Little Big Planet

http://www.gametrailers.com/gamepage.php?id=4491

Most interesting/unique gameplay I've seen in a while. View the HD version if you can.

I'm not sure how you're supposed to control the four guys. Maybe there's a toggle button you press to switch the one you're controlling and the others attempt to follow you?

Ah, here's some more info:
http://kotaku.com/gaming/ps3/gdc-07-sony-reveals-littlebigplanet-242171.php


Apparently, in this game the environments are user created, and what we're seeing is four players playing at once.

Sony's gonna have some kind of online thing for the PS3 called "Home" apparently, so you could download levels for something like this and play with people online.

Man that looks like fun, classic platforming + great graphics/art-style + physics...........

Regarding controlling, I'm assuming what yer assuming, where the AI controls what you don't control and takes a follow-the-leader fashion, and from the looks of things, up to 4-players in co-op, I haven't seen me a co-op platformer in years....

Some awesome use of motion-blur also....

hey.. it looked kinda cool.. a lot of physics going on there.. :)
very nice graphics too..

On the PS3? Nope. It'll flop. No one buys a ps3 for cute games. This will have such a totally narrow audience.. unless it is SO GOOD it gets cute-loving gamers to buy a ps3..

Sweet physics and awesome graphics... too bad I'm never going to have a PS3.

Interesting that they're going to tie this into Home, rather than PSN (the PlayStation Network). Little infos for those that don't know:




Lemmings and flOw are/will be doing well, no matter what you say. Both sold via PSN.

The thing about (cute) games sold on the PS Network is that they are thus far hell cheap, so people are much more likely to see them, than most of the AAA retail titles.

So the PS3 is now a P2P warez toy that all the media and licensing companies will deem as evil, oh noes!
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Excusing the sarcasm, I'm intrigued as to whether or not that system is as "open" as I think it'll be, and if so, how would Sony go about doing it without having to be worried about getting sued.

they are sony... they do the lawsuits... Sony IS a record label... they'll just pay the others some throw-backs.

For now, it is not. Nobody has access to the PS3 filesystem except the PS3 OS. It is of course a matter of time before that changes, but it will surely require nasty hacks that Sony will try to circumvent with every update.

That looks pretty good. I wondered what Mark Healey and his team were up to after RDKF - they did say it'd be something special.

Damm...you're on a mission aren't you!! Lol...but you're right. Nobody buys a PS3 for girly cute games. I got my Wii for that!!

I really want to see the ps3 and xbox totally fail in comparison to the Wii.. If only to inspire a turn towards gameplay over graphics in the future. Fun to play over fun to look at.

At the very least. I want the Wii to be a success and devide the market into 2 kinds of gamers.... The Ps3/xbox gamers, playing their football games, racers, and gore-fest FPSs... And the gamers who want to just have fun playing a game... the ones who don't respond well to terms like "Realism" or "Photorealistic" or other buzz-words that don't really mean anything.

Nintendo on the other hand is showing immense foolishness now that they've actually got their system out and selling. Miyamato's GDC keynote was a retelling of everything we already know and a slideshow.
Okay, I actually did find it a worthwhile thing; after all, this is the game developer's conference, not E3. He is talking about game development in general and that's a great thing. From the perspective of doing something constructive that fits with GDC's way, his keynote was pretty decent.

However, Nintendo's biggest release lately seems to have been the voting channel for Wii, while at the same time Sony is pulling out ginormously complicated things like this.

Hopefully for them, they are just keeping something really big really secret because otherwise they are lately being really dumb. Nintendo has been practically silent since January and they continue to tote the past as if last year's successes will last them for eternity.
Yes, I know Nintendogs worked. What else works?!
The worst thing is that Nintendo has now decided to port all their successful innovations from the DS over to the Wii. Surprise! People - more people, in fact - have already played the DS games! Brain Age and Cooking Mama are not the sorts of games you make a franchise out of and I really do hope that they imediately stop sequelizing them and return to their sadly ignored ideas room.

As for Sony's Home, it looks very well implemented so far but I am a bit of a sceptic until I can actually see it living on a PS3. Have we seen how they get from the menu to there? For this to work, it has to be seamless. It has to feel like "Home" is an extension of the interface rather than a whole heap of bloat hanging off the back. The novelty will wear off, and when it does people will be thinking: "Why do I have to load this whole thing and connect to the Internet just to play bowling?". That is, unless it is seamless.

