What's teeny and plush and floppy, comes in twos, threes, and even fours, can heave isosceles boulders into mounds of jostling rocks, launch itself kite-like from toothy cogs, party on curling wood slats pegged to rocking trees, and whiz around a screen like a cartoon balloon venting steam? If you're lost, so am I, but that's what's in store with Sony's LittleBigPlanet, coming exclusively to a PS3 near you this September.
A little background on Mark Healey, the guy who launched the studio designing this thing. He's a former Lionhead Studios artist and the guru behind Rag Doll Kung Fu, a couple years old PC fighter featuring string puppets whose many appendages (well, the legally displayable ones anyway) can be manipulated almost limitlessly. According to Healey, it's "a kung fu fighter with string puppets, except you don't have to worry about getting the strings tangled up, and you don't have to have a kung fu fight." The game nabbed a couple indie award nominations and quietly made the rounds before getting picked up by Valve and Steam. Healey left Lionhead in late 2005 to form development studio Media Molecule in Guildford, UK, and the new team immediately began work on an action game conceptually similar to Rag Doll Kung Fu, but dramatically expanded for the PlayStation 3 and dubbed oh-so-endearingly LittleBigPlanet.
Imagine the primitive physics-based mechanics of a 2D fighter like Rag Doll Kung Fu transmogrified into something broader, wilder, endlessly cuter, and even more freakishly realistic. Well, real inasmuch as that word can apply to a bunch of puppet-doll-sack-things flopping around with gigantic soccer balls and oranges or bounding in front of papery crayola'd houses and launching themselves up into storybook castles, swinging on stars, tag-teaming snail shells, and racing down launch ramps on skateboards. Still lost? Check out this trailer from last year's GDC and you'll have a sense for how sui generis this one's shaping up to be.
The LittleBigPlanet GDC 2007 online co-op trailer. Dig that funky music.
Sony's demo of LittleBigPlanet Sony at GDC 2007, highlighting the ease with which a couple players can quickly and easily create incredibly cool, unorthodox levels together.
Update: New trailer released just today (serendipity) and embedded below. It somewhat abstrusely recapitulates Sony's talking points. Hey, if anything, it's worth watching for a few of the new build/play sequences.
Re-Play
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