Game developer Media Molecule released LittleBigPlanet in 2008 and introduced gamers to a new lovable character by the name of Sackboy. Sony’s world of ‘Play, Create, & Share’ owes its birth to LBP, and several other games have followed in its footsteps (Modnation Racers and Joe Danger to name two). LBP gave console users something PC gamers have had for years. The ability to create their own levels, with tools that were easy to use and imagination friendly. All of these user created levels carry over to the sequel, LittleBigPlanet 2, so it can boast having over 3.5 million levels to play at launch.

LBP2 uses the same basic tools as the original, but adds more depth and size, as well as water and zero gravity. The tools and user interface were kept unchanged, with new tools added in. All of the new features can be experienced by playing through the story mode, so starting out there is a must.

The story is fun and lighthearted and very entertaining. Each level is well designed and has collectibles like stickers, clothing for your little buddy, and useful items for when you jump into create mode. Each level has a final boss battle that can be very challenging as you move farther along. The story isn’t long, and a few hours would be enough to rush through it, but finding and acquiring all of the collectibles will take some time. All of the new features, like new vehicle uses, water, and zero gravity, are shown off in the story mode, so keep in mind that everything you see and do in the story, can be recreated by you in create mode.

Create Mode itself has some new features. You can now produce cut scenes so that you can actually create your very own story mode. Cut scenes allow for different camera angles and special effects for more dramatic scenes. The game has also expanded into a more 3 dimensional realm, and is not just a multi-plane 2D side scroller anymore. You can now set the field of play to be more like a first person shooter, or a dual stick top down shooter, or an old school Galaga style shooter. This aids in the creation of more dynamic puzzles and truly turns LBP into a versatile platformer with endless possibilities. The levels are also larger with LBP2. A new level link has also been added so that levels can now send players from one created level to another by using a link portal. This adds an entirely new dimension to the creation of your own story mode. We are looking forward to the user created story modes that will continue to give LBP2 as much replayability as LBP had (and still has).

The online community features have returned from LBP, and have been enhanced. All of your published levels can be found on your home planet via your online profile. Friends can leave messages for you while you are away, make comments on your levels, and rate them too. If you have a PS Eye, you can use your own image on your profile for a more personal touch. When you are ready to find some user created levels to play, the search feature has been improved so that you can pinpoint exactly what you are looking for. Want a versus only level? Filter your results for that, and there you go. It’s pretty robust and gives you just about every option you can think of.

Co-op is not only available for every level in the story mode, it is also encouraged. If someone else is playing a level that you are about to start, you will be asked if you want to join in with them (this can be disabled). Some story levels actually require multiple players in order to collect everything there, so keep an eye out for big 2X, 3X, and/or 4X signs. Co-op can be played with friends on the same console, and across the globe. You can mix it up by playing with friends on your couch and friends somewhere else. Hint: There is a trophy for creating a chain of players grappling each other, so keep an eye out for that.

The graphics for the game are well defined and very polished. The details on everything are excellent. The water physics truly make the water seem real, and I can’t find a towel for my Sackboy anywhere. While in create mode, you can not only set the water level, but you can also create a wave pool effect with floating objects that rise and fall with the waves. The graphical detail for each item in the game, from little stickers, all the way up to big bosses, is well thought out and flawless.

The audio for the game is pleasant to listen to. The included music selection ranges from up tempo to down right spooky, with a quality that sounds great. The music is fun and light and fits the tempo and style of each level properly. If you want, you can always just play the music on your PS3′s hard drive. The voice acting for the story mode is well done and Stephen Fry’s voice overs add to that quality.

Media Molecule’s LittleBigPlanet 2 should appeal to a wide variety of gamers and have a long playing life. The user created content adds to the over all replayability of the title and the user creation tools should make a PC modder jealous. Everything about the game shows how dedicated and determined Media Molecule was to create a sequel to their first installment that not only lived up to the expectations of the LBP community, but surpassed it with leaps and bounds.

Young, old, hardcore, casual, however you define yourself as a gamer, you owe it to yourself to give this game a try. It belongs in everyone’s PS3 library. With over 3.5 million levels waiting to be played at launch, why wouldn’t you pick this up?

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First off, let me just say that I may have been mistaken before. Inception isn’t the best movie I’ve seen in a long time. It’s the best movie I’ve ever seen. Now you might ask, what makes this the best movie ever? Simply, it has something that most movies these days lack: plot. Let’s be honest; as good a laugh as the Hangover may have been, a story about a group of friends who drank way much hardly qualifies as a great plot, especially when you consider college kids across the country do the same thing on a weekly basis. The same goes for the sad excuses for horror movies that are spewed into theaters to no end these days. A guy wearing a mask running around stabbing everything that moves hardly qualifies as a plot. But Inception is different. It has a plot so engrossing that it sucks you in, grabbing your attention and quickly making you lose track of time. About half an hour into the movie, I was completely mesmerized, and the next time I looked at my phone, two and a half hours had passed. At the same time, the story is so deep, twisted, and convoluted that it makes The Matrix look like “Green Eggs and Ham,” as a friend of mine put it.

