I can’t really play Littlebigplanet 2. That’s something I’m going to have to say about ever more games. The closer I move towards the present day, the more out of reach much of the history gets. Online elements became a central feature of more games, and barely more than a decade later the servers are shut down and they’re gone. The promise of a long-term drip of new material collided with the established ideas of sequels and new consoles. The release of Littlebigplanet 2 itself came as a destructive force to the online community around Littlebigplanet.
The chief community element of the series was making and sharing new levels, and Littlebigplanet 2 brought in plenty of new and improved tools for that. As a new player I can only see the results through videos outside of the game, though. They include everything from basic platformers with an array of borrowed aesthetics (Mirror’s Edge being a top choice) to mind-bending first person games and idiosyncratic exercises like a rather fully featured version of Checkers. Developers Media Molecule would go further still with that encouragement of freedom (it’s interesting that “Dreams” is the first word spoken in Littlebigplanet 2) but it was already plenty impressive.
Shorn of that part of the game, what’s left for me to play in 2023 is Media Molecule’s own set of story levels. These are tasked with introducing a lot of the new ideas and mechanisms, and with setting up the attractions of 2.5-dimensional platforming. There is a lot of floaty jumping and things swinging around just outside of the player’s control. There’s also the story, an irreverent thing pitched at a recognisably British register. It has an entire world themed around cake, for a start (The Great British Bake Off had started by this point, though only for one series with about three million viewers, ten million fewer than its later BBC One peak.)
It was also the second #1 game in three months made by a Guildford-based developer in which the player is given suggestions by Stephen Fry. In contrast to the arrogant and harsh Reaver of Fable III, Littlebigplanet 2 has him in twinkly lovely uncle mode. The script’s mode of self-effacing whimsy is one which has only become more popular and made its way to more advertising since, which can’t have helped how it has aged, but I can’t imagine finding it anything less than annoying even in 2011. Its phrases like “get mediaeval on someone’s bottom”, and instructions to grind some rails “like a young person”, are filled with an affected distance from popular culture even as they lean on it fully. The fluffy irony is as cowardly as it is twee.
It’s also not even a particularly good fit for the best parts of Littlebigplanet 2. Its imprecision works best when there are bubbles dropping everywhere and you’re trying to harness things flinging your character around. The winning sense of unpredictability — the same one that fuelled its community triumphs — goes better with being in the moment than sitting outside it all. It’s also a very British thing, in its own way. Giving players such a wide-ranging set of options to make stuff and put stickers on everything was quite in keeping with the developers’ Lionhead past. Attaching it to a homemade-feeling floaty platformer that values weird creativity above mechanical robustness? That goes right back to Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy.
Top of the charts for week ending 22 January 2011:
