A lot of the folks on the 1UP Yours podcast seemed to be voting for Little Big Planet as game of the show. I love platformers. I'm a huge fan of user created content. Why am I not excited about LBP?
2D platformers past the Genesis / SNES era seemed to get worse, rather than better. (I guess this would be a good time to shout out to Patrick Klepek as the one person on the podcast who voted for the ultra retro Mega Man 9 as the best game of E3 2008. This is somewhat surprising when you consider that when the first Mega Man games were coming out he wasn't even in kindergarten yet.)
The more realistic graphics of later 2D platformers often made it harder to judge jumps and attacks. The gameplay generally got more complicated just to have bullet points on the box. It wasn't actually more fun. And once physics get into the mix, things tend to get even less precise. This lack of precision means that levels have to be more forgiving, or the player has to be more cautious. While this might work for a horror platformer (as horror games are mostly action games with hobbled controls), I don't see it being fun for the lighter image of Little Big Planet. (Yes, I know one of the people who works on the game is looking forward to the horror maps users will create. I'm not basing a purchase (of a console) on some potential content.) So while I usually trust Garnett and the 1UP crew's taste, my experience with the genre keeps my hopes in check.
I'm also curious about the hands on time the press has been given. Was it all co-op? Co-op can make up for a multitude of flaws. It can also be hard to organize once players actually get the game home. And it can also lose its luster in an hour or two of play.
I'm also very concerned about people getting really excited over user created content. Quality game design is a huge amount of work, and perhaps more importantly, rework. Having to throw out large amounts of stuff you thought would be awesome can quickly become demoralizing. There'll always be a few geniuses with too much time on their hands. But content needs to be a steady stream to really hold people's attention.
If Sony and Media Molecule are smart, there'll be as many or more people supporting LBP than worked on it. If they can add a lot of social networking features into the game (so you can see what levels your friends have been playing, when they change outfits, when they create new content, when they've uploaded new gameplay videos to YouTube (which was already announced to be a feature of the game), etc.) and do a really good job of finding and promoting not just the best content, but also the best content creators, so that people start subscribing to their content feeds and talking about who's cool and who's not on forums, then the game could have a very long tail, even if the gameplay is only mildly amusing.
Additionally, Sony announced that users can charge other users real money for their content. I don't care how good a level designer is, I can't imagine I'd rather pay for LBP content than buy a new game. It's not like there's an LBP level grind or some other persistent reward to keep people hooked, is there? There probably is.
I don't know. I just feel alone and out of it for being a LBP doubter. Hopefully it'll be at PAX and I can be converted, or at least know that I genuinely disagree with most of the gaming press.
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