Little Big Planet: Late Reactions

Little Big Planet: Early Reactions

Recently I sold a stack of Xbox360 games (somehow I ended up with the collector's edition of Skyrim that came with the giant dragon... I didn't even like Oblivion, so I'm a bit confused by my own reasoning) at my local Exchange, and with the funds I purchased a used PS3 and a Playstation Network card. It was, honestly, something of a whim, but I'd been pretty dissatified with the virtual console library on the 360, and if the past has been any indicator, there is no end to the amount of times I'm willing to buy Mega Man 2 & 3 and Final Fantasy 6 & 7. There was however, one exclusive PS3 title I was really looking forward to playing: Little Big Planet.

Now, I know I'm coming into this extremely late in the game, there's already a sequel available (which is currently very likely to be the SECOND PS3 title I purchase), but that's kind of the point: I'm entering a world and community that is already very well-established and densely populated... a very different experience than I would have gotten had I started on the ground floor.

The story mode of LBP is just about perfect... the physics, the platforming, the adorableness... all of it narrated by Stephen Fry in the warmest, most welcoming voice possible... if the game was just that, I could easily rate it as the best new property I've played in years... but that's not really what LBP is all about. Right from the beginning, the game is all about customization, giving you costumes and stickers and new materials to make Sackboy (our adorable protagonist) out of, and once you clear the first set of levels, they open the level-making tools so that you can build your own levels and share them online, and clearly this is where the game expects you to spend most of your time (when I went back to the story mode, Stephen Fry seemed more than a little surprised, and seemed to think I had done it by accident). Now, this is somewhat understandable: the story setting is rather small and insubstantial given the vast array of worlds I could build or the exploration of worlds made by other users I could explore... I could (and currently intend to) subsist solely on LBP for my gaming fix basically indefinitely with all the user-made content out there to play (there's even a job out there for someone to just review user-made levels full-time... a repeative job that would be eventually degenerate to evaluated the quality of the stickers any given level gives you, but still..)

There is a problem where, whenever I'm about to praise a level for an ingeneous bit of platforming of physicsplay I realize they're actually just taking advantage of tools and abilities already provided and showcased to them, and it is disappointing the number of levels I've seen that felt the need to employ the paintenator (the only "gun' option I'm aware, which is from the DLC) given the ability to build anything. The trends I've noticed with the user-made content so far tend to be towards turning Sackboy into other, more-established video game characters and this is somewhat upsetting, because even when I'm enjoying a particularly well-structured Castlevania-themed level (and it was great, EmiliatheSage, hats off to you), I'm still struck by the fact that it's taking a fresh (to me at least) IP and replacing it with something a little more tried-and-true. The DLC seems to promote this as well, with material built mostly around other games (tellingly mostly T or M rated games) and comic book characters (who might as well be video game characters at this point). It's a bit disappointing that given all this freedom to create, the drive is still towards the tired and familiar.

Still, the ability to create levels is brilliant, prolongs playability basically indefinitely, and is deeply rewarding. Somewhere there are boxes full of banner printer paper full of the masochistic platform levels I designed at Daycare after school when my age was in the single digits... I'm currently planning a gauntlet of hundreds upon thousands of fatal deathtraps and swinging rope timing jumps, with the solely reward being a sticker of myself with the words "Good on You," but I must admit, I've not yet experimented much with building my own levels... with all the best toys safely locked away in the story mode (or downloadable content), my options are somewhat limited for the time being... in a way, it's just as well. For as much as I enjoyed turning Sackboy into Shakespear or giving him the ears of a rabbit, zebra-stripes, and cat eyes, he seemed less endearing and (ironically enough) he lost a lot of character. Which I guess is part and parcel with putting him in old Mega Man games, but..

I've been trying to express exactly what my reaction to Little Big Planet has been and it continually eluded me until I finally realized to my shock and bewilderment that more than anything else it made me happy, which is a reaction to a video game I find puzzeling and basically unprecedented. I've been playing video games for literally longer than I can remember and while I have always enjoyed them, often gotten a sense of achievement from them or been absorbed in a world or the characters that lived there or found myself basically addicted, I could not honestly think of another game that made me genuinely happy by itself, without being part of a large experience of memory. It might actually be my favorite new game in the last decade.

Now I have to go copy a 20 year old Mega Man level.

Why I Stopped Reading A Broom to the System

Why I Stopped Reading David Foster Wallace's

A Broom to the System

This is everything you need to know about A Broom To The System and subsequently why I stopped reading it 200 some pages from closing: there is a scene in a Gilligan's Island themed bar where a character is on a date with an inflatable woman.

And yes, she does pop and fly around the room like a deflating balloon.

