PS3's world is your playground - again

It might be thanks to a technicality, but it's still true: "LittleBigPlanet 2" is the first game in history to launch with 3.5 million levels ready to play out of the gate.

And besides, it's no small technicality. The first "LittleBigPlanet" broke considerable ground by making it easy for players to create full-featured 2-D platforming levels using nothing but a Playstation controller. Players responded by designing lavishly personalized worlds and using the game's immense flexibility and boundless physics engine to mimic genres the game was never even designed to emulate.

Those levels all carry over to "LBP2," which delivers on developer Media Molecule's promise to nurture the "LittleBigPlanet" universe as a self-standing platform. The lessons learned and implemented during the first game's lifespan -- interface streamlining, community feedback, tools for finding the best of those millions of levels -- carry over, as well.

As in the original, "LBP2's" core content includes a traditional 2-D sidescrolling adventure that, in addition to continuing the story of series star Sackboy, provides a comprehensive overview of the game's tone, its physics engine and what's possible on the creation side of things.

If you didn't like the way Sackboy controlled in the original game, the return of these controls -- floaty jumping, excessive slipperiness when standing on unstable ground -- is likely to be the worst news about the sequel, which probably had no choice but to leave the physics alone in order to maintain full backward compatibility.

But flags of progress fly just about everywhere else. In addition to running, jumping and grabbing, Sackboy now can lift, throw, fire projectiles, swing around with a grappling hook and commandeer a more diverse array of vehicles (some living). A story twist also introduces us to the Sackbots, which creators can configure to give their levels programmable artificial intelligence.

But the unarguable (and literal) game-changer is "LBP2's" now-ingrained ability to create gaming experiences -- twin-stick shooters, puzzle games, a makeshift game of basketball -- that have nothing to do with 2-D platforming.

To the contrary, the introduction of the Controllinator -- which allows creators to map objects and functions to controller buttons in whatever configuration they please -- takes the original "LBP's" high ceiling and kicks it over the moon. Being able to map anything to anything else means creators can design foundations for just about any type of game genre, and the process of doing so is remarkably simple.

"LBP2" provides would-be creators with roughly an hour's worth of surprisingly entertaining tutorials. While it's impossible to demonstrate on paper how versatile and user-friendly these tools are, a little hands-on time in conjunction with the tutorials does wonders.

Testers were able to design everything from racing games to first-person shooters during "LBP2's" brief beta period. It will be exciting to see what emerges with the full toolset in hand and no time limit in place. The game's persistent co-op (four players, locally or online) now applies to the creation tool as well, so players can collaborate on a masterpiece if they can manage to work through their creative differences.