zippdementia's LittleBigPlanet review

Great review.

"Like a child in a toy shop, the game never stops thrusting things in front of you for you to look at."

This doesn't quite make sense due to the order, I think. As is, it implies the child is doing the thrusting, and not the toy shop. Unless you mean the child thrusting toys in front of a parent. That's a bit of a reach as phrased currently.

Maybe avoid using thrusting and child in the same sentence altogether.

That is a very good review. Especially as you really got into it. I could really feel the excitement there while you were talking about the community this game has and all the fan-made levels you can play and the variety there.

Thanks! I'm really trying to move away from the English Major dry reviews that I did for a while and into a more emotionally "here's the feeling I get from this game" kind of thing.

Glad that came through this time.

LOL at child and thrusting. You got it right the second time though, I was thinking of a child thrusting toys in front of a parent.

Lovely-lovely review which manages to convince me I enjoyed LBP more than I actually did.

That said I've only played it for an hour or two, and not even bothered with the level editor yet.

One thing that's got me a bit arsey is that people are heralding it for its "innovation" that allows people to create their own content. So, um, just like every game Valve has ever released, then? I suppose this is more user-friendly though, and taylored towards the community adding to the game. Is this what Spore was trying to do, perhaps?

You got it. As I said in the review, even the good level editors tend to be difficult enough to master that the truly good material is limited to the developers. Half Life is a great example of this (though I remained impressed by what you've created with Neptune).

The problem with Spore (and I just had this discussion with a friend), is that Will Wright likes to give people building blocks, much like giving someone a box of legos. But these building blocks are limited, not only in what they can do, but in what setting they are placed. Spore's creature creator is very cool, but it's creating content.

LBP doesn't have you create content. It has you create a whole game. If we stick to the lego analogy, then LBJ provides you with the molding material to make your own legos, rather than a pre-configured set.

It's impressive.

"though I remained impressed by what you've created with Neptune"

I've worked with that engine for about a year, though, and had worked with the Quake Engine (on which, bizarrely, Source is heavily based) for five years before that. It's one of the more user-friendly SDKs, but it is distinctly an SDK, not a user-tool integrated as part of a game.

I almost feel a little bitter about LBP - currently battling out the Resolution GOTY feature, and LBP is keeping Fallout 3 in a dismal third place. I guess that says something wonderful about the quality of this year's games, though.

Fallout for me was a 9/10. But then consider that I gave Morrowind a 5 or 6 out of 10. That style of game just doesn't hit me as hard as it does most.

Or rather, it hits me FRICKING hard... but then I recover rather quickly.

Wow, what would you give Oblivion? Minus six out of ten?

Ha ha ha, to be honest, I didn't play enough of Oblivion to ever review it. I played two hours, in which I escaped the first dungeon, very quickly got diseased, and spent the second hour looking for someone to cure (never found them).

One of the reasons I haven't written a Morrowind or Oblivion review is that I'm not yet sure WHY I didn't like them. And I refuse to write a review on a game until I understand my feelings on the matter.

Unless it's Vampirism you caught, you cure almost anything by GOING TO SLEEP. Hell, you can cure vampirism in that fashion if you're quick enough.

Are you talking about Oblivion or Morrowind? In Morrowind, diseases are only urable by taking the appropriate cure potion or going to a shrine. Unless it's Corpus, in which case there's a whole quest for that.

There's Vampirism in Morrowind, too, but I've never contracted it. I did contract the werewolf one in the Bloodmoon expansion, though, and that was curable just with a regular potion or shrine visit, so I imagine vampirism would be the same in that game.

You must be talking about Oblivion, then. Seems kind of silly to me - just sleeping them off. Haha.