In these heady times of shooting anything that moves what with Sony’s offering of first-person shooters (Resistance: Fall Of Man, F.E.A.R., The Orange Box, Call Of Duty 4… the list goes on) many have wondered if there’s room left in the games industry for innocent, harmless and, well, cute characters to make their return. Enter LittleBigPlanet, Media Molecule’s answer to the lack of innocence – and originality – in videogames as we know them today. We’ve been following the game very closely since it was announced, watching every new piece of footage, every new interview and the specialist shows the game has been on display at. We’re going to tell you what we’ve seen at the Consumer Electronics Show and the Tokyo Game Show.

The demo we saw started at the menu for LittleBigStory, which zooms in to the LittleBigPlanet itself (shown as a globe with sewn on patches of land and sea) where a series of clickable circles represent different levels. In this case, they were generically titled 1, 2, 3, CES, CES, and SeaSide, and we’ve been told these levels will come with the game, bar the CES ones anyhow. Exiting this menu and clicking My Levels takes you to a smaller planet in space with more clickable slots, as you might have guessed, here is where you select one to create your own level. From this point, you’re dropped into a blank level with walls, floor and a basic colour backdrop. Before you get started on your virtual canvas though, you can customise Sackboy, LittleBigPlanet’s main character. It was here we learned that the characters of the game have their own emotions that can be controlled by you; moving and shaking the controller moves Sackboy’s head, and tapping up and down on the D-pad makes him happier and sadder respectively, with displays of smiling, peace signs, to lowering his head and dropping his eyes to display how he is feeling. But anyway, as for customising your character, the options are near limitless. It begins with choosing material, what the character is made of (with all sorts of patterns such as leaves and polka dots), then the head which can be given no end of adjustments (moustache, eyes, shades, an Evil Knievel-style helmet, bunny ears, devil horns, pumpkin heads… you get the idea). Finally is the body which can have accessories added to it, ranging from different tops to gold dollar signs, just for the gangstas.

Once that’s done you can start building. To try and adequately describe how much variety is presented to the hands of the player would be a pointless task, so we won’t bother with that. The items you can place on the map range from simple shapes to more complicated ones, but with the tools at your disposal there’s literally a limitless amount of things you can create. Once some shapes have been placed, it’s up to you to decide what to make of them – for example purposes only, you could create steps leading up to a platform that grows in height. The observant of you will surely be wondering how you can create such a diverse playground out of the shapes available. Well, even though there are a lot of tailor made ones to cater for the majority of the things you’ll be building at the start of the game (without prior knowledge, that is), it’s when you use the cutting tool that you really understand how long this game will last. Let us explain: imagine you’ve placed a large cube of wood on the ground, and you want to make it L-shaped for whatever reason. Well, you can select the cutting tool and choose a square, then adjust it to the right size and place it on the top right-hand corner of the cube of wood. By doing this, the game’s engine removes that section of the cube. Now that’s clever!

It’s this, the physics engine, which makes LittleBigPlanet so realistic. Don’t choke at the thought, we know the characters are made from used potato sacks but watch one of the gameplay trailers and tell us you don’t think it seems realistic… we won’t open our inboxes because it just won’t happen! Clothes wave effortlessly in the wind, objects bounce and react as they really would, and heavier objects fall to the ground much more quickly than lighter ones. This is immediately evident in the game and probably one of the first things you’ll notice. Because we like putting things in context, we’ve seen a bridge made of rope and wooden blocks for steps, and as characters or objects are on them, the gravitational force causes it to sway from side to side according to where the pressure is… sweet!

Physics can be applied to everything you do in LittleBigPlanet as well. TGS footage has shown us characters grabbing on to a windmill and waiting for it to turn a few times at great speed, before jumping, which sent the characters flying high into the air and bouncing as they landed. Another thing displayed at TGS which has made us anticipate the game even more was a skateboard. Yes, we know, we’re easily pleased. But wait! One of the characters broke down a nearby wooden gate then grabbed the front of the deck and started moving forward, before hopping on for a ride. This sent the skateboard down a steep slope gaining momentum (and displaying clothes flapping in the wind as we mentioned) and flying up a ramp, which caused it to jump a gap to the other side. It fell over and landed on the characters, but never mind, anti-videogame types, they weren’t hurt.

LittleBigPlanet spurs far from the single-player side of it however. The four-player co-op mode is obviously going to keep gamers on their toes when they’re tired of playing it on their own (if that’s even possible) and while details are scarce at the moment, we know you can collect coloured orbs in hard-to-reach places which unlock extra items for you to use for building. That said, the place the game will come into its own online will be through user-created content. When you’ve built your own levels offline you can upload them and watch as others download them, and the cool thing is you can even set criteria for completing your levels, and in doing so, you can award those players prizes of items you’ve already created. The catch is they can’t give them away which is good because if you’ve created something worth giving away, you won’t want to never see it again.

Overall, LittleBigPlanet is the game we’ve always wanted to play. Media Molecule has impressed us no end with the physics engine and level of variation on offer, and that’s not a typical ending line for a preview… we actually mean it! We’re daunted, to be honest, but in a good way, because there’s still a considerable amount of development time remaining, and LittleBigPlanet is already huge at its current stage, which is quite fitting if you think about it. Come on Media Molecule, show us what you can do and create the system seller this is unquestionably destined to be!

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