makingmusic476 on 12 August 2008
| mesoteto said: i think the people will make it or break it, personally i don't want to spend 5 hours building a map that will be done in fifteen, that is 5 hours i could be playing a game and not making one |
Except "making" is one of the best parts of "playing" when it comes to this title.
From Edge Online's recent hands on impressions:
LBP is broken into three discrete modes: Play, Create and Share. Initially, you’ll have to unlock Create by playing through the first few pre-made levels of Play (there are 50 in total). Sackboy and Popit are the lynchpins that tie everything together, both modes using them as the means of interaction, with Create allowing him to switch between flying about the level to place items and dropping back down to the ground to test them. (Share handles precisely what you’d expect.)
Hands-on, Create is not a million miles away from a simple art package. We start by selecting a material and brush shape from Popit, and are soon drawing a thick swathe of shiny metal plating on to the environment. Using the right stick, we alter the size of the brush as we go, and then break this into chunks with judicious stabs of the eraser. When we switch to test mode, our strange metal landscape falls to the floor, rocked back and forth by the physics engine, before coming to rest (you can use ‘dark matter’ to glue blocks in the air, but the designers rarely do).
We’re left with a pile of chunky rubble, but within seconds we’re tugging it about to form a promising assault course, and Healey is already showing us how to build working motors from a few metal blocks and a cog, while technical director Alex Evans stops by to offer instruction on the serious business of adding belch effects to stone lumps to make granite whoopee cushions. Even without this top-quality help, we’re quickly finding things we want to do, just by pulling objects from Popit and trying them out.
The results are hardly Yoshi’s Island, but within five minutes we’ve turned a blank canvas into a playground we could happily mess about in for hours, tweaking platforms and playing with the physics properties of different materials. And we’ve done it all without thinking – the design emerging from the ease with which we moved between building and testing.
The emphasis throughout is on enjoyment rather than speed. “We’ve put the priority on making the game fun to use,” says Evans (pictured). “People think you’ll be able to make a Miyamoto-style level in five minutes. Not quite. You can make a Miyamoto level, but it will probably take all weekend. Our effort has been to make sure that weekend’s fun.”
