#play create share

[jonasiapie]

Some characters I made in lbp

[breadknight-likes-things]

“Dreams” Is The Ultimate Ideal Of “Play. Create. Share.”

Y’all remember “Play. Create. Share.” right?  It was the game design philosophy (or, maybe more cynically: marketing slogan) behind a series of games Sony released mostly on the PS3.  The biggest success of this line was Little Big Planet, which was a huge hit at the time and has since become one of Sony’s go to franchises to represent their brand with.  Others included Kart Racer “Mod Nation Racers” (Wildly underrated imo) and uh....other Kart Racer “Little Big Planet Kart” (look, the racing game framework was solid), but today in our modern landscape we have Dreams.  And Dreams is the end all be all of this concept in such a way that I don’t think it could ever be matched, just iterated upon. 

Let’s get this one out of the way early on, “Dreams” is kind of every game you’ve ever played, and also kind of isn’t a game at all.  Dreams is a robust set of tools, everything from music creation, painting and movie making is there, in addition to its main suite of game dev tools.  And let me be clear, you can create damn near anything you want in Dreams.  There was a lot of talk given to games like Little Big Planet when players would break out of the 2D platformer mold and create something wild, but in Dreams everything is that level of wild.

Dreams even offers at least one ready made scene to serve as a sort of ready made coloring book if you like, I personally hope somebody picks up on that.

If you just ask the game to serve you up some random creations in a netflix style autoplay you will see some bizarre stuff.  Just last night I got everything from a haunted mansion experience full of strange monsters, a trailer for a movie someone is making entirely in the tool set and a more accurate re-creation of fallout 4 than I think it would be reasonable to expect.  The key to this beautiful insanity is Dreams never once discourages someone from realizing an idea.  It uses a gentle hand and resounding encouragement to get players and creators to throw damn near anything at damn near any wall and see what happens.  If an idea isn’t working it’ll just tell you that trying and failing is more than okay.  If the idea is working, you’ll see stuff like “Jeep Adventure” I played in the early beta period, which frankly was probably one of the more unique games I even played in 2019.

Dreams is unconcerned with whether or not something will work, it just wants you to put something out into the world.  It’s something special in the world of video games, it’s not asking you to destroy something, it just wants you to build something for others and yourself to enjoy.  Little Big Planet was leading to this.  Dreams is probably among the most important games released in the 8th gen of consoles (even if most of its life span will probably be during the 9th gen of consoles), and I just wanted to spread out some appreciation of that.  I hope it reaches the audience it deserves (i.e, everyone).

[thefreecheese]

The Free Cheese Episode 575: LittleBigPlanet

This week on The Free Cheese, we’re all sackdudes, hey! We revisit Media Molecule’s LittleBigPlanet and explore its single player campaign to see how it holds up. We also discuss the loss of the game’s internet connectivity and the unfortunate absence of its greatest features.  Reviews Joe I was surprised at how LittleBigPlanet feels very dated today while still representing the future of…

The Free Cheese Episode 575: LittleBigPlanet