By Nick Place
Sony stole the show at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco with its announcement of the PlayStation Home online service and the platformer title LittleBigPlanet.
The PlayStation Home service, demonstrated during Sony World Studios President Phil Harrison’s “Game 3.0” keynote address on March 7, is a completely 3D-based online community that appears to be Sony’s answer to Xbox Live and Nintendo’s Mii Channel. With Home, PS3 owners will create a 3D avatar, like a realistic version of Nintendo’s character-creation tools, which will inhabit a persistent online environment.
Harrison demonstrated how this environment will be a combination of each user’s customized “living space,” Sony-created common areas, and other sections of the world that third-party publishers will be able to create and maintain. The PS3’s multimedia capabilities will have a corresponding control in Home. For instance, to play MP3s stored on one’s PS3, a player would guide his or her character to the stereo in their living space.
Home also briefly showcased trophies that players would ostensibly be able to earn in different PS3 games, like a more illustrated version of the Xbox 360’s achievements, although this feature was not elaborated on and only seen in passing in Harrison’s demonstration. According to Harrison, Home will be available for PS3 through a firmware update this fall.
LittleBigPlanet is the title of a PlayStation 3 platformer being developed by independent studio Media Molecule, makers of Rag Doll Kung Fu, a game distributed over Valve’s Steam download service. Media Molecule’s new title is a co-operative side-scroller that places an emphasis on user customization and features a cartoonish, felt-puppet art style. Characters and levels can be cobbled together by players using different objects and texture sets that all adhere to the game’s highly reactive physics system.
In an on-stage demonstration on March 7th, Media Molecule showed off the game’s level builder and then played through a simple puzzle where four players worked together to use a soccer ball and an orange as stepping-stones to progress through the level. The game’s miniscule, customizable, puppet-like characters can push, pull, and grab on to the different objects in the game. According to Sony, LittleBigPlanet will be released in early 2008.
Neither Nintendo nor Microsoft had any headlining revelations for GDC to rival Sony’s unveiling of Home. Instead, the two other major console companies celebrated successes of the past year through the Game Developers Choice awards. Epic Games’ Xbox 360 shooter Gears of War won Game of the Year and the Technology and Visual Arts awards. Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess took home the Best Writing award, and Wii Sports won in Best Design. Finally, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto won the lifetime achievement award for his work on games from the original Donkey Kong to Twilight Princess and the Wii hardware.

Sony steals the show at game conference