last weekend I got my new shiny PS3 because I want to play Little Big Planet. If you are not familiar with video gaming you might not be interested in this topic and so you can skip this post. ;-)

If you don't know Little Big Planet I would like to explain it shortly. LBP is a new Jump'n'Run from Media Molecule. The game itself is very funny with small little people called sackboys. It's a lot of fun to play, no doubt about it. But one big feature of the game is the built in level editor. The users can build their own levels and share them with the rest of the world. Great idea in the first hand. But I have to say, that I really disappointed by the editor.

Every level has three layer where the sackboys can walk on. No problem so far. But you can move the camera in editor in a range that would be necessary. Because you can't look behind a particular layer you really have to plan the stuff you want to build very well before you do anything. For me it's almost impossible to just start with something, let the inspiration flow, and add new things afterwards. In most cases you just don't have enough room because the layer you would need is already occupied by some stupid big block you put there before. And if you remove that part you remove some other things that are not supposed to be removed. And you can't turn the camera to have a better look on what you doing. That drives me crazy... really.

Another thing is the physics engine. Once again, on the first look it's great but it has some stupid behavior in the editor. For example if you try to build a hanging bridge. First step is to create a single element with a small handle to connect the pieces later. No problem so far if you get used to the layers. But that you want to glue them together and put some anchors at the left and the right side of the canyon. Sounds reasonable but the point is that everything fixed as soon as you in editing mode. That means, that you can not move just the end of the bridge to particular point. What I would expect is, that I grab am element of the bridge and move the end to the anchor point and the rest of the bridge behaves like in play mode. This means that physics are turned on and the other elements just hang down. But no... Everything is fixed in the position it fall the last time and you move everything. And I mean everything... If you connected on end of the bridge to big part of your world, the hole world is moving. What the heck... The only solution I see at the moment is that you have to build your bridge in place what is not as easy at it sounds because of the things I explained before.

I will not rant about the unprecise control with the controller because this could be much worse than it actually is. I hope some of this things will be changed in the future but I don't have much hope.

Anyway, the game is really fantastic. It's a lot of fun to play the story mode and even if have some rants about the editor I guess I will give it another try. Maybe I just need more training. ;-) But it had to be said after my frustrating bridge building experience yesterday.

Greets,
Thomas