Fond Memories of the Decade — Little Big Planet

By JetFable, on January 1st, 2010

lbp1 It’s been a little over a year since Little Big Planet emerged and brought life to the stale PS3 online community. For the first 2 months it was out, my girlfriend and I played it incessantly, and for almost a year it has been collecting dust on the cabinet shelf under our TV. The Sackies – Level of the Year, brought my attention back to adorable Sackboy and his fantastic world of LBP. I can’t with a good conscience call LBP one of the best games of this decade, it IS good but it isn’t one of those deep life changing experiences like Shadow of Colossus, it IS light-hearted, fun and filled with gorgeous creativity of its lively community, and it provided me with one of the most memorable gaming experiences of the decade.

Having grown up as an only child in a high-rise flat (here known as the apartment — well condo if you own it) in metropolitan Hong Kong, I never did have any gaming companions as I didn’t have a neighbor next-door that played games. It wasn’t like in the US that kids went to the local school in the area and you would likely find friends that live near you. Without brothers and sisters, cousins or neighbors, nor parents that understood gaming, I was a lone ranger/hermit braving the frontiers of video gaming, therefore I indulged in games like RPGs and graphic adventures that gave me an immersible single player experience. When I came to the US in high school I was the kid that didn’t fit in, and for the first time in my life I learned playing games could be seen as uncool and nerdy (and I struggle with the concept of that word — there isn’t even a Chinese word equivalent of nerds and geeks). That didn’t slow me down of course, but neither did I advertise my hobby to look for gamer companions.

College and the arcade and the advent of the Internet and Warcraft and Age of Empires changed everything. I found people that enjoyed gaming, even revered gaming, and we were in college. People grew up, we made it to a good university probably because we were geeks, so we didn’t need to hide the fact that we weren’t cool. I played Steet Fighter and King of Fighters at the arcade in between classes, and Warcraft and Age of Empires launched our nights of incessant competitive gaming sessions, and Diablo brought the cooperative arcade experience with people I knew half way across the world, and it was like living in a science fiction novel from the 80s. As awesome as those experiences were, they never brought the childhood memories of what could have been if only I had a brother to play Super Mario Brothers with.

lbp2 Little Big Planet accomplished just that, which no other game has, that it actually ignited nostalgia — the fond memories of my childhood, of what it could have been like to have someone next to me sharing those experiences . It is 20 years later, and I met my current girlfriend, who isn’t as big a gamer as I am but she was someone that didn’t mind getting into games. She jumped to her death a lot in LBP, but I advanced with vehemence and always brought her closer to the goal, and she could even dress Sackboy up with the costumes she adored, and we had fun — it was unlike any other gaming memories I had — it wasn’t pumped with Fighting game adrenaline, not the 5 minute rush to death of Starcraft if you didn’t build your bunker right, nor was it a tear-jerking heart-warming plot twist of FF X, it wasn’t the mind bogglingly philosophical story-telling of Planescape Tormet, nor was it dark corridors of Demon’s Souls filled with frustration and death at every corners. It was simply adorable, beautiful, simple, relaxing, and distressful fun.

LBP didn’t have a long campaign experience and unlike other games, it never begged you to rush to the end, but only for the player to explore the beautiful visuals and the scattered secret stickers and goodies that one would want to collect, in leisure. With its realistic physics and beautiful HD visuals and old-school platforming, it was a mesmerizing treasure that you would at most play for a straight 2 hours, and put down for another more hard-core game like Valkyria Chronicles or Metal Gear Solid 4, but you would finish those games, put them away and out of your mind for good, and keep coming back to LBP — for it isn’t just a game, it is a community, much like the browser on your computer — it is there so you can visit the artistic beauty of other game creators who has something to say (just like this gaming blog). If you didn’t want to make a statement yourself.

The first few months of LBP community sometimes brought frustration because of the irregular connection speed, unfriendly searches, and the lack of quality content or ways of simply finding them. But Media Molecule worked hard at their frequent updates to improve the experience, optimizing the search and letting players bring up the highest rated and most hearted levels so a player can easily sift through the best levels without blindly diving through an ocean of clunkers. And reading about what others from LBP community has created from various websites is also part of an integrated, unforgettable experience. I have to admit, sometimes, what others have crafted left me speechless and in awe. From complicated string-operated computers that run simple AI routines, a giant piano that plays my favorite tune from Final Fantasy X, a Gradius-clone shooting game, Duck Hunt, Connect 4, various homepages paid to Super Mario Brothers , Ico, Dead Space, and Mirror’s Edge, the possibilities were endless. I remembered fond levels like Azure Palace, anoter level which I could only pass by committing suicide (the name escaped me), and Little Big Contra, an awesome nostalgic hard-core experience that let you even enter the Konami code (and figuring out how to do that is half the fun) — which was made possible by the paint gun and the Metal Gear Solid expansion pack.

The release of Pirates of Caribbean pack and buzz of voting the best community levels brought me back to this beautiful world after months of being distracted by the plethora of other hard-core but less impressive titles. Little Big Planet isn’t my favorite game of the decade, it isn’t by a long shot. But I fell in love with it nevertheless, for it provided me fond memories and gave value , purpose, and life, to my PS3. It was like playing a Wii game without owning a Wii, it has that invigorating inventiveness of a Wii casual game, yet retaining that hard-core gorgeous HD experience of the PS3 — a best of both worlds, an unforgettable experience of the decade that I would no doubt treasure for the rest of my life.

Here are some of our favorite levels from the community (those that still exist):