LittleBigPlanet Beta Secured

After weeks of trying to get a LittleBigPlanet beta key, I finally managed to snag one yesterday when USAToday gave out 15,000 of the suckers on a first-come, first-served basis. I sent my e-mail in and less than an hour later I had my beta key. Its just unfortunate that the beta ends on Sunday afternoon, so I have little time to get to know the game. My brother and I played around with it for about five hours yesterday, and here are some of my initial thoughts. (Note: Keep in mind this is a beta version of the game and is not final, therefore anything I mention could be changed in the release version we get later this month.)

I'm glad to say that everything that has been claimed about LBP to date is true. Its incredibly fun, creative and complex. The user-created levels were the most fun, although the time it took to load some of them was long enough that at certain times I thought the game froze. In fact, I think some sort of progress bar should be added whenever the player is sitting around waiting for something to load. We were doing some tutorials for the tools used in Create mode, and when the tutorial was complete and we told the game to take us back to our level when we were asked, it took quite a while for that to happen, we had no idea things were loading and it seemed like the game was frozen or stuck in that tutorial level. At one point, I even quit the game because it took so long to pull out of the tutorial and back to our level. If I had known it was loading and was just taking freakishly long, I probably would have just sat and waited.

We experienced very slow server connections, and it wasn't on my end because everything else worked fine. It took quite a while to load up the user-created level pages, the stages themselves when we finally decided on one to play and we got dropped from the PSN several times in the middle of game play. (That has never happened before for me inside a game, so I don't think its on my end.) That was the most frustrating part of all, because we'd be playing a level and when we lost the PSN connection it would move us back to a previous point in the level. Its good that if you lose your connection, you can continue playing the level, but its rather frustrating to have that issue at all on an otherwise stable connection to the Interweb.

Continuing with the same line of thought, we had the game paused for about 10-15 minutes at one point, and we lost the PSN connection. That was likely because of disuse, like when you let your PS3 sit for a while after connecting. But, really, in a game that requires being connected to the PSN the majority of the time, that functionality should be halted. You should never have to reconnect to the PSN while in the game itself.

Other than those connection-related problems, things were incredibly fun and addicting. I'm looking forward to messing around in the beta for the next few days and playing the full game when it hits store shelves later this month.