LittleBigPlanet gets littler on PSP this fall

There are a lot of games with hero in the title on that list.

haha, you said PP.

im putting "Little LittleBigPlanet" in the hat too.

Yes...why is that a problem?

Did you remember to install your brain this morning?

Oh noez! Brainz on teh floor.

Must have fallen out after the lastest CFW install. Man, UMDs suck.

yeah now THAT is the real question.

I just played God of war on it and it was a striking resemblance to the ps2 version. You mean to tell me after all that the psp can't handle 2D sidescrolling platforming with maybe slightly worse graphics than the ps3 version?

Today's news of all these psp games is making my head spin. I'm extra happy I got one for christmas now.

I beg to differ

I find it hard to believe that you know what the PSP is and/or have ever played one as it's clearly powerful enough to run a decent version of Little Big Planet.

The PS2 has 32MB of RAM; the PSP started out with 32MB and now comes with 64MB, so it's not surprising that the PSP can run PS2 games. The PS3, by comparison, has 256MB of RAM.

The PS3 also has 256MB of video RAM, while the PSP has 2MB. This disparity isn't as bad as it might seem, given that the PSP has a much smaller screen, with roughly 130k pixels, while a PS3 running LBP at 720p has to draw 921k pixels. However, there's more to LBP than high-res graphics.

LBP isn't an ordinary side-scrolling platformer; it's a physics simulator. Most games have very few physical objects. Consider that in most first-person shooters, there are only a handful of crates that you can move around and stack freely; most of the objects are fixed and non-physical. Similarly, in a traditional platformer, when you swing on a rope, the rope is basically just a rigid pendulum performing simple harmonic oscillation. In LBP, by comparison, you can swing on an actual chain made of distinct links. Simulating the interaction of each of those links with each other is very computationally-intensive, and a LBP level can have hundreds of physical objects in it.

It'd be easy to reskin a traditional side-scrolling platformer to look like LBP, but it'd be a lot harder to do the underlying physics simulation. And the physics simulation underlies all the level-creation tools. A PSP version of LBP could be restricted to smaller levels with fewer objects, but then there'd be little integration with the PS3 version. You wouldn't be able to use the PSP to work on a level you'd begun building on the PS3.

Actually it still is possible to make the gameplay identical to the PS3 version on PSP, it really all depends on how you program it.

They could code it only to focus on the on screen objects, creating and erasing objects on the fly using some form of cache to keep everything smooth.

I'm no expert on complex programming but I do know this is fairly possible (the only issue would be the loading time before actually starting the game and how many objects can appear on screen at once).

The biggest issue would probably be the online experience (cross platform stages may work but online probably won't).

and knowing that this is just a PSP game, they probably won't put in the same level of work, having support for playing existing PS3 stages but with the additive that the physics engine will work differently and won't be as robust (so the whole individual chain link thing probably won't work the same way).

I know there's a bunch of grammatical errors in the paragraph above, but bear with me (I typed it all up fast and wasn't reading as I was doing it).

About the physics part... ever heard of Loco Roco...2?

The problem is, the behavior of the elements you see onscreen can depend on the action of elements offscreen; look on YouTube for the Little Big Calculator video to see an example. Obviously not all LBP levels are this complex; one solution would be to have two tiers of levels: levels that be played on the PSP and levels that can only be played on the PS3.