Continuing our series of add-on packs bringing stickers, objects, costumes, backgrounds, and music from The PS3 to the PSP, comes the Metropolis Theme Pack.

This week you’ll be able to download a PSP add-on pack made up of 10 Costume Pieces, 25 Materials, 14 Stickers, 1 Music Object, and 1 Background. The costume from the pack will be available for free!

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The tenth LittleBigPlanet Contraption Challenge has been a massive success, bringing in over 1,000 entries looking to impress the world with their creative and unusual contraptions. This time the challenge was to create an Amphibious Vehicle which could travel across land and water, and you didn’t disappoint with your submissions, which were played over a total of 200,000 times in less than a month.
From all the entries, the PlayStation Forums team had the tough choice of picking out the six finalists and their contraptions.

These are:

• Land / Sea Vessel by falcon-636

• Crouching boat, hidden car by Asbestos101

• OctoCab by fluxlasers
Haunted Carriage by Orava1988

• The Crazy Wheel by monday1235

• Transforming Sea Guardian: Artemis by Belweg


You can check out their submissions in the video gallery below!

So, what comes next? Well, that’s up to you. From these six finalists you can vote in a poll in the PlayStation Forums and help choose the winner who will be crowned the Contraption Challenge 10 master. The lucky entrant will also earn a PSPgo system with a copy of LittleBigPlanet for their hard work.

Voting is now open, so if you have a PlayStation Network sign-in ID, head over to community.eu.playstation.com, check out the contraptions and make your vote count!

The winner will be announced on 17 March 2010, so make sure you don’t miss out on what’s going to be one of the most popular PlayStation Forums events ever.

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Once a year the world turns a little bit Irish; rivers are died green and leprechauns roam the streets causing chaos, all in the name of St Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland.

St Patrick’s Day is next Wednesday, the 17th or March, and so this week we will be re-releasing the Leprechaun outfit, so that Sackboys and girls everywhere may celebrate St Patrick’s day in style.

Head into the LittleBigStore on Thursday to grab your free Leprechaun outfit, and remember; everyone’s Irish on March 17th!

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The LBW Create contest resets at the start of each month, and the winner of each month’s challenge is rewarded with the much coveted Rare Prize Crown. To enter the contest, find out more details, or just check out some of the entries, head over tot he LittleBigWorkshop forums.

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We’ve seen how some community levels have been affected in an undesirable way by the update, and we’ve been busy trying to put this straight.

Update 2.04 should help to sort out the following things:

• Pistons now behave correctly when connected to a dynamic object then a static object.
• If a piston doesn’t connect, the player is able to exit the Popit menu.
• Scoreboards now trigger whilst upside down, like they used to.
• Two emitters emitting the same MyObject no longer causes any nastiness. We don’t like nastiness.

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Continuing our series of add-on packs bringing stickers, objects, costumes, backgrounds, and music from The PS3 to the PSP, comes the Canyons Theme Pack.

This week you’ll be able to download a PSP add-on pack made up of 5 Costume Pieces, 19 Materials, 15 Stickers, 1 Music Object, and 1 Background. The costume from the pack, featuring a Seniorita wig, sombrero hat, long moustache, lace trim dress, and red poncho will be available for free!

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DLC for LittleBigPlanet has expanded the game in all directions, bringing new costumes, stickers, materials, music, levels, and toys to players and creators, enhancing the tools available for building levels, and so too enhancing the variety, quality, and abundance of player-made levels.

To date, there have been over 100 individual addons available to download, and that number is set to rise even higher, because 2010 is set to be another add-on packed year, with a huge collection of new and exciting content coming to the game!

For the moment though, let’s take a look back over all the content we saw in 2009…

For more information and full details about all the add-on content available for LittleBigPlanet, check out our comprehensive Downloadable Content Catalogue (there’s even one for PSP now too!).

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On the LittleBigStore this week, a set of four costumes from Level 5’s White Knight Chronicles – a brand spanking new PS3 game, and the latest thing in JRPG fashions, or so we’ve heard.

The costume pack allows Sackboy to dress up in the garb of the White Knight himself, his foe the Black Knight, plus the Dragon Knight, and Leonard, the protagonist of the game, a boy who is able to harness the power of the White Knight, and combat the evil forces of Magi.

All of these very shiny costumes will arrive on the store this Thursday!

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This week you’ll be able to download a PSP add-on pack made up of five Costume Pieces, 14 Materials, 15 Stickers, one Music Object, and a Background. The costume from the pack, featuring a wedding veil and dress, will be available for free!

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For this challenge you need to make a vehicle that can travel across both land and water. However, we don’t just want to see a floating car with a rocket on the back – these challenges are about creativity and originality, so we want to see vehicles using innovative methods of movement or which change and work differently when they hit the water. Think outside the box!

