This morning I had a (long!) hands-on demo of Little Big Planet, an upcoming game for the Playstation 3. And, oh my, it is truly astonishing - the underdog, show-stealing, freshest, funkiest, most ridiculously innovative game of E3 and, maybe, the year. It quietly slaughters many of the overblown over-budgeted Hollywood-wannabe AAA titles here this week. And, most importantly, it manages to push the medium forward while being unassumingly fun. Whether it sells is anyone's guess.
This is like nothing you've ever seen or played - and, therefore, difficult to market/describe. The tagline - Explore, Create, Share - sums up the experience. Imagine a combination of a sandbox and side-scrolling platform game. You start out with little brown ragdoll, who you accessorize with goofy features and apparel like, say, a pirate hook and kimono.
Then the fun-with-physics begins. Using a simple, intuitive menu, you create your own objects/obstacles to put in your path: wheels, blocks, baskets, cubes and other things that you can stretch, grow, carve, hollow, pile, and jumble. I took a round slab of wood, expanded it to the size of a blimp, and hollowed out the middle. Once you make the stuff, you can play with it like a kid in a Tinker Toys paradise - climbing, rolling, sliding, all according to the on-the-fly physics you've spawned. By running at full speed inside my big wheel, I could roll the whole thing forward.
While Media Molecule includes its own levels for you to explore, the big sell here is the user-generated content (Sony wins more brownie points for incorporating user-generated mods to the upcoming game, Unreal Tournament III). So the idea is that you make your own levels, then - through Sony's online network - share them with others. It turns every player into a game creator. You can even import your own media to decorate your landscape (which potentially raises YouTube style hassles for Sony, with regard to policing copyright infringement and porn).
Credit Phil Harrison at Sony for throwing his weight behind this title (and, rumor has it, snatching it away before Nintendo could grab it).
