It is a small world after all, isn’t it?

Little Big Planet, which has been sited briefly at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, earlier this January, is out once again, this time in Japan for the 2007 Tokyo Game Show.

The very neat display had a very intimate look at the game by separating two very large LCD screens, 3 total players and a guide which was represented as a character in your game. I was able to acquire a translator who helped me follow instructions by the guide.

The look and feel of this game, even though it is a work in progress is really nice, even though you’re playing as little dolls. If you were a fan of Rag Doll Kung Fu, the creators Media Molecule are behind this, so you can imagine how you’ll be moving around.

So, me and my new friends’ mission is to walk around this very animated environment and help each other make it to the finish line. There are very obstacles such as swinging stars which can knock you to the ground, or big platforms which raise and drop quickly before you’re able to jump aboard to get you to the next stage. You prance around on wobbly puppet-like legs and just jump from object to object, climbing up big maze-like chambers.

Your characters then can swing from stars held by strings and leap from level to level to get higher in the maps. There is even a part where me and my friends grabbed a rope which connected us to jet packs, and we flew around the map to pick up objects, then left them on big platforms in hopes of breaking it, which unlocked a gate. It sounds like a mouthful as I explain this, and it is. The entire game was very fun, simply because of how your characters looked. They are patched together objects that look like a creation from The Nightmare Before Christmas, very Halloween and spooky at times.

One very cool motion is the dragging feature. You can hold down R1 (on PS3) and if you’re next to an object, or even one of your friends in the game, you begin to drag it. The purpose is these objects when pulled and stacked together allow you to climb on top of it to move to the next section of the map. Dragging your team mates, although have no official point in the game, certainly is fun.

The camera work in this game is very impressive. Since you have 4 players and you are not on a split screen (which cannot be done on a split), is very quick to adjust so your whole team can see the game. The very last stage of the game we all needed to jump on a skateboard and travel down a huge ramp to the finish line. As we were doing so, I jumped in the air and flew off of the board on the ramp and saw my friends crash and burn at the end of the level. The cool thing about that, is that I was not out of the picture. I was a mere spec, but there I was all the way left, as my now tiny little friends watched me from a huge distance. Surely enough I began running down the rest of the ramp, and as I made up ground the distance between us shrunk, and so did the focus on the camera.

Overall the game looked very fun, but I cannot imagine a ton of depth to it. However, I will keep an open mind, because I would honestly love to try this out on the Playstation 3, which had this game looking fantastic, considering it is not a graphically intensive game.

Lastly, the fact that 4 players can get involved in this game simultaneously and continuously be on the same page which every action that is taken, this is nearly a sure thing of a seller, as games played together are always a winner.