When I first starting reading this book, it was under the misconception that this was David Foster Wallace's last book and was published posthumously in 2008. When I realized it was actually his first book published in 1987, I thought perhaps I should reevaluate my criticisms, but then I realized Gilligan's Island jokes and rubber girlfriends were probably hackneyed then, too. Wait, let me review the Tom Hanks film "Bachelor Party." Yeah... seems pretty outdated there, too.

As a whole, this work feels woefully outdated, like one an early 60s "collision course with wackiness" farce ala Myra Breckinridge (the film, not the book) or Casino Royale (the one with Woody Allen, not Daniel Craig)... and if you've ever tried to go back and watch those films, it really makes you wonder about the potency or the drugs being passed around. There's a city shaped like Jayne Mansfield, psychiatrist joke upon psychiatrist joke, and it's dialogue seems frankly ridiculous coming out real people in what is supposed to be 1990 and not a dirty joke book from the hazy pre-Kennedy days.

In fact, the book it most reminds me of is Terry Southern's Candy, the only other book I can remember ever being legitimately angry with. It shares the same griminess, ugliness, and feeling that the author sees every man in the world as a date-rapist and finds that both acceptable and hilarious. Granted, that book at least had the common decency to be short, while this book is nearly 500 pages with no ending.

Also, Candy Christian at least has a character. It's the character of a glove that feels its providing hands a valuable service that it gains no true enjoyment of, but it's still a personality of sorts. The protagonist of A Broom to the System, Lenore Beadsman, is more of a vague amorphous thing... that gets a line of dialogue when David Foster Wallace remembers we're meant to be following her story. She's introduced as a fifteen year old girl visiting her older sister's college dorm, there she's quickly shone in contrast to the older, more experienced girls to be somewhat confused and naive. A group of drunken frat boys (the first of our many date-rapist) bursts into the dorm and proceeds to tease, harass, and ultimately threaten the girls into signing their buttocks as a fraternity initiation stunt. All of the girls are bullied for several ugly pages until they finally capitulate except Lenore who, despite being the youngest and least experienced, repeatedly insisting on leaving until the boys give up and let her. It's a scene that really establishes

who Lenore is as a character.

It belongs in a different book.

Adult Lenore has no real personality, being completely dominated by every other character in the book, mostly men who in some way possess her, but also her own great-grandmother (who, in what I'm sure is meant to be a hilarious detail is literally cold-blooded), virtually every line of dialogue assigned to her is asking clarification. She even sleeps with the frat boy date-rapist at one point, and he has in no way reformed himself over the years, (far from it, having just thrown out his wife (one of the other girls he assaults in the opening chapter) because she has "run out of holes"). Now, this might be intentional. There's a recurring thread where she wonders about fictional characters and their ability to think and feel anything more than what's assigned to them, so perhaps I could be accused of missing the point... but on the other hand, I'm supposed to being willing to follow this character for 500 pages and the fact that she's utterly bland and uninteresting isn't made any easier by it being "on purpose."

The real protagonist is Lenore's boss/lover the hilarious named Rick Vigorous. Rick is like Humbert Humbert, but sleazier and less likable. Completely serious, Humbert is at least a master of the language and has the added benefit of the author being aware he's writing a monster. Every line coming out of Rick makes you

want to smack him, which is a problem since he also acts as the narrator. A frustrated publisher, Rick spends his time criticizing bad college fiction pieces, which, ironically, is exactly what it feels like he lives in. Riddled with inadequacies despite having a well-paying pet job and a much younger girlfriend that inexplicably adores him, Rick goes on long tangents about his ex-wife and his gay son (and, yes, they are very homophobic and, yes, we are meant to agree with him) and the thirteen year old neighbor he lusted after, that increasingly push Lenore out of her own book. As I got further into the book, I found myself skipping more and more of these segments, getting back to the plot-relevant sections about Lenore and her brother making bad jokes about the Bob Newhart Show.

Then I realized what I was doing and stopped reading all together.

So, I read one to three novels a week and I think I get in a fairly diverse reading list (I went from Garcia Marquez to the Quaran to Amy Tan one week), and I think I "get" at least most of what I'm reading. I understan

d that this is a deeply meta-textual work... but that doesn't make it any good. In fact, since meta is incredibly hard to do without seeming cheesy or contrived (and I grew up watching Tiny Toons, I learned bad meta-referencing before I learned the three act structure), it's almost a strike against it from the outset. The characters are alternately non-existent or completely unlikable, the dialogue universally makes me question if David Foster Wallace ever saw much less spoke to another human being, and the whole mess really just made me angry, like I was legitimately fighting the book.

I've read Nabokov, I've read Thomas Pynchon, this is neither of them. This is just a mess.

I do like that there was a character named Mindy Metalman.