I played LittleBigPlanet for the first time this weekend, and generally quite liked it. The provided levels are actually really good. The art style and sound is absolutely perfect, and it has some really fun platforming. If you’re a fan of quirky platformers, it’s worth a buy for the single player content alone. I’ve played a little bit with the level creator, but I still have a bunch of things to collect before I’ll get around (well, if I ever do) to making my own level. The user interface for creating levels is generally good, but certain things like connecting switches are needlessly tedious. It does seem like it’s harder than I thought to do non-platformer games, as there isn’t an easy way to bind buttons to actions. However, if you want to make platformer levels, LBP is clearly the best place to do so.

I’m a bit disappointed by the Share 3rd of the game. The community tools generally work well, and once they got the servers up and running it seems to be pretty stable and usable. The general functionality of uploading and playing levels seems to work well. However, when it comes to things like searching, there is a lot of room for improvement. The searching options are really minimal, and don’t seem to always work. Here’s what would make LBP an EVEN BETTER game (yes, it’s possible)!

1. In general, copy YouTube. A YouTube video is pretty close to a LBP level in terms of time required for creation and time required for enjoyment. YouTube is also clearly the most successful community for video sharing, so is worth taking a look at. Okay, so the comments are horrid, but everything else seems to work.
2. Show me the rating! LBP has you give each level a 1-5 star rating, but you never get to see cumulative rating of any other levels. This bothers me, and I don’t get why they’re afraid to show rating, but have no problem showing number of favorites (hearts)
3. It would be really great if it was easier to tap into “The Raw Feed”. There’s an achievement to be one of the first 10 people to play a level, but I can’t figure out any way to find new levels! When I go to “Recent” I get a bunch of levels that were uploaded 3 days ago, and the other searches all prioritize based on number of favorites. I don’t see how videos are going to get a foothold.
4. I can’t figure out how to do a text search. They give you a tag search, but if there’s some way to search for a specific level I can’t figure it out. I may just be missing something, but the search interface needs help.
5. The tags need some help. The solution that Media Molecule took for the problem of tag duplication was to hard code the list of available tags. This is a fine idea, but I’m really not sure what the difference is between “funky” and “cool”. The interface for adding tags (they show you one page of random tags, with a next button) encourages people to be lazy and pick a random tag, so the tags that are there are a bit useless.
6. “Levels like this” is the most important feature. When I hit that option for a level, I either get an empty list (which should really never happen) or the general list of cool levels. Related videos is the most important search feature of YouTube in my opinion, and I really wish it worked better for LBP.

Anyway, Media Molecule has said they’re going to add stuff to the game, and it’s obviously a well constructed piece of software, so I have a lot of hope that things will get better. LittleBigPlanet has the potential to be the community the PS3 so badly needs, with a few minor tweaks. I’m looking forward to see how LBP evolves over the next few months!