Today I clicked on the "brilliant" tag to see what Little Big Planet levels had been labeled as such, and I jumped into one called "Mad Mansion", created by geosautus. And, oh boy, did it grab me. It began with a carriage ride to a mysterious castle. It was appropriately dark, and the color was muted. Inside the castle were parts of a riddle, which seemed to be building up to a word game at the very end. I was so completely on board with this level. I was taking notes and parsing the letters of the secret word. I was smack dab in the middle of in one of my recurring "Gosh, Little Big Planet sure is awesome, after all!" phases. They come and go, but I tend to get them once a week.

But then i came to a part where I had to jump through a series of insta-death spikes. I kept failing, which was no big deal, since you get several tries. As my lives dwindled, I started to get a little worried. I liked this level. I wanted to see where it was going. I wanted to make these relatively simple jumps. I had gotten the clues for six letters of the word, but I had idea how many more letters I had to go. But I did know that if I died here, I was going to quit in disgust.

And sure enough, I lost all my lives at the last part of the spike jump, just shy of the bronze gong that saves your progress. So I had to restart at the beginning of the carriage ride, before the difficult chandelier swing over the flames, before the struggle to get onto the bouncing bed that catapulted me up, and eventually back to these spikes again. Which meant I quit in disgust. Cute can only get me so far before the gameplay has to take over. Until that happens in Little Big Planet, my "Gosh, Little Big Planet sure is awesome, after all!" phases are going to be just that: phases.

(This is the sort of stuff that makes me wish I liked Little Big Planet more. How awesome would it be to cruise among custom-made levels and discover that? Of course, you'd have to be cruising through Japanese text to find it.)