Bunny Ears Mozart

Little Big Planet is one of the most charming things ever. Whitney and I have been going through it as our newly born sack-people: a pirate penguin in sunglasses and a helmet, and a little orange Mozart with rabbit ears. (Appropriateness of these characters for us... you can decide for yourself.)

First of all, it's remarkable that in a game where you characters are made out of sacks and the whole environment is stitched together out of bits of cloth and household items, that it doesn't end up being accidentally a Tim Burtonesque nightmare. I suppose the style slightly reminds me of Micro Machines at times, with you going through levels that are designed to look like they've been set up by hand as toy obstacle courses for little people to run through - appropriately, seeing as thanks to the editor, that's exactly what they are!

The physics-based idea of the game means that by its very nature it's imprecise and the controls feel very floaty sometimes, but to make up for this it's quite liberal with its restart points. I'd really missed things with same-room multiplayer, and just being able to play about in this world together is rather wonderful - it also has optional little sections where it's explicitly said that you need two players to co-operate to get through them. However, you only get four spare chances at each section, and you all share the same life pool so you can easily fall out by using up other people's lives if you're not careful.

I've only briefly looked into the editor, which I have heard described as a sort of rebirth of ZZT in the way that it's about machining together simple individual little elements to form great big Wallace and Gromit-style contraptions of complexity far beyond what you'd expect. I'm getting the same feeling that I did from Unreal Tournament, that I lack the real imagination to put together anything on the same kind of level as the stages we've been playing through, but it seems to be impressive in the way that it takes something that's usually very difficult and translates it into something that a controller can do (without a BSP hole in sight). The editor isn't even all that far removed from the main game - it's just like a blank level where you have slightly more options in your menu than you usually do, and you can do it with multiple players as you can in the main game, building something concurrently, and it makes sure to guide and tutor you on every point in its own unique way.

The fact that it's Stephen Fry doing it helps, too.