There's a lot of good points in this thread, it was nice reading this through. I was slightly disappointed with the Pac-Man level. If you want to make a 1:1 recreation, then please do make a 1:1 recreation and settle for nothing less. Having the gameplay and visuals up to par is awesome, but please, please don't stop there. I can't for the life of me understand why you can't tunnel from one side of the level to the other. That would be the most impressive part of that whole level.
Then there's the AI. I did play through I think three levels, and I noticed that if you're close enough, the ghosts do seem to turn towards you at a higher percentage, but still it's nothing like the real Pac-Man ghost AI. I can't help but feel like the level is a hollow, beautiful shell of a level. This is not to say that I wouldn't be absolutely stunned by the visuals and the sound effects. But there's a lot lacking in the level.
However what I really wanted to address is some of the points in this discussion about what makes a good level, getting plays and recognition and recreating games. I don't have anything against recreations, but if you make a carbon copy of a game, I expect it to be perfect. However I much more prefer recreating classic games with your actual flavor. Like the Mini Golf level. That is the perfect example of originality and stellar gameplay design while staying fairly true to the basic idea of a mini golf game. It is basically a copy of all of the million mini golf games out there, but still somehow you feel like it's different as you can attack other players, for example. The Contra levels are another good example; I am far less critical of their design compared to this Pac-Man level because the Contra recreation seems to have its own LBP flavour instead of trying to be perfectly Contra. NinjaMicWZ put it well when he mentioned that his preferences might be the way they are partially because he's more of a creator than a player. I can say the same about myself. And the point about not naming the level the same as the original (Asteroids being used as an example here) is exactly how I feel. I don't want to get a lot of plays because I ride on a name of a franchise, even though my levels might be rather obvious recreations of some game series. I want to have my own series with my own name and get plays by my creating merits.
I am determined to create the best Mega Man remake in LBP2, but I will try to avoid copying anything 1:1. That means that I will never use music, characters, names or logos that are straight from any existing game, I will create everything by myself (or with help from the other project members). This doesn't mean that I won't mimic the gameplay elements of Mega Man or the structure of that game. I recreate it because I know it's massively fun to play through and I love the series. But I want to make it with my own twist, and develop my own weapons, enemies and levels.
Another point that I loved in this thread was about the complexity behind the levels. This is something that makes me heart creators. When you play a level by rtm223 for example, as a creator it's easy to notice that there's a lot of small, extremely complex things going on in the background of the level. I love it when I get surprised at how well a level reacts to me playing it however I want.
It's kind of a shame when the most difficult and ambitious work goes unnoticed by most players, but to me just being able to create complex, fully functional and bug free systems is something I can be proud of. I'm sure whenever I finish with my project (Sackbot X, *wink wink*), most people won't appreciate that it has a drop system that has specific percentages for each kind of drop a destroyed enemy can give. Or how intricate the camera and lightning system is, especially when paired with handling player deaths, enemy spawns and boss health / initiation systems. But just like CCubbage said about vectroids, I'm hoping I get more quality plays than a high quantity of them, and that in the end people will appreciate how finely tuned the whole system is. I don't like settling for 'almost as good as the original', and in turn I can be kind of harsh when judging other levels, especially if they are carbon copies of an arcade classic.
EDIT: Refined a couple of points.
