LittleBigPlanet 2 Encourages Social Gamers to Create [VIDEO]

Sony-owned game development studio Media Molecule has announced LittleBigPlanet 2, the sequel to one of the most critically acclaimed video games ever made. Expect it to launch exclusively on the PlayStation 3 by the end of the year.

Like its predecessor, the game will borrow ideas from social media, YouTube and the web in general to facilitate a community of players who play, create and share their own gaming experiences online. This title will take the original's creativity to a new level, so to speak.

LittleBigPlanet was part of a genre called "platform" games. The genre includes Super Mario Bros. and other titles that involve jumping around to avoid or defeat enemies and navigate levels. However, Media Molecule says the sequel is not just a platform game, but "a platform for games." It ships with robust tools that players can use to create their own games, levels, songs, movies and works of art and share them through the PlayStation Network.

The Platform Game Platform for Games

In LittleBigPlanet 2, you will be able to share content directly to your friends or browse a cloud of tags just like you would on content-sharing websites like Flickr and YouTube. Levels and other content will be tagged and rated by the players who try them out. You'll have the option to sort through the most popular and most highly rated stuff that users create.

Once you find a game or level you're interested in, you'll play it either alone or with friends who are online.

The original LittleBigPlanet — which garnered a "universal acclaim" Metacritic rating of 95 — included many of these web and social media-inspired features, but it limited players to creating Mario-style levels.

That didn't stop players from coming up with creative and unexpected applications, though. One player created a fully-functioning calculator using interconnected components that towered into the digital sky. Others made musical compositions by lining up sound effect triggers through which any player could run.

The sequel's tools will be greatly expanded to encourage this kind of creativity; they'll enable users to create experiences that aren't platform games and compose musical pieces and video presentations. The calculator that took up an entire level in the first LittleBigPlanet will fit on a small, in-game microchip of sorts, just one piece of a larger level. All of the two million LittleBigPlanet levels will continue to be playable in the sequel, too.

Media Molecule released a trailer and several screen shots to accompany the announcements. And the song in the trailer is "Sleepyhead" by Passion Pit in case you were wondering!

Announcement Trailer



Samuel Axon