I used to frequent a web site called Cybertown, which uses VRML to provide a user-run 3D web site. This was ages before the whole Web 2.0 craze, but it was (and is, though it has stagnated) certainly a very open-ended thing. Almost all of the content was user-created, peoples' avatars were their own, peoples' homes were decorated in all sorts of interesting ways... Really a big role-playing thing, where the whole gist of it is effectively getting meaningless 3D objects to put in your meaningless 3D home. People submit objects to the mall, from where they are sold if accepted. (You can make virtual money from sales of your objects, of course).
VRML, though a terrible language, is a cool idea. It integrates with Javascript so stuff can be given all sorts of fancy scripting, and user content is really easy because an object in a scene can come from anywhere. For example, my Cybertown avatar was hosted on my own web space.

Anyway, my point is that Sony's stuff here is similar though a lot more modern. Little Big Planet sounds like openness is its middle name, though I wonder about Home...

They also just released Ocarina on the virtual console... the higher-rez master-quest-GC-bundle version of Ocarina no less... With all the bugs fixed.. like the 5th bottle :(

I, personally, think Nintendo is getting ready to either release something really huge... or they are gearing up to enable some kind of online jobby..

What I am hoping for is online play that will let me play any multiplayer game online.. Including GC and virtual console games.

Games can do their own online play... or I can play wii-sports online in split-screen like the other player is standing next to me.. (Since they can't re-write the game)

Nothing is preventing the wii console from using the controler connection system to connect to players online.

NOTHING is preventing that.

This is what I expect.. and will be unhappy to not see.

I mean.. think about how awesome it would be to play the 2-player or 4-player virtual console games online with friends. Or 2-player Wii games that were released too early, or were too lazy to include real online play.

Hmm, I'll go where Square Enix takes me. I'm suprised you're ditching FF because of your sudden hatred for Sony?


It seems like a bit of what you said, a bit of Second Life and a bit less user configurable.

Crunch Gear Article
GDC Video of the demonstration of Home

You mean like cheesy flash-type games over say.....Resident Evil 4??? No way dude.....didnt we already talked about this in another thread? I thought you were begining to see the light....lol... :)


Except Nintendo themselves. They've historically been very stiff on what they say developers are allowed to do. And they've already NOT allowed 3rd party devlopers to make use of the Miis.

But its quite obvious, if the other 2 companies are doing online gaming, why in Gods name would the big N not do same. It would be ridiculous not to. But then again, why would we need that online stuff when we got stuff like Wii Sports and Wario Ware to entertain our mothers and girlfriends for hours..?

I'm not ditching FF.

I couldn't afford a ps3 if I wanted one. But as a rule. I don't buy a system if there is only one game I like on it. I knew there would be other games on the ps2 when I got it, and there already were.

I don't know this about the ps3. We'll see. I highly doubt there will be a ton of games for me on the ps3. There weren't that many on the ps2. A good nubmer of RPGs and some truely great games that interested me outside my normal comfort-zone. Like Ratchet and Clank, God of War, Okami and so on.

Well.. The online thing I described isn't a 'let them do' thing... any game with 2 player modes should be capable of playing over the internet if nintendo adds that function to the controler hookup thinger.

Regardless. Some of us don't have a lot of friends. I've barely ever played my Wii with anyone else. All my friends live elsewhere... and it is had to make new friends around here.

Try not being so negative man. Seriously, every post you make around here is critiquing this or that or slamming this or that design (or person/persons work).

Stop thinking that you have all the answers to everything and that the solutions to some huge problems are as simple as "this and this and this." Seriously, there are a ton of smart people in the industry and there are a lot of reasons that things are the way they are. I'm not saying things can't be improved, but it's just not that easy. It's just like how all the armchair politicians always have all the answers - if it was really that easy don't you think SOMEONE would have solved whatever problem by now.

That's something that I think needs to be kept in mind in general. Making games is hard. Making a triple-A title is extremely hard. Making one that is fun and fresh and innovative is ridiculously hard. All the talent in the world helps but still, there are no guarantees. Great bands write lackluster albums. Great authors write lackluster books. And each of the above generally have a lot more creative freedom than the game studios.

I'm just sayin.

You're right. I should just kill myself. Save myself a whole lot of pain trying to deal with the constant inadequacy that most people just bear with, because they think it can't be changed.

I wish I had a few million. If I had the funds to hire the right people I could prove everyone wrong. Unfortunately the money goes to those who play along. So, logically, it goes to who can't deliver. After all, the people who play along are the ones who resolve to make small changes to the status quo.

