Maybe that has changed. You do know that the market isn't static and things can change right? Right!?

I guess I just expected it to crop up on N4G if the situation were to reverse. I assumed that no news meant it was status quo.

You'll notice I finished my sentence with a question mark, to allow someone who's followed their financials very closely to correct/update me.

No wonder you thought it was boring.  I bet you're not the only one who didn't go online or try making a level.

Seeing as the Single Player mode's intent is to show you how to create levels, hmm, I can see why you had absolutely no fun.

Heh...

exactly.  theres a lot of games like it already, I fail to see the innovation.

Saying little big planet is a platformer plus level editor is like saying Braid is just a Mario game with Prince of Persia's time rewind thrown in.

Yes, those two things accurately describe facets of what you do while playing Braid, but they also fail to describe the overall experience of playing Braid, and are even potentially misleading. It is the overall experience which makes the game worthy of being called innovative, the way that all of the elements come together and make a game which is much harder to imitate than, say, the small innovation of adding leveling up to an FPS, or more actiony battles to an RPG -- those are things that can be immediately integrated into any game, and nowadays they are -- they are evolutions in the formula. But Braid can't be described by the formula Mario+X=Braid, because it's just too innovative.

Maybe we should call Braid a more-serious-adultish-mario-in-animated-watercolor-time-manipulation-and-outside-the-box-puzzles-and-secrets

-which-are-the-real-point-of-the-game style game.

But that gets ridiculous, and still doesn't address the fact that the core gameplay is elusive if you're looking for more of a mario game or more of a puzzle game.

In the same way, we don't usually call Mario an acceleration-and-powerup-based-platformer-with-zaniness-and-enemies-with-cranial-weak-spots.

We just call it "Mario," and other games that play similarly we call "Mario-like."

The point of all this is that, yes, you could call LBP a four-player-offline-online-physics-based-platformer-with-total-world-and-character-customization-in-a-player -created-persistant-online-world-with-mmo-like-developer-updates-and-three-stooges-and-shooter-elements style game.

But calling it a physics based platformer (which you may or may not like) with a hackneyed level editor tagged on is misleading. For one, no one has done a level creation game on the scale of LBP for consoles, with the possible exception of the RPG maker games. The control scheme is daunting. More importantly, the creation mode of little big planet is totally unique. This is coming from someone who’s made levels or games for Warcraft 2, Warcraft 3, Morrowind, Starcraft, Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2, Myth 2, and many RPG makers.

LBP isn't really like level editing as I’ve known it -- it's more like throwing a bunch of materials together and making a huge machine. Everything in the game can be thought of as basic physics problems -- all of the things that would normally have programmer-y names like triggers and height maps and scripts are instead renamed into things that have obvious meaning in the physical world: switches, bolts, magnets, even emitters. This is particularly true because there aren’t a lot of variables to manipulate in the background. In an RPG or RTS level editor on the other hand, you spend a lot of time editing background variables in menus because the genre of game demands that there be things like statistics for enemies, spawn points for everything, and all kinds of other behind-the-scenes numerical stuff.

In other words, that old awesome book The Way Things Work is a more useful users manual for LBP than most level design books.

That’s the brilliance of making the game a platformer -- when you think about, platformers, even with no scripting, actually offer some of the best gameplay that’s ever been invented. Sure, many people might prefer an RPG by a mile, but RPGs are all stitched together by scripting – there’s no gameplay without it, just a guy walking around a bunch of empty space. Same goes for an RTS, a bunch of guys following a mouse pointer around empty space, unless of course you’re playing multiplayer. That means that the minimum requirement for making levels in the game, both in terms of time and experience, is way less than even something like warcraft II, let alone Neverwinter Nights. Even if you just thrown a bunch of materials to climb on into a level, the core gameplay of a platformer is still there.

And the final secret to Little Big Planet is that you can’t really separate the playing experience from the creating experience, because of the way the whole game has been designed. One of the main motivations for playing is collecting an arsenal of physical things you can throw into a level, and creating itself actually feels like being in your level – with the push of one button you can instantly walk around your creation just as a player would, no separate level editor program needed. On top of that, so many people create levels that the online experience isn’t just about playing or creating, it’s about both, and many people play with the eyes of a creator. Anyone who’s done level editing before knows how different it feels to play a game once you’ve spent some time with editor, and LBP is the ultimate example of this, because everything in the game is so physical and overt.

This is why we call it “Little Big Planet” and “innovative as hell.” Not “platformer-with-level-editor.”

Sorry about the length..

Alic

I don't disagree, but the bottomline is that the game is a side scroller.  It's innovativve and creative, but I'm not into the whole "briad" phenom-thing.  I'm not knocking it and people who like it, but jsut as you don't see me playing SSBB or other side scrollers, don't expect me to be impressed by a side scroller that I can add stuff to and create stuff.   

Which was my only point:  the game is on the extreme end of the innovation specrum, even if people who don't like side scrollers (and even some other folks) don't get into the game.  Which I totally understand.  While I have two friends who come over and only want to play little big planet, and it's my girlfriend's favorite game (it managed to beat Fable II) I would never reccomend the game to my brother, who prefers FPS games, action games, and puzzle games.

I appreciate the response,

Alic

Except... it isn't.  It's just doing what's been on PC for ages.... and finding ways around what the console can't handle.

What's innovative in LBP that wasn't in... Blastworks for example?

The fact that you don't need to use a webbrowser to download the extra levels?

It's a platformer instead of a sidescroller shooter?

That's all i can think of... and Blastworks is on the Wii.

LBP really isn't innovative... it only seems that way to people who haven't been paying attention to the "create" scene of videogames.

People who call it innovative are the same people who think Bioshock is innovative not realizing it's a successor to System Shock and thought Santanna was a new band when  they had a hit in the 90's.

Needing to use a webbrowser to download extra levels is completely different from LBP. Yes level creators have existed forever, even on consoles, but no console game made creation as much of a focus of its entire game like LBP. Making a game where creators come together and make an actual community that was not only planned by Media Molecule but is actively fosterred by them. That is something that has not been done on a console, and yes it could be because the online capabilities are new, but it is still something new and different being done

Actually that was the whole theme behind blastworks as well.... and fostered by Majesco... who specifically set up a site for wii owners... and the mods are the biggest draw of the game.

http://www.blastworksdepot.com/games/blastworks/

So... your "what's new" is basically them finding an endaround from the webbrowser... despite the fact that since the PS3 has a webbrowser it would of been just as easy to set up a website that could do exactly the same things.