Prediction: "Little Big Planet" will leave a big crater

For those of you video-gaming geeks out there, Sony Computer Entertainment has announced that their game, Little Big Planet, will come out for their PlayStation 3 this September.

At the risk of opening myself up to charges of video-game fanboyism, I will now state for the record that I predict LBP will be a disappointing dud.

For the uninitiated, Little Big Planet is a side-scrolling platform game, a la Super Mario Bros., where you maneuver a team of little blobby "sackboys" across photorealistic landscapes to reach a goal.

If that seems a bit vague, it's intentional. Sony's big "hook" for LBP is that it's centered around user-created content -- that is, players will be able to make their own levels, complete with their own images and music and whatever, then upload them to the internet and share them with other players.

And I believe that will prove to be Little Big Planet's Achilles Heel.

Why? Two reasons:

1. Players who aren't in a mood to spend hours building their own levels won't find much to appeal to them. Other games give you well-defined goals -- rescue the princess, stop the alien invasion, whatever -- so there's a motivation to play them. Near as I can tell, a person who just wants to sit back and relax can't do that with LBP, because the game's primary focus is on building stuff.

   The most successful "build stuff" game I can think of is The Sims, and a big part of the appeal of that title was in either (1) nurturing and raising your Sims, or (2) finding new ways to torment them -- neither of which apply here.

2. Sony readily admits that they expect people will keep playing Little Big Planet because other players will provide an endless supply of custom-created levels for it. The problem there is that (I strongly suspect) most people do not have the artistic talent or game-balancing skills to provide quality, captivating levels to play in.

   Want proof? Visit a typical MySpace page and have your eyeballs assaulted by neon glitter, low-contrast colors, and other tasteless tributes of the masses. And if creating an attractive web page is hard, then creating a well-crafted level in a video game -- one that people will actually enjoy playing -- is even harder. Little Big Planet players hoping to hit the mother lode of homebrew content better be prepared to sift through hundreds of badly-built stages before finding something even vaguely comparable to a typical Super Mario Bros. level.

Admittedly, I could be wrong (it wouldn't be the first time). But I'm enough of a pessimist to think that the folks pinning their hopes on Little Big Planet are going to be disappointed, for the reasons outlined above. It certainly wouldn't be the first time a high-profile PlayStation 3 title gets revealed to be all glitter and no game...