I don't believe that people are as reluctant to try something brand new as people make them out to be. Look at the internet. You have every-kind of person online and it all happened in almost no time at all. That is a testament to people being able to recognise something that is truely better than all the other alternatives.

Whenever you get something that is just-right it takes off. Be it WoW or Half-life 2 or Starcraft.

Some teams, some people, just have the right mix to be able to deliver fantastic products. Is it because they are smarter than the rest of the world? No. It is because they don't just follow what everyone else is doing, and they put a real lot of time and effort into the work.

They never sit back and say things like "It is good enough" or "That isn't the focus". They do what needs to be done as dictated by the product itself. If it doesn't look right, play right, feel right. They are liable to scrap the whole project.

These people, they started in a time when just about anyone could put together a team and make a game. All it took was effort and talent. But that isn't the case anymore. Talent and effort won't make you the next big thing.

If I were a good coder, or a good artist, I could maybe make something great. But I would almost certainly lose what I AM good at. Which is seeing what 'needs' to be done. Just knowing what needs to change to make something perfect.

But indie people don't want that. They want to code a graphics engine, or create a game part by part and just stick in cool things as they come to them. They find lack-luster graphics based on bells-and-whistles rather than the aesthetic of the art. They make the same games over and over, or they go off the deep end and make really strange ideas that become disjointed and while playably fun, hard to get into on a conceptual level.

Indie games are typically focused on one or 2 things and forget about the rest. They buy some cheap music to fill in the background, they use some bad voice-actors cause they think they need VO. They push polygons rather than making them count. They focus on the play, but not the metaphor that enables that play to be second nature. They have bad writing, when they could have NO writing.

In short. They try to do more than what makes the game fun, they try to compete with the presence of AAA games, while the ugly easy-to-pick up games tend to over-shadow them. Your flash-based-bejewleds, your card games. Your classic arcade clones. Your tetriss.

If I had a good pixel artist, and a good blitz-coder. I would go straight back to basics and re-invent some games. Focus on what actually matters in those genres, and really push the envelope of what can be done cheaply.

But it doesn't work that way. Because I can't wrap my brain around code, because my creativity isn't capable of making aesthetic art. I get hung out to dry. People don't like me cause I create more work for them, even if doing the work gives them a vastly better product.

People view me as negative. I'm not negative at all. I see the hidden potential in things, and point it out. Sometimes I get frustrated in how backwards things can be. I get very frustrated when people say things like "People will never do A, B, and C, because I've never seen them do it before"

People used to say that about ordering things online. About chatting. About IM. About MMOs. "People won't pay per month to play a game." "People won't play a black-and-puke gameboy over a gamegear, no matter how god the games are." "People won't buy a next-gen system that doesn't have better graphical capabilities." "Adults won't play a cute sports game." "People won't pay for TV."

The history of new ideas is paved with these kinds of statements.

The worst, is when people trash a good idea that was poorly implimented as proof that the idea was bad.

The biggest example I can think of are the FPS resident evils and any first-person-adventures. The survival horror genre has poor controls. In all the games. You have hard to see camera angles, and clunky-walking. It isn't fun. HOWEVER, the concept of the games is gold. Modern adventure games with some light-weight fighting to build tension and lots of horrory elements. Things jumping out at you and what not. It is enough that people will suffer the bad controls to play the games for their gore, story, and the puzzles. They SUFFER the controls.

A long while back, they tried to do some FPAs first-person adventures. With Myst and some others. They were like the adventure games, only free-roaming. But people didn't like them. So they stopped making them.

RE tried the same thing. And again, people didn't like them. So when RE4 came along. They didn't go the FPS route, even though it would have actually worked in that game. Prolly better.

Is first-person adventure a bad idea? Can't be done?

Yes, says the industy. But what are they basing that on?

Adventure games have 3 aspects. Graphical Awe, Puzzles, and Storyline. If you remove one of these you lose what makes an adventure game work. You become dis-interested if what you see isn't impressive or engaging, Or if the puzzles are boring and trite, or if the story is boring. You lose interest.

Think about when these free-roaming versions of myst and others came out... It works with high-quality still images, cause they are interesting, but darting around a really spartin castle, and worse, being encumbered by difficulty in puzzles due to having 'too much' to look over. It DIDn't work. Why? Bad design, not powerful enough hardware.

Much of the same was true of the first-person REs. The PSone wasn't able to make good enough looking areas to pull it off, and the combat and controls were poor. It wasn't because it wouldn't work in first person. It just wasn't ready to leap to true-3d and with bad controls.

