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On Tuesday the LittleBigPlanet servers were still down, so I had the opportunity to enjoy some of the excellent create mode tutorials. Day 3 kicked off Wednesday night for me after I'd put the kids to bed and to my delight I found the servers were up, performance to be pretty good, and much fun was had by me! (Note: a new 1.03 patch for the game is now available and my experiences below are from the 1.02 version of the game.)

Update: added the latest LittleBigPlanet Episode 3 documentary video talking about the create mode of the game.

I joined AmazingZoidberg from the GamersWithJobs forums and played through his first couple of levels he'd made in the beta featuring renditions of David Caruso. He was able to give me his director's commentary as we went, and his Fuel Tank level was still fun for a second effort. As we chatted our sackboys' mouths moved to lip sync, adding an extra bit of immersion. To me, his blue sackboy in a tux and top-hat with a frying pan in hand was really him.

Things we learned:
* a second sackboy will quickly show ways your custom level doesn't work.
* once you cross the sackboy-stopsign marker you can't bring friends into a level.
* coordinating a jump into a mine cart is funny: me: "ok, next cart" him: "wait, this one or the next--wait for me! oh no I fell!"
* any item picked up by anyone in the level is given to all players of the level. (Update: I'm not so sure about this anymore. Needs more testing.)
* Media Molecule really know how to make beautiful and fun levels.

Things really kicked into high gear when my brother James finally came online. While we were playing Lowrider and maneuvering the bouncy-hooded cars to let us vault to different goodies he showed me something I hadn't thought of. While I was looking up at an object bubble talking about the best way to get there I noticed he'd opened his popit menu and the popit cursor was wandering over to me, something dangling from it. I noticed at the last moment what he was doing, but before I could stop him he had stapled a scaled-up, huge donkey tail to my head.

Whenever we'd get stuck in a level or even while one of us was focused on something the other would whip out the popit cursor and try to stick silly Decorations to each other. When James stapled four hands on springs to his sackboy's forehead and proceeded to nod his head vigorously like a headbanger, he had them swaying and springing around like crazy. I laughed so hard I almost got sick. It made the boss fights a bit easier to take when you could stick big rabbit ears to them and have a good laugh before figuring out exactly what you needed to do.

By the end of the late night we'd stapled giant ears, springy hands, skeleton arms, engine blocks, and other items to each other and my pod in hilarious combinations. I'm looking forward to many more fun times with this game and, even better, spending time online and off playing it with friends and family. If you've been on the fence about the game, I'd jump off and hit the ground running. It's that good.

From Aeropause.