Spore vs LittleBigPlanet, battle of the creative games.

[The_vagabond7]

Also @ cloud3000

when I was a kid, probably about 10, I had a computer program called "gamemaker 95" or some other digit at the end. There have been other iterations since then. It was almost exactly what LBP is, except it was 8 bit graphics. You could design everything from scratch with no programming knowledge. It was all intuitive and with a bit of tinkering and ingenuity you could learn to create some incredible things using the systems in place. It came with a handful of games to show you what you can do with it.

You could create your character sprite by sprite, animate him, give him whatever abilities and powers you wanted, create items, weapons, keys, anything. You created all the tiles with their own attributes to build the levels, you could make them damaging, add gravity, have them heal you, animate them. You could make it a side scrolling game by having the background tiles have downward gravity, or make it a top down game by making them lack any gravity. You created all of the enemies sprite by sprite, animate them, and then control very specifically how they would behave. You were limited only by your imagination and ingenuity. the goal of the levels were up to you, beginning points, end points, objectives, ect ect, all up to you. I made god knows how many games as a kid using that program, I loved it to death.

LBP will have better physics no doubt, but it's going to be more limited than even that program. You will always have sackboys, you can customize them, but they will always be sackboys. The physics is already set in place, and you have to work with it rather than create it. You can't create the abilities or animations of your characters or levels. they give you a construct, you work out what you can within it.

There have been innumerable games and programs with just as much if not more freedom to create than LBP. LBP planet's defining attribute is marketing, not revolutionary design.