have to scale back the ambition of what you could save and do. So yes, you could make this game on the 360, but it’d be a different game.

I love certain things on the PS3, and the hard drive is one of them. And it’s not just that it exists, it’s that it’s on every single SKU.

I think Alex says it pretty well, if you bother to read it.  My take: Certainly the guaranteed hard drive is a factor, and (althought Alex doesn’t mention it) the openness of PSN is a factor; but primarily it can’t be a 360 game because it was designed around the PS3 from the beginning.

It seems that EGM/1UP’s Shane Bettenhausen (with help from David Ellis) has been making good use of an early build of LittleBigPlanet.  October’s Electronic Gaming Monthly has a nice article giving us some tips from their first level-building attempt.

But first, there’s a two-page ad for LittleBigPlanet:

Nice to see the print [...]]]>

It seems that EGM/1UP’s Shane Bettenhausen (with help from David Ellis) has been making good use of an early build of LittleBigPlanet.  October’s Electronic Gaming Monthly has a nice article giving us some tips from their first level-building attempt.

But first, there’s a two-page ad for LittleBigPlanet:

Nice to see the print ads starting to show up.  From the ad, it should be clear that it’s a whimsical multiplayer platformer.  There’s talk of uploading your creations, but nothing about what those creations are.  Given the difficulty of expressing all of the goodness in a simple ad, I’ll take the multiplayer platformer take-away over confusing the reader into thinking it’s only a level design tool.  The lines “Actually, it is all fun and games” and “Fun shall overcome” are a good counterpoint to the dark serious tones that market a lot of the other upcoming games.

The article itself has a few reveals, including apparent confirmation that you must complete “the game’s first set of professionally constructed Story Mode stages” before entering Create mode.  Some forum-goers have been complaining about this restriction, but I certainly would not want to play anything constructed by someone who hasn’t even played enough to have the basic platforming mechanics down.  Trust me, the first set of levels won’t take you that long to at least complete (although there’s a lot of replay value later).  The same internet denizens will likely be perturbed by the mention of mandatory tutorials present in Create mode, but they are reportedly “brief, entertaining, and best of all, worthwhile”.

There’s also talk of levels having multiple exits, and a note of caution: “Jumping, in particular, requires a little practice, as your vertical leap goes considerable higher than a lateral one”.  In my experience, Mario and Metroid veterans won’t have a problem, and platforming newbies will get the hang of it pretty quickly.

Showing you their level, built “over the course of three hilarity-filled hours”; they give advice on choosing materials, inserting PSEye images, offering multiple paths, simple obstacles, leveraging mistakes, “wicked” jumps, corralling big contraptions, and including challenges near the end.

There’s not a huge amount of LBP content, but I’d suggest at least thumbing through it when it shows up at your local newsstand.  And since they already have the code, look for EGM to do a review of LBP soon.  Gee, I wonder who’ll be writing the review?

A games blog over at the Portland Mercury seemed impressed by LittleBigPlanet, and were nice enough to point out something that I think is being largely overlooked:

Unlike most world-building games, this platforming section is robust enough to functionally be its own game, much to the delight of those who don’t have [...]]]> PAX

A games blog over at the Portland Mercury seemed impressed by LittleBigPlanet, and were nice enough to point out something that I think is being largely overlooked:

Unlike most world-building games, this platforming section is robust enough to functionally be its own game, much to the delight of those who don’t have any desire to slap together oversized fire-breathing cranes for their friends to play with.

The PlayStation Blog posted a booth tour from PAX; at 2:20 or so they start talking to SCEA’s Kyle Shubel, and he shows them a cool rocket car and the PAX08 Wall of Awesome.

The Escapist magazine gives a positive report of their hands-on session with LBP at PAX.  They mention the now-famous Disney DLC, purely as an example, and also repeat the October 21st release date.  Reassuringly, “Even so, Sony noted, they’re determined to keep LittleBigPlanet‘s unique style and presentation intact, so they won’t be replacing sackboy with other characters or introducing content that would weaken their own brand.”

Joystiq spent their hands-on time at PAX wisely, and give us a delightful time-lapse of them building their logo in LittleBigPlanet.  Be sure to check out the multi-rider tank at the end.  You can see a demo of that tank here.

PS3Center.net has a good gameplay vid of the ghostly Skate to Victory level, minus the actual skateboard part.   Whoever’s playing is much better than I am; those ghosts always got me.

Robot Martini has an informative and matter-of-fact hands-on preview up.  Kind of an analytical engineer’s view, which I strongly approve of.

Here’s a mini-preview from Blogcritics.  “I cannot wait for this game to come out.”

The Daily Dairy also got a chance to play.  Bowie reference FTW.

Cellphone camera videos of people playing LittleBigPlanet at PAX08 are certainly not in short supply.  dliggins put a few up on photobucket.  All of the remaining thermometer complainers seem to like seeing Kyle show the huge Elephant Temple filling only half of the glass.  Someone even caught what appears to be the game’s intro animation, although the quality’s not the best (sudden brightness vs cellphone camera, I guess).

Leipzig

videogamer.com unsurprisingly listed LittleBigPlanet among their “Games that most floated our boats at GC 2008″, saying that “[...] for all the buzz about user-built levels and online communities, it was the sight of row upon row of enraptured Germans that reaffirmed our faith in this game.”

Our favourite GC-attending Molecule Craig Kerrison only got a brief appearance on X-Play (and it doesn’t seem to be online), but GameReactor lets him give a nice demo of the oh-so-gorgeous Dancers’ Court on GRTV.  He does say that there are seven themes, each of which has three or four levels; if there are 60 or so levels included, mathematics tells us that some of these must be outside of the seven themes (or maybe they’re not considered “levels” per se).  Maybe this is the Player/Creator divide?

buzz-worthy

CVG made some hearts flutter by posting part of a recent interview with Pete Smith, where he said that “[...] we will be aware of who those awesome designers are and certainly there’s the potential to get them building levels as part of the dev team.”  Many fans already viewed LittleBigPlanet as a pathway into the industry, and I wouldn’t doubt that other developers will be keeping an eye out for fresh level design talent as well.  As I recall, the “show ‘em what you can do” path worked out pretty well for Zoid.

Shuhei Yoshida, President of SCE Worldwide Studios, told videogaming247 that “LittleBigPlanet is going to be the biggest title for Sony in all markets this year”.  Everyone seems surprised that he includes Japan in that prediction, but we’re not.  We’ve been paying attention.

Speaking of Japan… ta-dah!  Official Sackboy plush toys from Taito!  Play-Asia has somewhat better scans, but I can’t wait for real pics.  About the info page at NCS, though:  Can someone with less rusty Japanese (and better eyes) help?  What does it say at the bottom-right about the three television commercials?  Early October teaser.. something new.. Mid October bookstore commercial.. ?  Christmas commercial.. LittleBigChristmas Campaign?  Forgive me, チャング先生、I have forgotten much.

misc

GNN gives us some cool info on (and screenshots of) the Chinese/English version of LittleBigPlanet.  It looks to me like one of the player names came from a Japanese version, unless katakana is used in Chinese games as well?

One of our favourite webcomic artists, Scott Johnson, says he’s looking forward to LittleBigPlanet.

Over at wayofthegeek, CMorrison seeems certain that LBP will flop.  A sucker for gamer pidgeonholing, (s)he says Hardcores are too hardcore, and Casuals are too cheap.  We’ll see.

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