LittleBigPlanet 2 Preview

It's over. Media Molecule's epic, 90 minute LittleBigPlanet 2 presentation has just come to an end, and to be quite frank, I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed. At heart it's still the same game – the same playful festival of user-created content and four-player-carnage – but it feels like the development team has taken the basic concept and then pumped it full of cream using a small arsenal of aerosol cans. Actually, that metaphor doesn't really work, because the cream would have to be multicoloured, and somehow really exciting, and not at all sickly. As I say, I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed.

While it was probably inevitable that we'd get a sequel to Sony's flagship platformer, you'd be forgiven for questioning whether LittleBigPlanet actually needs a stand-alone follow-up. Media Molecule's presentation last week kicked off with a numerical blizzard of stats relating to the first game's success: three million copies sold worldwide, 2.3 million levels shared online to date, with 53,000 new levels created during the week before last. MM co-founder Alex Evans reckons that last figure equates to one new level every 17 seconds, though when I checked the maths it actually seemed to be one every 11 seconds. Either way, the point is clear: LBP still has a very active community.

The first bit of news, then, is that all these existing creations will work perfectly in LittleBigPlanet 2. Old levels will also benefit from the sequel's improved graphics, with sharper models and some nice new lighting effects like dynamic shadows. If you end up sticking with the original then your work will still be available to everyone who's playing this year's game; though it probably goes without saying, the reverse won't be true. If you want to get your hands on the new toys, you'll have to open your wallet and make the jump.

So, what are the new toys? Well, the short answer is that there's an awful lot of them – but from a creative perspective, some of the most exciting ones lie behind the door marked "A.I.". Traditionally this is always the trickiest area of do-it-yourself game design, and despite its many triumphs LittleBigPlanet 1 was no exception to the rule. This time, however, things should hopefully be a tad easier to pick up. At the shallow end of the development pool, you now have access to a limitless supply of programmable automatons, known as Sackbots. Assign them a set of orders (patrol an area, follow the nearest Sackboy), then set them on fire or charge them with electricity, and BINGO! One instant enemy. I'm sure you'll be able to do an awful lot more with these programmable bots, defining their behaviour in great detail, but for those of us who struggle with the hard bits, they should also be a godsend.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, there's a new mechanic that should help the most ambitious designers to realise their trickiest technical designs. If you're even remotely interested in LittleBigPlanet, you've probably seen or heard about the guy who managed to build a fully working calculator, or the person who made a piano that plays Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Levels like these showed off the true potential of what could be done with LBP's tools, but in the past there was always a need to hide the massive array of levers and switches that made the magic work. Now each and every object in the game world has a hidden "circuitboard" – a scalable space where you can dump all the serious, make-it-all-work stuff.