We’re usually hesitant to spend real-life money on virtual clothing, but you can bet we’ll spring at the chance to purchase the recently revealed Sonic the Hedgehog costume pack for LittleBigPlanet. See, if we dress ourselves up like the series’ speedy, cerulean protagonist, then play one of the many, many Green Hill Zone stages crafted by the LBP community, we can pretend that we’re playing a decent, current-gen Sonic platformer.
We’ve contacted Media Molecule to try and find out the North American release date and price for this costume pack. We shouldn’t let the developer hear us say this, but we’d pay anything for that beautiful illusion.
[Via Siliconera]
LittleBigPlanet getting bluer, blurrier with Sonic costume pack originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on November 20th, 2009 at 4:30pm by Griffin McElroy
Filed Under: costume, dlc, littlebigplanet, media-molecule, sonic, sonic-the-hedgehog
In case you may not have noticed, games have slowly been moving towards being services rather than stand alone products. New releases, from the biggest blockbuster to the lowliest PSN of Xbox Live Arcade game, are now frowned upon if they don’t include some sort of internet-based shenanigans either through online multiplayer, or even just simple leaderboards to compare your scores with your mates.
World of Warcraft and Runescape are the most obvious examples of games that are services. In fact everything from Modern Warfare 2 to Shadox Complex has some sort of online service incorporated into them.
“Service is becoming everything,” underlined Valve’s Jason Holtman during his Montreal International Game Summit keynote. “It’s going to impact every line of business and every line as you think about your game.”
Of course Steam is the perfect example of games delivered as services. They boast 20 million users worldwide and a catalogue of 950 games, all of which are automatically updated when Steam is running on your PC.
These include titles like Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead, both of which have been constantly updated since they launched. Team Fortress 2 alone has seen 97 updates that include new content as well as patches and fixes, and all provided for free.
“The direct customer relationship means now that you shouldn’t think of your product as ‘finished’ — a single piece that goes out monolithically. You should think of your product or the game you’re making as an ongoing service to your customer,” Holtman adds.
Of course, the services that Steam provides to its customers are also provided in a lesser fashion across the major consoles with updates downloaded automatically when they are available.
LittleBigPlanet is another fine example of how a game has grown into a service, with the community now topping 1.3 million user-generated levels. Over the year since its release, Media Molecule has been just as busy keeping the game up-to-date and running smoothly as they were developing it having now patched it 25 times. Paul Holden, lead architect behind the game, believes in the the importance of good community support.
“We realised pretty quickly how important it is to ensure the quality of the releases and the patches,” he said in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz at MIGS. “It’s surprising that even fairly small changes that we’ve made have had large impacts on the community.”
Community maintenance is key to LittleBigPlanet’s continued success. Holden continues, “By releasing regular content we keep people interested. Once we release a big pack we can see a big uptake in the number of people playing. If you look at companies like Blizzard with StarCraft, or Bungie and Valve, they look after their communities by releasing regular content and updates, and in turn the community responds well to that kind of attention.”
He adds, “The next patch to go out is 1.21 which should have a whole bunch of new features that have been in the pipeline for some time. And then there’s more planned for well into next year. Sony’s been very keen for us to support the game ourselves. A lot of publishers are keen to move on once a game has been released and patched but Sony has been very keen to give us the resources we need to support the game in this way.”
In an industry still dominated by monolithic blockbuster titles and analysts claiming that marketing sells games more than quality does it is refreshing to see that there are some big names ready to stick their necks out and say that it’s the players and communities that games build that are important and that quality really does matter.
Amen to that.
Thanks to Gamasutra and GamesIndustry.biz.
Posted on November 18th, 2009 at 7:05pm by [email protected] (The Games Are Evil Family)
Filed Under: James Holtman, MIGS 2009, Montreal International Games Summit 2009, News, Paul-holden, features, left-4-dead, littlebigplanet, media-molecule, opinion, sony, steam, team-fortress-2, valve
Media Molecule lead architect Paul Holden said he would like to make a proprietary memory monitoring tool his company developed for the PlayStation 3 available to other studios. Speaking at the Montreal Game Summit, as reported by Develop, Holden said the tool helps map and control memory usage in games, which became necessary during the development of LittleBigPlanet.
“It would be great if we could release it for people to use,” Holden told the crowd during a Q&A session following his keynote address. “We could definitely get it released to PS3 developers with little difficulty.” The tool, named HeapMon, allows software to make and manage numerous requests of the PS3’s hardware memory.
However, before Media Molecule is able to hand the “very simple tool” off to other development teams, Holden clarified that Sony would first need to approve the decision. We suspect an online petition is in the works, because they work.
Media Molecule wants to share PS3 memory tool with devs originally appeared on Joystiq Playstation on Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on November 17th, 2009 at 7:14pm by Xav de Matos
Filed Under: Development, LBP, Paul-holden, heapmon, littlebigplanet, media-molecule, montreal-game-summit, ps3-memory, tools
The PSP version of LittleBigPlanet is two shoulder buttons and an analog stick away from being one of the greatest games on Sony’s portable platform.
There were plenty of things I loved in the original LBP — frantic multiplayer, outstanding artistic and musical design, and an endless pool of community-generated content, to name a few — but all of the game’s delightful components relied heavily upon the strength of its creation engine, and the aforementioned community’s willingness to master the tools they’ve been provided.
While the PSP version of the game does an adequate job of transplanting these tools onto a portable console, a surprisingly large amount of that power and ease of use was sacrificed in the process. The level creation engine is functional, but doesn’t come close to the standard set by the original game. That’s partially because of the marginal changes that were made to how these tools function — though, more than anything, the PSP’s inherent lack of buttons plays the biggest role in the game’s diminished accessibility.
Continue reading Review: LittleBigPlanet (PSP)
Review: LittleBigPlanet (PSP) originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on November 17th, 2009 at 12:01am by Griffin McElroy
Filed Under: LBP, littlebigplanet, media-molecule, sce-studio-cambridge, sony
Ready to start collecting Sackboy costumes all over again? Pre-ordering LittleBigPlanet for PSP at GameStop seems to be a good way to get a headstart on building a respectable LittleBigCloset. The retailer is offering a series of six outfits based on popular PlayStation franchises, including two each from Uncharted 2, MotorStorm and Killzone 2. The costumes will be e-mailed with online orders or handed out on cards with in-store purchases.
One of the Killzone costumes is the tank revealed recently by LittleBigWorkshop. Hopefully, it’ll be accessible for non-GameStop buyers, because we’d be heartbroken if every LBP player didn’t get to run around in a lil’ tank.
[Thanks, Kevin!]
Pre-order LittleBigPlanet PSP for a tank costume originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on November 3rd, 2009 at 12:20pm by JC Fletcher
Filed Under: costumes, gamestop, littlebigplanet, littlebigplanet-psp, media-molecule, sackboy
