LittleBigPlanet Basics

See that little door your Sackboy just popped out of? Throughout levels there are many doors like these that provide the opportunity to try any challenge just one more time—or five more times. Some checkpoints only allow you three goes, while others are more lenient. Your first priority upon surviving that impossible gamut of spikes, fire, smoke and/or electricity should be to saunter past a checkpoint.

A checkpoint lights up when you pass it, and the glowing ring reveals how many lives you have left. A chunk of it disappears each time you are destroyed, and it glows red when you have one more try. You'll also be treated to an obnoxious warning buzzer. Does before reaching the next checkpoint and you'll have to restart the level.

To "ace" a level, you must not use any lives. That's it: just survive the whole thing without having to resume from a checkpoint. For doing this you'll be rewarded with items like stickers, costumes and objects.

You'll get a message at the end of the level mentioning what you won, and you'll receive a gold "ace" which appears under the level icon on the world map.

Each level is full of Item Bubbles, which contain stickers, costume items and objects for level creation. There are a finite number of these for each level which you can view from the world map or form the pause menu. Many of these Item Bubbles are extremely well hidden in the levels.

To truly get everything out of life on LittleBigPlanet, you'll need to fine tune your sense to tracking these bubbles. Or use our Walkthrough—we'll show you how to get them all. What's your reward for getting all the Item Bubbles in a level? Why, more Item Bubbles naturally. You'll also win more just for completing the level, and for acing it (not losing any lives). You can keep track of the Item Bubbles you need on the world map (choose a level and press right on the D-PAD to access the Items info) or by pausing the game.

In multiplayer, there's no need to fight for Item Bubbles, whatever you get will count for everyone. Moreover, you can exit a level after collecting the stickers you need at any time and they'll stay with you. To get the 100% Item bonus items, you'll need to beat the level again, though.

Found in Item Bubbles, the level creation tutorial and rewarded at the end of levels, stickers are more than just decoration. In each level of LittleBigPlanet there Sticker Spots: blank cardboard cutouts just aching for a certain decal.

You'll have to learn to spot these as they hold many of the levels' secret Item Bubbles. Our Walkthrough outlines the locations of every Sticker Spot and the sticker needed to activate the spot. You see, when you pull up your Pop It menu, you'll see a section marked "Switch Triggers." There are several specific stickers that work as Switch Triggers on any given level's Sticker Spots. There are up to three Switch Trigger stickers per level, and they vary widely.

Sometimes, these Switch Trigger stickers are located in other levels (usually in the same world), or even the level creation tutorial. We'll let you know where they all are in our Walkthrough, and where to use them.

Score Bubbles are littered throughout each level. Getting consecutive score bubbles lands you score multipliers, up to 20x. Item Bubbles become large Score Bubbles after their retrieved and count for more points than small ones.

To maximize your score you'll need to not only get multipliers, but win races and avoid losing lives. Each life costs you score points. In multiplayer, the person with the highest score is rewarded with a trophy. You can see your score and multiplier in the upper left corner of the screen. To make score bubbles easier to spot, you may want to change your player color in the Pop It menu to something brighter than the default light blue, as it tends to blend into the background. You can do this in the same area you outfit your character, just press the D-PAD right a few times to see the player color options.

Aside from spikes, electricity, fire and that mysterious smoke, enemies sometimes appear as hazards. They have weak spots that you must touch to make them crumble. Usually they just have one, sometimes several.

Look out for the deadly parts of an enemy—they are comprised of the four deadly elements mentioned above. All other parts of an enemy can be touched safely. Some enemies may even be used to give you a boost to an out of reach Item Bubble—just hop on them Mario-style.