New screens for Little Big Planet. A game which is based on user created content. Create your own world and your own puzzles. Then share them online with your friends and the whole world. This game also features multi-player where you can solve puzzles with your friends.

Let’s start with the little. In this game from Media Molecule, you can make your button-eyed, hemp-skinned, zip-fronted little avatar run, jump… and act. The D-pad selects facial expressions: grin, grimace and frown. The right stick waves its arms around together, but hold down L2 and R2 and the left and right sticks can move them independently. And, in a simple stroke of genius, tilting the Sixaxis controller moves its head. You can assume attitudes, look at things in the game world, dance; if you wear a frown and tilt your head forwards, you’ll move in a dejected shuffle.

It’s an inspired use of the Sixaxis that cleverly exploits its dual nature, turning it into an effortless combination of game controller and puppeteer’s rod. It makes such instinctive sense that within a minute of picking it up, you feel that this is the game the controller has been waiting for. And then when someone explains the whole concept to you, you realise that this cute, simple little game – being made in Guildford by Media Molecule, a tiny team of less than 20 souls – could be a huge, defining release for Sony. No less than the game the PS3 has been waiting for.

So let’s move on to the big things. In the most basic terms the game is a side-on multiplayer platformer with a knockabout physics engine and a distinctive visual style: a cross between LocoRoco, Four Swords Adventures, and the accidental hit that first caused Media Molecule to come into being: Rag Doll Kung Fu. But it’s also something far more significant than that, something that caused Sony’s Worldwide Studios to snap it up as a firstparty PS3 exclusive when Media Molecule presented the game a year ago. It’s a creative tool.

And it doesn’t simply have a level editor – it is one, and your character is the game’s star and designer rolled into one. A button press brings up a thought-bubble menu system, and a cursor that’s tethered to your character by a luminous colour-coded kite string. With this you can place objects in the world, decide their physical properties, move them, reshape them, create new ones from scratch, apply stickers, paint pictures, add sound, import photos, design costumes. You can work with a blank slate or from a template, and there’s a scale of creativity from arranging ready-made components to designing your own. Media Molecule is calling this system Poppet, for no particular reason. (Creative director Mark Healey, Media Molecule’s lunatic lynchpin, says he’s been trying to reverse-engineer an acronym for it, but with limited success.)

“A map editor in a game isn’t a new thing at all, but traditionally they are either really complicated and techy, or very limited in what you can actually do with them,” says Healey. “We wanted to give people the ability to sit back in a sofa, use a joypad, and just make wacky stuff, and most importantly, be able to do it co-operatively – either with other friends on the same sofa, or online. Co-operative creativity, or jamming, was one of our mantras.”

Sayyed via edge-online.co.uk »