Kodu is the new Boku: Xbox Live's 'LittleBigPlanet'

Microsoft pulled no punches during its CES keynote, shuffling an "actual 12-year-old girl" onstage to demonstrate its newly renamed Xbox Live Community Game "Kodu." Apparently too reminiscent of the failed 80s-era adult juice, the former name, Boku, was dropped in favor of the less associable two-syllabler. But we digress. Kodu is still easily described as a LittleBigPlanet-esque effort, but on a much simpler scale -- and probably far less "brilliant," in the Brits' all-purpose sense of the word.

Sparrow, that 12-year-old we mentioned, apparently did create a "pretty impressive" game using Kodu, described by Engadget as, "Katamari meets light-cycles from Tron. It's totally bizarre -- now her and Robbie [Bach] are using cycles to steal rocks from each other." Actually, sounds brilliant to us.

Kodu was originally designed as a learning tool for kids, but Microsoft promises it's compatible with people ages "seven to 70." Players reportedly create their game worlds in mere minutes using a pool of 200 building blocks designed to drive simple gameplay concepts like vision, hearing and time. Kodu is scheduled for release this spring and has yet to be priced.

Update: Video after the break, and more details here. [Thanks EvilDud!]

Reader Comments (86)

Man, I miss Boku... the biggest juiceboxes of all time

I thought this was the biggest juice box:

http://img150.imageshack.us/my.php?image=franziauy3.jpg

Par for the course, Microsoft steals someone else's idea, and I'm sure it will be called 'innovative' and nobody will find fault with that. They'll be too busy jackasssing about the PS3 and Sony.

How is this stealing someone's idea? And who's idea are the stealing?

I remember making tracks in Excitebike on the NES. That was my favorite part. Maybe they stole this idea from Nintendo.

I'm really looking forward to this, it sounds like we can make lots of genres without much trouble.

You were voted down for that?

Fanboys sure are out in full force today.

They seem to be more afraid of Kodu then Halo Wars and both are going to drive the 360 to even further heights.

It's because your both vespers. Especially Alien Lord. Snowblind is just more of a Diet Vesper.

Maybe you vespers can actually make something with this since XNA is for the grown folks.

So is anyone who likes any game on a particular system a fanboy now?

I actually proved in my last post that I do own a PS3 (as well as a Wii if you want my friend code for that too), yet I was still voted down for it.

I didn't like LBP, where as I do like things like RPG Maker. So sue me.

Just ignore their immaturity Snowblind, once $ony is dead so to will be $0ny fanboyism.

"but Microsoft promises it's compatible with ages 'seven to 70.'"

How do they test this? Did a 71 year old's head explode when trying to play this game?

I think they're assuming that everyone from this generation won't live past age 70, especially those who drank all the disgusting Mountain Dew gamer fuel with the release of Halo 3.

I thought Mountain Dew shortened your penis, not your life span

I think that's exactly what happened

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=HY-03vYYAjA

@Strategy_Panda
For the recored, the urban legend is "lowered sperm count".

"Microsoft promises [Kodu is] compatible with ages 'seven to 70.'"

Great, just what we needed -- a small army of pissed off six- and seventy-one-year-olds.

Oh man. That makes me cry. MicroSoft is trying too hard to do everything their competitors are doing.

I was hoping for some of the '12 year olds on xbox are racist' jokes, or at least something on her being named sparrow... fable 2 and all that.

Man I HOPE that was just a marketing angle of some sort, because if someone out there actually named their child "Sparrow" they should be shot, right along with the parents of Chair, Rainbow and Honeydew.

Back in the Commodore 64 days, kids younger than the girl in the video wrote programs in Basic. So I don't see what's so special about a 13 year old using dumbed down colorful icons in a glorified level editor.

Even this wont teach anyone the full scope of programming, instead it will encourage them to take programing and game design in university.

AHAHAHAHA!

"The professor's got boku shits, man."

What movie?

RPG Maker '03 wins every time.

What's the big deal? She didn't make a game, just used features in the game to make a controllable environment. Sorry if I'm missing something.

Are you kidding me Microsoft? You're trying WAY too hard. LBP destroys whatever the hell this is.

it looks interesting, i want to see more though. it reminds me of spore a little and read someone compare it to halo 3 forge

So is LBP Sony's Blast works?

Was that good btw? I was thinking of picking that up.

No idea, I've yet to find a copy..

I'm not impressed at all. FAIL!

Katamari and Tron Light Cycles. EPIC FTW. Too bad I didn't see any of that.

I saw a garbage editor with ugly graphics.

And Snowblind's talks like he has play LBP enough to judge it, Dude has got 0 trophies for it. U earn 5 trophies just playing it online and 1 trophy for every stage u clear. Dude didn't even clear the first stage.

He's a fanboy, that's what fanboy's do.

Anyway, they should have shown more examples of what kinds of things you can make...all I saw was some 12 year old girl's version of a neon painted multiplayer fetch quest.

Maybe I'm jumping the gun here, but this looks like it is going to fail miserably. When the audience was applauding I was like, "Really?"

See, to me, an anime fan, "boku" is a pronoun...

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Kodu is the new Boku: Xbox Live's 'LittleBigPlanet'

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