Point is. There are no first-person adventure games. Survival horror or otherwise. And it is the direct result of a few really bad ones in the past. It is viewed as "Can't be done"

That really bothers me.

I... am so entirely off-track and on a tangent I really can't tie any of this back into the begining... Sorry.

It's all good. I wasn't trying to come down as holier-than-thou although it probably came off that way.

I guess my point was is, at least when dealing directly with others work (ala Escapaders music thread) just be a bit more careful in your choice of words and the persons feelings when you are presenting your critique instead of hitting them with it like a baseball bat to the stomach. It's one thing when you are critiquing a big company, another when you are critiquing another indie as "face to face" as we tend to ever get - message boards.

Anyways, I'm not saying stop critiquing this or that design. What I am saying is that just keep in mind that the reason most designers aren't radically pushing the envelope is because it's someone elses money at play. If it was all theirs, I'm sure we'd see a few more risky games (but even still, who wants to risk their whole company (and possibly their house and more as collateral) if the game bombs?).

And that's the crux of the problem. You'd probably be in the same boat even if you did have a few million - it'd probably be someone elses money and they'd be funding a relatively safe venture or they'd pull the money.

I know you know this and I'm not telling you anything new. But don't forget there are some really unique and interesting games still coming out these days. Shadow of the Colossus is, IMO, one of the greatest games of all time. And there have been other interesting innovative games (Viva Pinata? <-- looks interesting and new but I haven't played it). MAny others, I'm sure. I don't know though, I don't play games much anymore :\.

I guess my whole point was that in the human relations department it's not always best to be quite so blunt with your observations - even when you know you're right.

DampeS8N:

Ooh... ranty! But you do have a point, albeit a naive and idealistic one (or perhaps you're missing the point. I'm not quite sure). It doesn't matter how or why first person adventure games "don't work"; people think that they don't, and it's easier and less risky to give them what they want than to change their opinions.

naive idealism is what people who haven't been totally broken by the world and it's lazy-incompetence have. I don't view my idealism as a negative. In the right hands, which it has been in more than a few times, it produces some incredible work/actions.

I'd gladly give my observations on projects to anyone who wants them. I've made this clear in the past. People here are reluctant to give it a try.

If you KNOW I am going to be 100% blunt and honest, and you are willing to invest the time to ask, what do you lose by getting my input.

I'm incapable of stealing your ideas. Mine are prolly better anyway. I tend to give people 'wow' moments about their interface work. Games are all interface. So I'm capable of really blowing your mind... Don't believe me? You are an e-mail away from knowing.

pffft

Woah....getting a bit personal there. Chill out dude and cheer up, we're all just conversating here. Plus werent we talking about how much you wish Sony and Microsoft would fail?

Yes, because apparently he said to develop MORE negative coomunique.


Maybe you should unlock that hidden potential and kill yourself and prove us all wrong then =]


WoW is certainly not 'just right'. There's a certain amount of instant satisfaction (the gfx are purty) that draw people to be sucked in. In most cases people are recommended to start playing by friends... not because Wow is perfect. WoW is not the only MMO out there and neither is it the best.

No. But it has over 8,000,000 active users. They must have done SOMETHING right.

They prove that MMOs aren't just for a few nerds with no lives... it is for a TON of nerds with no lives.

Wow, that video was impressive - but the "GDC 07 On Stage Demonstration" video where they show them creating a level is even more impressive.

I did mention the purtyness. Plus they are the only MMO to advertise in Aus, don't know about elsewhere...

The game isn't the best game ever. But MMOs don't have to be.. Infact... it is almost better that they aren't.

A good MMO creates the illusion of life. Ups, Downs, Tedium. If it was always fun, you would get bored of the fun. Desensitised to the fun.

A good MMO rewards you for doing boring tasks, while providing fun to do things that don't really reward you much. WoW does this pretty well. And the biggest form of this is 'sight seeing' which is one of the things that kept me playing UO for so long. Granted.. That was, for me, pixel-art seeing. But WoW is like running around in some fantastic fantasy art.. and the locales are breath-taking in their style, which is timeless.

I can look at Wc3 and still be impressed by the artisticness of the level-designs and assets. WoW is even better, more varied, and has oodles of chat.

Not that I play WoW... I know it would ruin my life.

Remember.. the thing that kept people playing Diablo for so long was the B.net chat... With the occasional fight to stave off boredom..