LittleBigPlanet PS Vita

LittleBigPlanet PS Vita took the series about the sewn-together character Sackboy and brought it to hardware that, surprisingly, suits it even better than the home consoles. The foundation remains unchanged — a two-and-a-half-dimensional platformer where you run, jump, and grab onto objects in an environment stitched together from fabric, cardboard, zippers, and buttons. The campaign leads you through a colorful journey full of traps, carts, and whimsical machines, and as always offers material and sticker collecting that can then be used in your own level creations. Alongside the main campaign there's also a set of quick arcade minigames designed specifically for touch controls, perfect for a few minutes on the tram.

The novelty here is the use of touch. The front panel is used for pulling and squeezing rubbery blocks, the rear one for pushing platforms forward, and some levels are built entirely around the idea that the player interacts with the world using fingers instead of Sackboy. Tarsier Studios and Double Eleven didn't settle for a mere port, either: the level editor here is complete, and thanks to the touchscreen, drawing and placing objects in it is noticeably more pleasant than with a gamepad. A whole range of community-made minigames emerged as a result, sharing nothing at all with the classic platformer and exploiting the Vita's hardware in their own way. The editor also handles logic circuits and custom sounds, so the line between playing and creating is thinner here than elsewhere.

Technically, the game kept a clean look and smooth performance, albeit with fewer objects on screen than on PlayStation 3. Sound and music stayed true to the series' spirit — a mix of circus, world music, and electronic motifs layered according to wherever the player happens to be walking. Reception at the time was very good, and the title was often called the best entry in the series since the second installment. Today its value is mixed: the campaign itself works wonderfully and is still fun, but online sharing of user-made levels has since shut down, so the greatest strength of the whole brand is harder to access than it used to be.