But perhaps the thing that sticks out most in my mind is the fact that Inception made me think. Not during the movie, of course; if you try to think about what’s going on while you’re watching the movie, your head might just explode. I’m talking about after the movie. I saw the movie yesterday, and out of the last 24 hours, I’d say I’ve spent seventy percent thinking about the concepts that the movie introduces. Simply put, Inception will make you seriously question reality. Referring back to The Matrix, if you thought everything you knew about your existence was shattered to pieces the first time you saw the movie, Inception will be the atom bomb that obliterates those pieces. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that if you really give this movie some open-minded thought, it has the potential to change the way you think about existence itself.

Another thing that Inception has going for itself is the fact that it can appeal to anybody. The movie’s one plot has all the makings of an action movie, a mystery, a good horror film, and a love story, with a few jokes sprinkled throughout. Basically, if you’ve ever seen a single movie that you’ve liked, it’d be pretty damn hard not to like Inception. But the I think the true universal appeal of the movie lies in the ending, during the last five seconds. Those last five seconds, simply put, make the film work for everybody. Watching them, you can interpret the entire two and a half hour experience any way you want. No two people will have exactly the same impression of what just happened when they walk out of the theater. The casual movie goer who doesn’t pay much attention to details and the intricacies of the dialogues will see a definitive end to the movie, while the person who really payed attention will try to make sense of the whole plot, while reaching a completely different conclusion than the person who sat next to them for the whole thing. Compare two different interpretations of the movie, and you’ll likely find yourself wondering whether the director even had any idea what was going on and picturing Leonardo DiCaprio saying “I don’t even know. I just read the lines.”

Of course Inception has its faults. More than once I found myself thinking “a hand grenade would never make that big an explosion.” At first, the movie is extremely confusing. At the showing I went to see, three or four people walked out within the first hour, muttering something along the lines of “what the hell is going on here?” And of course there were times that I found the actors attitudes to be a little bit over-the-top or just not fitting a particular scenario entirely. But as a whole, Inception is an excellent movie, and if you’re willing to sit through to the end and give it a couple minutes of serious, introspective though after you walk out of the theater, I can guarantee that you’ll be left with the most unforgettable cinematic experience of your life.

With “older” games like the first Resident Evils and Silent Hills, Dino Crisis, and so on and so forth players were shown true horror. For the first time you were playing a film of terror. You were the character who, in a movie, would be decapitated as the serial murderer moved on to the next teenie-bopper without a passing memory at your existence. Now you were in that position and, instead of facing an early death, you would do all you could to arm yourself with what armaments you could find laying around. Not once during games such as these could a player feel safe.

Now, let us examine a few choice picks of recent “survival” horror games. Resident Evil 5, Condemned 2: Bloodshot and Dead Space are my points of focus for the sake of this article. Of course, there are numerous other games from which to choose but these three will nail my intention perfectly.

Let’s start with Resident Evil 5. Even when Resi 4 released I felt that Capcom had made a huge change, but not in the good way. With the addition of frequent drops for ammunition, money, and health items as well as the introduction of the merchant the Resident Evil games suddenly got a whole lot less survival-oriented. Yes, the player is still going at it alone (with the exception of co-op in Resident Evil 5) but, at least to me, I felt like I was all powerful. Upgrading my weapons and having a nearly limitless surplus of ammunition not once did I feel that fear of running low on supplies. I feel that, because of this, Resident Evils 4 and 5 have changed from survival horror to third person shooter horror.

Next up on the list is Condemned 2: Bloodshot. There is no doubt that this game pitted the player alone against leagues of spooky things. Yet, the high action of Condemned with the concentration on the combination beat-em-up fighting skills seems to devalue the survival aspect. Again, no doubt it belongs in the horror genre but in is my opinion that Condemned should be placed in a classification of beat-em-up horror.

Last, but nearly not least, Dead Space. Visceral Games did an amazing job with Dead Space. The atmosphere is unnerving, the visuals are dark and wary, and basically everything in the game made Dead Space to be utterly horrifying. Now here’s the major difference between this game and Resident Evils 4 and 5. Both DS and RE4/5 feature frequent item drops and merchants/stores where the player can buy health items and ammunition. The separating feature though is in DS the drops are less prolific and credits come much more few and far between. Unless one maintains nearly perfect accuracy and is exceedingly reserved with his or her supplies, it’s very easy to run out of both ammunition and healing items. Thus, Dead Space qualifies for the survival horror label.

