E3 Previews — Lego Star Wars Complete Saga and LittleBigPlanet

Nintendo's success has marked a refocus on games for the sake of fun, and nothing exemplifies this trend better than the Lego Star Wars series. Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga will be the first game to offer the functionality gamers have wanted since they first saw a wiimote: motion-controlled lightsaber battles. It's not dueling, but it is a lot of fun. In the same vein, with even more creativity added in, is Sony's imaginative LittleBigPlanet . With Media Molecule finally opening up a bit of the user based content-creation process to journalists, 1up offers one of the first hands-on with the game's core mechanic: "Fusing various pieces together can forge entirely new objects. Place hinges and wheels on a pile of wooden blocks and suddenly you have a makeshift jalopy rolling through the stage. With a tad more work, you can transform that car into a massive (yet ridiculous) rolling wooden dragon. We didn't have quite enough time (or experience) to bust out a run-and-jump rally to put Super Mario Bros. World 8-2 to shame, but we can't wait to get our hands on the open beta due out later this year."

Comments

Re:Really.

[lpangelrob]

As I discovered in a Super Paper Mario minigame a couple days ago, it turns out the controller knows what "level" is. There's a minigame where you tilt the controller left and right to control Mario (the island is what tilts as you tilt the controller) as he tries to grab things from the sky that are falling, and avoiding thwomps and other bad things that are falling from the sky. If I hold the controller perfectly horizontal to the ground, Mario doesn't move.

In addition, one of the items you can use requires an action that basically tells you to tilt the controller a certain direction. I wasn't pointing the controller at the IR devices when I tilted the controller in either case.

While Wii Carpentry probably isn't going to happen anytime soon, the controller has a good idea of what's going on around it without the benefit of the IR sensors. The IR sensors are used primarly when pointing at something on-screen. There seems to be an accelerometer inside that measures accurately how fast you're, well... accelerating the controller. And based on the above, I'm guessing the accelerometer measures tilt in 3 dimensions, so it provides an absolute reference that way as well.