[PS3] LittleBigPlanet Impressions

How can there be a 1.01 Euro patch known? Who's playing LBP now in Europe? Who broke the release date by a week?

 

Is there such a thing like an european version ? A friend of my received his american copy yesterday and he could switch the language to dutch.

Couldn't it be that the only difference is the case and the manual ?

 

Sucks Love the singing in it.

 

Well, I finished it last night. All I can say is "Bravo Mm!" Those last 10 or so levels were Awesome. I hope the servers go up soon, I would love to retrieve my beta levels and get some co-op going so I can get those last items.

I'll concur with deep's assessment of the retail. Framerate seems a touch more stable, textures look a bit crisper, way more music, stickers, objects and materials . There are still a few bugs that need to be patched up, specifically pertaining to cameras and sound objects either resetting itself or not saving it's settings. I also encountered the "rewind" freeze up once, thankfully it did not result in a corrupted save. I am still making multiple copies of my WIP's and backing up my save data...just in case.

 

Apparently NA is getting the replacements in now.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=14934104#post14934104

 

I got a call from GameStop today saying LBP will be avaliable tommarrow afternoon. Sweet!!!

 

I hope that means the servers will be going up too. Anyone heard anything yet?

 

How do you do that? It's an important tip!

 

Picking up my copy in a few minutes!

 

For such a purportedly casual game, the single player can get terribly frustrating.

 

It seems like anyone that pre-ordered at Gamestop or EB Games can go pick up their copy of LBP today.

I just called mine and they have a ton of copies in! Will head down shortly...!

 

This had better bode well for the EU release!

Nice use of proximity keys. Great design, and a fabulous soundtrack.

 

Honestly, I have to wonder what the hell MM was thinking when they made the checkpoint system the way it is.

 

You can copy your level in your moon by highlighting it and when the 'Edit/Play option comes up, push right on your D-pad until you get the option to copy. I usually reserve 2 or 3 three slots for copies until my level is complete. I then copy periodically to those slots, so in case I make a mistake (that I can't take back) I can just load up one of the older copies and start over from there. I do this because during the beta, I did a 'detach and delete' while in pause mode, then I changed to play mode to test my change only to discover that my whole level fall apart and there was nothing I could do about it because I had no backups. It's an easy way to lose hours of work and I guarantee it'll happen to a lot of people. I back up my game save from the XMB to a USB thumb drive because during the beta there were two bugs that could ruin your day. One was a system lockup during a 'rewind function' that could result in corrupted level save data the other was a system lockup during a join session that would result in complete loss of any recently saved level data. Both deepbrown and I experienced the latter, and it sucked because we both lost many hours of work because of it. I'm pretty sure Mm has fixed these last two problems, but I'm playing on the safe side for now.

 

What's wrong with it? The idea of a checkpoint object to do wtih as you will seems very good to me. The only floor I noticed in the beta was the life-limit being way too short for some platformy bits, but I'd say it was the level design at fault.

Thanks for the suggestions. The lack of a proper 'save' file selector in the editor was most annoying, but the cloning option is a useable workaround, and of course backing up the save file will backup the level designs.

Incidientally, is there actually a means to port levels locally, a sort of export/import option? I'm sure MM said that private, local files woudl be an option, and you could carry level designs round someone's house. I hope they aren't going to exclude those not online from sharing with friends.

 

Well, my problem with it is how you're kicked back to the beginning of the level once you run out of lives. And typically, you'll have 3 lives on any given checkpoint, except for bosses, which will give you about 6.

The way they did checkpoints makes LBP far less forgiving than other platformers, especially since the only thing that doesn't kill sackboy in one hit is fire, and there's absolutely no 'temporary invulnerability' when you get hit or when you respawn. The latter isn't really an issue, but sometimes it is. Against the 'america' boss, at one moment he killed me, then dropped a bomb right by the spawn point, so that when I popped out, I died again. I managed to get past that, but later on, in the Japan levels I had to restart levels over and over and over. And worse, once I got past some of the more frustrating bits it made me go 'I don't want to ever have to do this again'.

I don't know, I'm getting the feeling that the single-player levels weren't playtested enough. Especially considering that Sony hopes LBP will be a game with broad appeal.

Edit: The game also doesn't really care about tutorials, past the basic stuff and the creation stuff.

Spoiler

For instance, in Japan you find these narrowly-spaced, flimsy 'planks'. The game doesn't tell you that you can just run across -- after I tried to run across when I saw them the first time and failed for some reason, I spent a lot of time spamming the jump button with varied success.