LittleBigPlanet 2 Preview

Seeing is believing, as the old saying goes. It’s one thing to hear of a real-time strategy game made using nothing but LittleBigPlanet tools; to actually watch it being played is something else entirely. Call it proof of concept, call it bloody amazing – call it what you will: the mentalists at Media Molecule have pulled off something special. And as the developers themselves are all too keen to point out, this is just the beginning.

Admittedly, the Sackboy RTS won’t be causing the folks at Blizzard to lose much sleep. No-one’s going to take a look, pull the plug on StarCraft 2 and then leap, wailing, to a pavement-splattery death. It’s a simple affair, a colourful romp featuring a spider-like bot that can spit out turret-y offspring who scurry about on little legs. It’s certainly Real-Time, but the Strategy looks a bit simple, and I reckon you could probably win by sending everything you’ve got at the enemy while shouting “RUSH-RUSH-RUSH-RUSH!”. On the other hand, it’s still pretty remarkable. There are drag and drop controls, there’s the ability to make your own army, and each unit has its own independent AI. In other words, it’s a working RTS – made entirely via a game that’s supposed to be about a beanbag jumping up and down on platforms.

Just as the fully workable calculator level became a sort of posterboy for the power of LittleBigPlanet 1, so the workable RTS has become a yardstick for our expectations of the sequel. Everyone (in the press, at least) is talking about it, and the damn game won’t be out for months yet. The internally-made RTS stage was happily shown off by Media Molecule as part of their behind-closed-doors presentation at this year’s E3, a demo which focused almost entirely on community-made stuff, rather than the pre-packed levels that were shown at the game’s big reveal in May. It’s a decision that makes perfect sense: user-generated content is the lifeblood of LittleBigPlanet, so what better way to promote the sequel than by showing off what you can do with a bit of time and talent (and, presumably, an attention span that hasn’t been whittled away to nothing by years of Call of Duty, sugary soft drinks and an unhealthy appetite for Pokemon hentai).

A few of you may already be asking how Media Molecule can show off community-made content when the game is still nowhere near release. Well, a few weeks ago the studio held a private community event, inviting several prolific LBP designers to a cosy shindig where they could try out the new tools. The aim of the event was to see what these wunderkinder could do with the revised focus on game-making within the game – or metagaming, to use the slightly more flowery term. Though this is pure conjecture on my part, I also like to think that everyone put on coloured robes and started chanting the revised LittleBigMantra: “It’s not a platform game, it’s a platform FOR games!” Then they all got naked, pulled out a goat’s heart, and had a bizarre orgy in front of a giant Sackboy statue. Probably.

Perhaps due to the novelty of the new feature, many of the showcased efforts adopted a top-down perspective for their creations. One highly impressive example took the form of an old-school helicopter shooter. As we all know, standard LittleBigPlanet levels allow the player to move between three “plains” of the environment: the background, the foreground, and the bit in-between. Here, however, the shift of camera angle meant that the plains were used to create separate fields of combat, in that the player-controlled chopper had to use a machine gun to destroy foes on the ground and air-to-air missiles against rival ‘copters. Incidentally, these rockets had a homing capability; like the tanks in the RTS, each missile had its own AI.

Another top-down offering put the player in control of a UFO, floating over a rural landscape and shooting down enemy planes. As in Proper Games’ PSN and XBLA title Flock!, there was also the ability to herd sheep about the level – only here there were bonus points to be earned by steering sheep into the path of oncoming motorway traffic. A similar degree of animal cruelty was evident in a strange, sideways-on hunting game – a bit like a version of Operation Wolf starring The Animals of Farthing Wood. Later still I was shown a retro arcade shooter that borrowed heavily from Tempest. In fact, “borrowed” is putting it a bit lightly; it pretty much broke into Jeff Minter’s house, nabbed his stuff and then left a stinky calling card on the living room carpet.

As a demonstration of what can be done with LittleBigPlanet 2, Media Molecule’s E3 presence knocked the ball out of the park. When faced with such a diverse selection of creations, it’s pretty much impossible to argue against the potential for user-generated greatness. The people who made these example games are very talented folk, and at the moment I’m still sceptical about how easy it will be for Joe Average to follow in their bedroom-coder footsteps. That said, it does seem that the developers are going out of their way to make things easier this time around. You can map the movement of any object or vehicle to the joypad controls of your choice, for example. If you want the X button to make your car go forward, you simply kit out your vehicle with a special object called a Controlinator. Once this is done you can summon up an on-screen drawing of a Sixaxis, and then draw a wired link between the engine and X. If you prefer, you could link the car’s movement to thumbstick inputs, or to the pad’s tilt sensors – it’s all simply a case of connecting the right elements.

For more advanced designers the real prize will be the new Microchip objects, which essentially allow you to attach a load of invisible AI commands to an object. It’ll eliminate the need for masses of behind-the-scenes levers and switches, and it should in theory make it easier for budding developers to master their logic gates, but I suspect that for a lot of us it’s still going to be damn complicated. Still, it would be hugely unfair to judge that side of the game now, and personally I’m very keen to give the new DIY stuff a go for myself. Besides, even for those of us who can’t code our way out of paper bag (or perhaps a sack), there’s going to be a tonne of stuff to download from the people who can. And if this is the quality of the pro’s efforts several months before release, I can’t wait to see what’s available at the end of the first week of sales. StarCraft 3, perhaps?

LittleBigPlanet 2 is scheduled for release later this year, exclusively on PS3.