At this point, I've seen and heard enough about LittleBigPlanet that I feel as though the game isn't even real and that it's never actually coming out. Thankfully, Sony brought along their first-party titles for us New Yorkers to try out and I can confirm that the game does in fact exist and will be coming out this fall. But after finally getting my hands on it, I think I'm going to have to turn down my hype meter just a bit.
When I got my hands on the controller and got booted up to the LittleBigPlanet title screen, the first thing I wanted to do was to make stuff. I think I've seen enough the gameplay from finished levels to know how it'll work when it's put together, but I felt since I didn't have a whole lot of time, I wanted to dig deeper in the creation tools.
Without any real tutorial of the controls, I just started messing around. The first thing I popped in the environment was a sombrero. OK, easy. But the Sony rep and I decided we wanted to give the sombrero wheels and drive it off a ramp. Now this is when things started to get a little harder.
I think something that's being overlooked with this game is the learning curve. I found it to be very overwhelming.
If you wanted to build a sombrero car, you have to attach it to a piece of wood (or something flat). But since the sombrero is two blocks long in width, you have to make sure your surface is just as long or it won't let you do it. And if you're not completely familiar with the system like I was, it's easy to get stuck and frustrated when something doesn't work.
So we finally got the hat on the piece of wood and I put some wheels on. But then since the hat is light, we had to make sure it's glued down or it will blow off. Then we had to add two motors (one for each wheel) and manually go in and alter the settings to adjust the speed of the car.
I don't know how long it took for me to build that sombrero car, but it took a lot longer than I thought it would, and it didn't even look like something I wanted to save and share with my friends. We never did get a chance to drive it off a ramp both because I had to go, and the ramp itself wasn't even done. :(
We also tried to attach one wheel to a can of tuna, which was dubbed the "Tuna Cycle," but it didn't work.
Granted, this was my first time with the game, but isn't this supposed to be accessible? I had an easier time with SOCOM from earlier in the day. The Sony rep did mention there would be a full tutorial of the controls in the final version, which is probably the one feature I'm most excited about.