My point is not that any of these games are not horror. I tried to make that clear. The point of this Off The Record was to show that horror is much broader than just survival. It’s changed to the extent that, in comparison, a shooter is no longer just a shooter. There are so many more classifications of genre that I feel need to be applied to the horror aspect, yet, when a game shows up boasting horror it’s automatically put into the survival horror category.

Today, in Off The Record, I come not to bear grievance over the outstanding similarities between Killzone and Halo or Gears of War. Rather, the industry’s current obsession with motion sensory based gaming. This is nothing new in the industry, nay, it dates back to the NES where many peripherals were attempted, and failed horribly. With the Zapper Light Gun being excluded we had the Powerglove and the U-Force, both touchy and gimmicky with little to no success rate. Still, no one could land that detestable plane in Top Gun. One would assume that the technology was just too new, it wasn’t ready. These accessories were ahead of their time and they’ve been pushed aside in the scramble towards the top.

However, let us travel back only a few years, to 2003, to the PlayStation EyeToy, Sony’s attempt at motion-based gaming, no cords attached if you will. As exciting as the peripheral was when it first released, and even though it was a major attraction at gaming store displays, the EyeToy quickly lost steam from the gimmick-fueled boat that shipped it into our homes. What really brought upon the death of the EyeToy was the lack of fresh content and, more than likely, the physical state of gamers at that time. Sony gave us something with too much potential but not enough of a finished product to back up its relevance.

Then, as previously mentioned, in 2006 Nintendo gave us the Wii, an almost completely motion-based gaming console. With the Wii’s birth into the industry Nintendo simultaneously stepped back from the competition and decided to do what they did best, appeal to their fans. What grew from that move was a spree of casual games, designed toward both extreme ends of the spectrum, children and the older generations. Scorned by hardcore gamers, the Wii was ostracized for this, but it must be recognized as a huge step in gaming history. For what seems to be the first time in our history, video games are starting to be accepted as a hobby, a family past time, a future career. Sure, there have been casual games from the beginning; after all, Pong was nothing more than a casual game by today’s standards. It was not until the Wii that gaming was realized as something for everyone.

Now, the year is 2010, and it’s finally time to cue Sony and Microsoft’s response to Nintendo’s incredibly successful console. We saw an attempt by Sony at the very beginning of the current generation with the PlayStation 3′s original controller release, the Sixaxis. The Sixaxis was considered to be somewhat of a failure in design. Not only was the idea of a sensory based controller obviously similar to Nintendo’s Wiimote, but the end product felt cheap and flimsy. Sony responded with the creation of the DualShock 3, which some would say was the original logical step, but leaving Sixaxis technology hidden inside the sturdier, more durable controller. Sony is trying again, present day, and this time Microsoft is tailing behind them.

It was only relatively recently that Sony announced the PlayStation Move. The PlayStation Move is a new motion-sensor based controller system which looks suspiciously like a pair of black Wiimotes with Bozo the Clown’s nose glued to the top of each. Microsoft’s response to this announcement was Project Natal. Not much is known about Natal yet, but Microsoft has boasted that it will not involve any sort of controller whatsoever. What Project Natal sounds like to this writer is the EyeToy, a decade later. In the eighties, at the height of the arcades, considered the Golden Age of gaming by some, virtual reality games were perceived to be the future. No controllers and a fully immersive virtual world where even the flick of a left pinky finger could trigger a line of code to react in a particular way was fathomed. I highly doubt we are any where near those times yet, but the industry certainly seems to be headed toward this progression nonetheless.

Whether or not the technology is developed enough to fully utilize the PlayStation Move or Project Natal is a question yet to be answered. When the Wii first hit store shelves the Wiimotes were still somewhat inaccurate and untrustworthy. The bigger question, though, is not are we ready, but where will it end? There are already over twelve major publishers signed on to Project Natal. Are gamers fated to do away with controllers and do-hickeys for good to wave their arms and legs in front of a television to become a fully integrated playing piece in the game? Or, will history repeat itself and this technology will fade out yet again, losing its onward push once gamers grow tired of the novelty? For these answers we will have to wait and see, but with over thirty years of joystick-in-hand gaming we can probably assume that there will still be some growth in the games we want to see.

The interface is simple to use and easy to learn, even though the experienced and hard settings might make you want to pull your hair out. As you score higher and higher you earn stars which then unlock fifteen levels of power-ups. If you can keep the game going and not have your blocks reach the top before the song ends, you can then advance to the next level.

For those of you that hate going it alone, you can have a friend grab a controller and go head-to-head to see who’s the best or work together in co-op mode. There’s also a handicap mode for when you know who’s the best, and just want give the other players a chance to win.

Groovin’ Blocks is a great game for those players that enjoy the likes of Lumines or bejeweled, and playing to the beat of some cool techno adds to the experience. If you are colorblind, no need to shy away from the game either since it has a colorblind mode that uses shapes and colors together so that everyone can join in.

You may think you have played this game before by another name, but give it a try as it’s worth the low price tag.

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