Evening Reading: Weekend Confirmed

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.

From The Chatty
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    November 20, 2009 6:35 PM

    So, is there a post button down here somewhere?

    Holy hell

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      November 20, 2009 6:52 PM

      how is Forza 3 coming these days? I'm kind of sad I've had to delay purchasing it. :(

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        November 20, 2009 7:05 PM

        We don't play online nearly enough :(

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        November 20, 2009 8:21 PM

        just buy GT5 instead *ducks*

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        November 20, 2009 9:01 PM

        It's a fantastic addition to the series, however, as far as Shackbattles are concerned, it's about where Forza 2 was 6 months after release.

        Disastrous coincidental timing of the release. Modern Warfare and Ass2Ass Creed just about killed it.

        Only see Toraz and ShackMonkey still playing these days, less than 3 weeks after release.

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          November 20, 2009 9:16 PM

          Also, it is pretty much the most amazingly robust community supported game in existence for in game content outside of track editing.

          100 player friend's list limit keeping you down? F3 has its own favorites system that let's you expand to your heart's content within the game.

          All of the following is rated and completely searchable with insane specific parameters if you choose, or just by word if you like...

          Hate tuning? Hundreds of tunes to choose from for every car made by other players.
          Want sweet looking cars but can't paint? Thousands of designs to choose from for every car.
          Want to paint but can't quite do complex work? Thousands of player made decals to choose from to help you get started and completely scalable to any size you want.

          Want player made movies, replays, images? It's all there.


          On top of that there are crazy amounts of new parameters in multiplayer for custom rooms. Want to score a race by most damage done to opponents? Distance traveled? Amount of time in the lead? It's all there.


          The only real big fuckup they did was they pulled a Modern Warfare 2 on the public matches, if you don't have friends playing in a custom room, you are completely at the mercy of matchmaking hoppers if you want to go looking for a game. You may want to go race your new A class Audi, but you'll bounce into an S class room that may be drag racing.

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            November 20, 2009 9:22 PM

            I'm all for setting up regular shack races, just name the night.

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              November 20, 2009 10:23 PM

              The nice thing now is I know how to set up the Tag / Virus / Demolition modes pretty well so even 4 Shackers can have some collision fun where you don't really have enough to run a race room or Cat and Mouse / Last Man Standing.

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          November 21, 2009 3:07 AM

          :(

          Plus I got engrossed in Borderlands and sunk basically an entire day into it!

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      November 20, 2009 7:47 PM

      [deleted]

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