At a Sony San Diego press event yesterday, we were able to for the first time play LittleBigPlanet, the game that was the talk of the show at this year’s Game Developers Conference. And while the level we played was the same one shown at GDC, it at least confirmed one thing: it feels every bit as good as it looks.

While performing all of the many actions in the game perhaps wasn’t quite as simple as Phil Harrison made it out to be at GDC, there’s a natural elegance to the controls and they’re only as deep as you want them to be. For example, performing all of the standard actions is quite simple (though moving between multiple 2D planes — such as jumping from one block to a block technically behind it — did take a little getting used to), but it’s all the extra emoting that adds complexity.

You may remember seeing one character slapping another in the GDC video. This is actually accomplished by holding down the R2 button — giving you full movement of the character’s arms with the analog control sticks — and then performing the actual motion of slapping someone else with one of the analog sticks. Each button on the direction pad represents an emotion for your character (up = happy, down = angry, and so on), and interacting with others in different states of emotion will offer unique results. Two happy characters will high-five, for instance, whereas they wouldn’t if one were unhappy. But again, none of this is fundamental to the core gameplay — it’s just there for deeper, and funnier, character interaction. And it seems like the type of stuff that will become second nature with play.

SCREENS: Click the image above to check out all LittleBigPlanet screens.

We also got to try out tilting the Sixaxis to control your character’s head movement — it’s fun, but actually easy to forget about. However, we weren’t actually able to mess around with the level-building tools (Sony’s saving those for E3 in July).

One thing that seeing the demo up close allowed us to confirm was just how great the game looks. It’s probably been said to death before, but LittleBigPlanet is utterly stunning. Sure, having everything exist on a 2D plane affords Media Molecule the ability to add great detail to just about everything in the environment, but seeing the game up close, on a great HD monitor, was just fantastic.

According to a Sony producer, someone fairly experienced with the game’s level design tool could probably put together a level of the demo’s size and complexity in a few hours. Hearing that just makes waiting for LittleBigPlanet’s winter PSN release all the more difficult. Thankfully, Sony promises a demo for fall.

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