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Evening Reading: Weekend Confirmed

by Garnett Lee, Nov 20, 2009 6:35pm PST

With my hands-on impressions of ModNation Racer posted now there's a whole other conversation we got into during my visit up there that I want to bring up. This is the second game built under Sony's "Play, Create, Share" banner. I remember being absolutely sky-high for LittleBIGPlanet at about this same point in its development when they finally turned us loose with it. But numerically successful as it may or may not have been, LBP hasn't had anywhere near the impact or gathered close to the energy around it that I thought it would.

We came up with a number of suspects for its fate but because there's not really any other similar games to compare to it's hard to validate any of them. I think a large part of the problem traces back to the control issues throwing people off when they play LBP. No matter how creative users may get with their designs it still has to be fun to play. And playing ultimately is the core. While everyone may play around with creation tools I suspect that in the end if the game were thriving you'd see a very small percentage of users actually hardcore designing levels and the vast majority playing them and potentially talking about them online.

There's of course more to it than that -- organization and presentation of the stuff people create, ability to share it in a number of places such as friends in the game, online, outside the game on the Net, etc. Accessibility of the whole design idea -- building entire platforming levels is a big undertaking, etc.

Instead of either creating or playing LBP over the weekend I'll be getting deeper into Dragon Age: Origins and dropping zombies in L4D2. If you need a little break from your games here's some stuff to check out:

And before I head off into the sunset Friday came through with an extra eclectic collection from the rest of the feeds:

Ireland out plays France but still has World Cup hopes done in by completely blown handball call that led to the winning goal.

Not sure whether we need to brace for the end again but the European Large Hadron Collider is back online.

Three hundred employees from the richest firm on Wall Street volunteer to take out the Thanksgiving trash.

Might want to be careful buying cosmetics as it seems Peruvian gangs may be killing people to drain their fat and sell it on the black market.


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