To take part, all you need to do is make your contraption, put it in a short level to show it off and publish it using the prefix ‘CC10’ in the level title so that everyone can easily find it. You’ve got until Sunday 28th February to get your level published, which is when we’ll start to narrow down all the entries to just five or six finalists. Like with CC09 there’ll be a poll on the EU PlayStation forums for everyone to vote for their favourite finalist, and whoever gets the most votes will win a shiny new PSP Go and LittleBigPlanet on PSP!

Please note: This contest is only open to EU residents, please see here for the full rules.

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This week, we will mostly be celebrating the Chinese New Year, with the re-release of this pair of free costumes for Sackboy, sporting some festive red lanterns.

According to everyone’s friend, Wikipedia, tales and legends tell us how the beginning of Chinese New Year started with the fight against a mythical beast called the Nien…

Nien would come on the first day of New Year to devour livestock, crops, and even villagers, especially children. To protect themselves, the villagers would put food in front of their doors at the beginning of every year. It was believed that after the Nien ate the food they prepared, it wouldn’t attack any more people. One time, people saw that the Nien was scared away by a little child wearing red. The villagers then understood that the Nien was afraid of the colour red. Hence, every time when the New Year was about to come, the villagers would hang red lanterns and red spring scrolls on windows and doors. People also used firecrackers to frighten away the Nien. From then on, Nien never came to the village again.

So remember to grab your free costumes this Thursday, and wear red… have a Happy New Year!

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Love is in the air. If that’s true, it means you could accidentally breathe it in, and just like an airborne toxin, it could infect you; turning you from a normal human, into a day dreaming, love-sick puppy-dog-eyed lump, quite useless to anyone, and unable to function without sighing all the time and drawing hearts on things.

This coming Sunday is Valentine’s Day, the one day of the year when the air is most likely to contain the love bug, and we hope it is one that you all get to catch!

Once you do catch it, you might need some accessories to love up your life, and so we’ve re-released the Valentine’s Level kit to you, the people we love most. It’s a creator’s kit containing hearts, flowers, kittens, chocolates, and other gifts to make your levels all pink and romantic, and you can pick it up on the LittleBigStore this coming Thursday, for one week only!

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There’s so much lurve on LittleBigPlanet, there’s always enough for everyone. To show how much we lurve you, you can download a free giant heart costume for LittleBigPlanet PSP™ from the PlayStation®Store this week.

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On February 9th, LittleBigPlanet PSP will get a big update. And when we say big, we mean BIG.

Community Features

• It is now possible to scroll through the downloaded levels list immediately after completing the playthrough of a downloaded level. A change well worth making. So we did!
• Search types have been improved, and more levels can be seen on each page on the community moon.
• Pressing the triangle button at the Community Moon menu will refresh the community data for all of your downloaded levels. If you want to upload the full set of all your high scores and download everybody else’s then this is the place to do it.

Usability

• A copy and paste function has been added to the editor, which can be accessed after selecting an object and opening the tweak option. Which is nice.
• Shapes can be scaled and rotated before placing them.
• MyObjects and object-based gadgets can be rotated before placing them.
• Items held together by gadgets can be scaled.
• Gadgets such as pistons, rods, etc. can have their positions edited after being placed
• The drag selection mechanism has been improved so that it will only select objects if they are entirely surrounded.
• Gluing supports user directed input. Side to side gluing is now allowed in preference over gluing backwards, which was the default.
• Sound objects are now labelled in the tweak menu for reference, once they’ve been placed in a level.
• The option to disable the undo/redo feature has been added to the menu – very useful if you want to avoid pause times on large levels, and handle everything through manual saves instead.

Editor Functionality

• When switching to and from create mode, materials and gadgets will not drift when repeatedly selected.
• Dynamic objects joined to static objects by dissolve material will separate and move once the dissolve material has been destroyed.
• Detaching glued objects correctly remembers the original static or dynamic nature of the individual glued objects.
• A material’s rotation will not drift between saves.
• Stickers applied to an emitted object stay attached to the object if the emitter itself is moved.
• Creatures only jump if Sackboy is nearby.
• Sensor switches and buttons save their initial states properly.
• Deleting a switch will not delete the object it was glued to.
• When a material is changed to peach floaty it will become buoyant.
• Pistons connected to an inverted switch trigger correctly on level load.
• Magic mouths with no text have the speech bubble disabled in play mode.
• Wobble bolts’ angle and flipper properties save correctly in Create Mode.
• Scoreboards only check above the base for Sackboy’s presence, previously it was possible to trigger them from below.

My Objects

• You can capture MyObjects within MyObjects. Oh yes.
• Emitters, scoreboards, prize bubbles can be captured as part of MyObjects.
• You can attach gadgets to Collected Objects and MyObjects.
• The bolt stability in MyObjects has been improved.
• You can change material classes, including the lethality of MyObjects.
• We have improved the capture capacity for MyObjects to allow for larger, more complex items to be captured.

