LittleBigPlanet

The PS3 is still waiting for its 'killer app', a game that is good enough to buy the console for. Many are claiming that it may arrive in the unlikely form of a 2D platformer that looks like a hybrid of Pikmin and Button Moon.

The brainchild of Mark Healey and Alex Evans, co-creators of Media Molecule's critically acclaimed Rag Doll Kung Fu, Little Big Planet's genius is that it is both collaborative and customisable.

As Edge reports: [edited]

"It doesn’t have a separate 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.)"

The Edge article is a long one, but a fascinating read. It left me wondering why LittleBigPlanet hadn't been developed for the Wii, until I caught a snippet in the latest edition of Games magazine, in which Alex Healy reveals...

"I always thought Sony had the best parties... I remember many times standing outside them without a ticket, watching all these people - producers, most of the time - so I thought, one day I'm going to a Sony party."

So, now I know.

Oh, and to watch the promo video click here, as the ancient proverb goes, '4 minutes of YouTube is worth a thousand words'.
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