Previews// LittleBigPlanet Vita

Console-quality games in the palm of your hand. That was the promise of the PlayStation Vita when it launched earlier this year. And while we saw some of Sony’s biggest PS3 franchises hit the system - Uncharted, Resistance, WipEout - they mostly felt like cut-down, B-grade versions of their console counterparts. With LittleBigPlanet Vita, that could change.

This portable version has been developed by a whole heap of studios - primarily Double Eleven, Tarsier and XDev - to ensure that Media Molecule’s flagship IP hasn’t lost anything in the translation to Vita. And the extra effort shows - LittleBigPlanet Vita doesn’t feel like a poor man’s LittleBigPlanet 2.

The game runs smoothly, controls exactly as you’d expect from a Sackboy adventure and sports some surprisingly quick loading times. Community leaderboards load instantly, and the persistence of the network connectivity features are really quite impressive. Perhaps, for a console like the Vita, this should be expected, but most games I’ve played on the platform have had a less-than-seamless networking experience.

Carnivalia is where LittleBigPlanet Vita takes place - containing a story that doesn’t actually feel like a bunch of Sackboys randomly wandering around some multi-coloured cotton environments. No, there’s a big bad enemy wreaking havoc upon the land, and you’ve got to take him on. He’s called the Puppeteer, and was once a kind and gentle entertainer for the people of Carnivalia. But now he’s turned nasty and brought upon his troublesome Hollows (faceless puppets) to cause chaos and despair.

It’s a rather engaging premise, and suits the nature of LittleBigPlanet rather well - and yes, the dulcet tones of our national hero Stephen Fry are all present and correct here. As are the multitude of customisable Sackboy outfits, items and stickers to decorate the place (and yourself).

The opening world that was available in this preview code essentially runs you through the basics of LittleBigPlanet, as well as offering a primer on the Vita-specific control inputs that feature in the game. Besides the PS3-esque controls - X button to jump, L to control your arms, R to grab onto things and Square to open your Popit Menu - you can tilt the handheld to manipulate objects on screen, move Sackboy’s head using the gyro and interact with certain objects using the touch screen and rear touch pad.

I noticed a few small glitches when trying to move Sackboy’s head (sometimes his head would snap down when trying to move up) and I had some trouble in tapping an object’s hitbox to gain control of it on the touch screen, but for the most part these features seem to add more to the experience than they take away. Selecting options in your Popit Menu can either be done with traditional controls or with your fingers - you can drag and pinch stickers and objects to resize them before placing them in the world.

These same touch controls add a new dimension to level designing when in Create Mode. The rear touch pad can be used to zoom in and out of your platforming canvas and move the camera around, while the front touch screen draws surfaces and pastes objects onto the scene. It’s a lot more intuitive than using traditional controls (although, again, you have the option of using those too).

Where the Vita’s many input mechanics really flourish, though, is in the Community Mode. Giving players the ability to work around all of these features really brings some interesting new twists to the user-generated content stages we’re all used to in LittleBigPlanet 1 and 2. One such stage offered a simple but charming platforming challenge, tasking Sackboys to leap over spikes, grab onto objects while tilting them across chasms, and pressing buttons to activate springs. I can imagine that, after release, some super-complex levels can come out of this.

The Community Mode itself seems to not only play on the Vita’s strengths, but also its weaknesses. One can find a decent-looking user-generated stage and opt to download it straight to their device for later - handy if you only have a WiFi Vita or your 3G connection is a bit spotty. Downloading a level takes around 30 seconds to a minute, which isn’t too bad considering the scope of the stages.

There are clues that LittleBigPlanet Vita could include some magic from LittleBigPlanet 2 as well. I played a Community stage called ‘RTS Tech Demo v0.41’ from a MR-MALRO, which was essentially a work-in-progress build of a strategy simulation game.

The developers have clearly been having fun with it too - alongside the main Story mode, you can unlock The Arcade - a number of non-Sackboy mini-games that would work well as iPhone apps. One game, Tapling, was a bit of a cross between Limbo and Loco Roco in design, with the aim being to tap the screen to guide a blob to the end of the level.

With a little bit of polish on the implementation of touchscreen and rear touch pad hitboxes for Community stages, this could stand to be one of the most solid LittleBigPlanet releases yet.