Corner Editing

• This update features improved corner editing of glued objects. Previously, editing could be blocked if corners were on the glued edge of an object.
• Corner editing an object with gadgets attached doesn’t cause them to detach.
• Corner editing checks all planes (not just the foremost one) for collisions.
• Stickers do not disappear when corner editing.
• The game autosaves after a corner editing session.
• It was possible to make an object invisible by using the corner edit tool, this has been blocked.

Play Mode

• Sackboy doesn’t get stuck on edges when he should fall to the floor.
• The ‘return to main menu’ and ‘continue’ options work whilst the scoreboard is active.

Stability

• Last, but not least: Numerous stability issues have also been addressed.

Phew! What an incredible amount of content!
Don’t forget you can keep an eye on future updates to LittleBigPlanet PSP over in the PSP Game Updates section of the site.

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Continuing on from last week comes the second in a series of add-on packs bringing stickers, objects, costumes, backgrounds, and music from The PS3 to the PSP.

You’ll also be able to dress as the King of the Jungle, with the free Lion costume release!

Talking of free costumes, You’ll also be able to get your Sack-mitts on a free costume from last week’s Gardens Theme Pack. Happy Gadding!

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Do you Love LittleBigPlanet PSP, but wish you could have more stickers, costumes, and other creative toys from the PS3 game? Well you’re in luck.

The Gardens Theme Pack for PSP contains costumes, materials, stickers, music and the classic Gardens Background, all wrapped up in a downloadable package. Check out the new PSP Downloadable Content catalogue for the full contents and pricing.

Look out next week for a special gift from us to you, as we’ll also be releasing one of the Gardens costumes for free, meaning you can dress Sackboy up in stylish Elizabethan threads without even opening up your wallet, bargain.

Head on over to the PSP Downloadable Content catalogue to find out more.

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This Thursday, our own groundhog will be emerging from his burrow, and onto the PlayStation®Store, in the form of a free costume for Sackboy. Will he see his own shadow, or herald an early spring? We hope it’s the latter.

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As a bonus, it will be up to YOU to decide which of these fantastic gizmos is the best. After watching the video, simply head on over to the EU PlayStation forums, sign in, and cast your vote in the poll at the bottom of the page. Easy.

Keep your eye out for news on the next challenge, which I’ve been told will be ‘very special’. Intriguing!

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The Sackies – Celebrating the highest level of achievement amongst Players, Creators and Sharers on LittleBigPlanet.

Over the last few weeks, we have been asking players to vote for the winner of the final Sackie award of 2009 – Best Level of the Year, narrowing down over 1.5 million levels to one that deserves this prize.

The voting closed yesterday, and now after receiving thousands and thousands of votes, we can reveal the winner to you.

Level of the Year goes to…

Little Dead Space by DarknessBear

[big applause]

Ladies and Gentlemen, we thank you all for voting, and helping to conclude this year’s Sackie awards. The Sackies will return, bigger and better, at the end of 2010, to celebrate the best of what the year ahead will bring us – a truly exciting prospect.

Everyone who has won a Sackie or was nominated for one will shortly receive a crown from us, congratulations to you all, and good night!

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A few weeks ago, we teamed up with the MacArthur Foundation, HASTAC, and The Entertainment Software Association with support from our nation’s capital, to host a unique competition to help the youth of America learn more about science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

Now we’re back with more details and looking for members of the LittleBigPlanet community to step up and be a “Game Changer.” If you’re interested, read on and you can earn up to $50,000 and help teach LittleBigPlanet gamers a thing or two about STEM while they play your level(s).

You can head on over to the updated Game Changers Competition details page to get the full download, but in a nutshell:

• The MacArthur foundation will be accepting submissions for levels / proposals combining an engaging gaming experience with principals of STEM learning.
• There are 10 different categories, where winning submissions can earn up to $50,000 in production / development grants.
• Judging will be based on the different categories combined with the potential of level design, with consideration to quality, integration of learning content, playability, fun, aesthetics and more.

The competition registration site will open for submissions on January 15, so make sure to start the thinking about your level designs and ways to integrate the fun of LittleBigPlanet with science, technology, engineering, and math.

For more reference info on HASTAC, The MacArthur Foundation and the Digital Media and Learning Competition, check out the links below:

• HASTAC Press Release: $2 Million Competition Opens for Ideas to Transform Learning
• Visit the Digital Media and Learning Competition Blog and the MacArthur Foundation Spotlight Blog
• Read press releases from the MacArthur Foundation and the White House
• Follow dmlComp on Twitter and join the Digital Media and Learning Competition News listserv
• Track the Digital Media and Learning Competition coverage on delicious at delicious.com/dmlComp2010

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