E3 2009: The Next Big Cart Racer?

At Sony's press event a couple days ago, they introduced us to ModNation Racers - a cart racing game aimed at their "play, create, share" philosophy, much like Little Big Planet. You can dress up your little racers, customize their cars, play and share with friends or strangers all over the PlayStation Network.

Let's take a step back, I was really hyped about Little Big Planet. I played the beta for a couple weeks. I pre-ordered the game for the bonuses. I picked it up on release day and had, oh, about two to three weeks worth of fun with it. Then it just tanked for me. Designing levels was so complex and time consuming that it became more like work than fun. Granted, to some people that is fun, but not for me. I wanted to play a game, not spend countless hours perfecting the mechanics of a level I was working on, which was likely to be disliked by the masses anyway.

I did enjoy playing through other players' levels, but after a while even that got to be redundant. There was a huge learning curve for being able to create and that was what interested me most about the game. Although, to this day, I still think being able to customize your Sackboy or girl is one of the coolest things.

Now, with ModNation Racers, it seems that, while still focusing on the core "play, create, share" philosophy, Sony is making it less tedious to do the creating. The customization rocks, and I don't think you can ever have too many customization options for your racer, your cart, your Sackboy, whatever. I do think you can go a bit overboard on the tools given for creation of your own levels though, and I think this was LBP's biggest downfall.

MNR, as it shall be referred to eventually, seems to allow for some pretty hefty creation options, while still allowing the game itself to do much of the work automatically. You don't have to laboriously test every last piece of your track like you would in a LBP level. As we saw in the press event, they built a pretty good looking track in under five minutes. I think a nice balance needs to be struck, somewhere between not being able to do anything to create your own content and having 100% of the control of that content in the player's hands. Sure, some people may like having total control, but LBP seemed to falter with it, in my opinion.

This new approach is appealing to me, I think it'll allow less "hardcore" players the ability to create without all the time-consuming, meticulous effort that was require in LBP. Even my wife, who isn't really a gamer, said MNR looked better than LBP, and that's saying a lot. The new racer seemed to get little attention, being dwarfed by the Final Fantasy and God of War coverage, but I'm really looking forward to seeing what Sony has up their sleeve this time around.