Yesterday I managed to do something that I haven’t done in a while now: complete a game. And not just one game, but two games!

First, I played Flower, which I bought a while back but hadn’t even tried yet. This one was actually pretty quick to finish as it’s fairly short, but it’s still pretty good. You control a petal that glides around on the wind, and it’s serene and relaxing to start, and then suddenly develops into something much more game-like. It’s really more about the emotional effect it induces than gameplay, though.

And second, I finished off Little Big Planet’s main story levels. I did about half of them two weeks ago (and forgot to write about it), and went back and did the rest of them today, along with some of the community levels with a friend riding co-op. It was a decent enough game, but the controls and physics were frequently aggravating enough that I don’t think I really want to spend any more time on it. It treats everything, yourself included, as real objects, and the momentum makes it really difficult to do things like jump on small platforms. The lives system also seemed a bit unfair at times; there would often be one really difficult section and if you failed it, you had to go back and redo the much-easier rest of the level all over again, and the aforementioned control issues didn’t help.

I’ve also recently played through a bit of New Super Mario Bros Wii, and so far I’m up to the middle of world 2. I don’t know if the game’s getting harder, or if my reflexes are getting worse (I used to be able to finish the original SMB no sweat), but it feels a lot tougher than I’m used to. Making jumps doesn’t seem as precise as I’d like, which leads to a lot of deaths.

And I also fired up Lego Rock Band and worked through the first two tiers of songs. The presentation is cute, as expected, and there are a few good songs in there, but a lot of them are teen-oriented ones that I haven’t heard of before, and don’t really appeal all that much to me. I’m thus still not sure whether I’ll export the songs back to RB2 or not. I’m not sure how far into LRB I’ll get when I’d prefer to play songs back in RB2 either. LRB does have at least one new feature: occasional rock challenges where you do something storyline-related, like demolish a building or scare ghosts with your music. They don’t really play that much differently, with just some restrictions like not being able to use star power, but they have custom background animations at least.