This week attendees of Playstation Destination were treated to the surprise reveal of Little Big Planet karting. Featuring the lovable Sackboy character.

Self evidently, the game would appear to be a kart racing game incorporating, presumably mechanics from Little Big Planet. As you can see on the right the advertisement says ‘Play, Create, Share’ so it seems relatively safe to say we can expect to see the game sporting similar features to Little Big Planet.

In normal circumstances this could be seen as a very natural move forward for the lovable Sackboy, but some of us haven’t forgotten Modnation Racers. You know, the game that was basically the Little Big Planet of kart racing. The game even featured Sackboy on release as a playable character.

Modnation Racers saw very reasonable critical acclaim, and with a score of 82 on metacritic, and even a user score of 87. Critics and consumers seemed happy with what that game brought to the table. On the other hand, despite its quality Modnation Racers only sold 0.9 million units worldwide – a pretty paltry figure compared to say, Mario Kart Wii’s staggering 31 million units sold.

Although that to say Modnation Racers performed poorly. You don’t see many racers on the HD consoles hitting figures more than a couple million, GT5 aside, but I think Modnation Racers fell significantly short of its potential and probably of Sony’s expectations. There’s no denying game was definitely enjoyable, it’s one I’ve kept in my personal collection because of how the user generated content aspect makes it almost infinitely playable, but it could have been better, and in turn performed a lot better. Here’s some of the key points I think Modnation fell short on. Hopefully these are where Little Big Planet Karting can step things up, and see greater success.

Controls and Accessibility

Modnation Racers since the early beta has always had complaints regarding its controls. I’m uncertain what it is exactly, but at times the game feels floaty, or overly responsive, at the same time you can’t get the level of precision you can from a game like Mario Kart. On top of that the game misses something that’s been key to Mario Kart Wii since launch: accessibility.

Mario Kart Wii has been built to play with both the standard controller, and Wii wheel. A regular controller can be pretty daunting to more casual users, and a Kart Racing game featuring childish, or cartoony characters should definitely acknowledge it’s casual marketability. This is something that LBP Karting’s already got right, it’s already been confirmed that there will be some sort of ‘wheel’ peripheral released for the Playstation Move for use with the game.

Character

Modnation Racers did have its own charm. The narrators of the racing league you race within, in the games singleplayer campaign sports a good, lighthearted sense of humour conveyed through its two commentators, Biff and Gary, but they weren’t exactly unique, and they only took part in the game between singleplayer races and tutorials.

Those two characters aside the game had very little going for it. The games core characters, Tag and his friends, along with the games ‘plot’ left a lot to be desired. Powerups in the game were also very generic, rockets, lightening bolt, blue glowy thing… it’s not exactly the same as Mario Karts shells, bananas, chain chomps, magic stars. The Super Mario series oozes charm with all of it’s uniquely characterised systems, Modnation Racers had none  of this, and that really let it down.

Creation Limitation

Perhaps one of greatest, but worst attributes was its creation. Yes, you can build tracks, yes you can customise every single detail, in theory… but what of this actually effects the gameplay experience? very little. For the largest part the game confines you to build a more traditional track, tools for off-road can be very temperamental, even setting up something like a shortcut via jump over a portion of the track could be difficult to orchestrate at times.

The games methods were convoluted, and at the same time it didn’t present the player with the same design-freedom a say, Little Big Planet 2 does with its levels. In Little Big Planet 2 not only can you design the levels structure and theme, you can create objects and mechanics unique to the level. Modnation Racers has no logic gates, no pistons, nothing like that. It misses out all the depth Little Big Planet provided, and yes there are some merits to accessibility in this regard, but eventually the lack of control restricts the users creative freedom and ultimately kills the ‘play create share’ mentality. There are very, very few unique tracks on Modnation Racers, sure they all have their different layout, but aesthetically and functionally they’re all very similar. It gets stagnant faster than it should, for both players and creators.

Online Play

One thing Modnation Racers fell short on is online play. On release the game was region locked, so people were disappointed, worldwide as they weren’t able to play with friends / relatives, across different regions. The online region locking was eventually lifted but by which time it had already dealt a great deal of harm to the games community – people who were disappointed simply moved on to other things.