‘Fable’s popularity over the years has increased massively and the games have never dipped in quality. The third instalment in the franchise set in the mythical world of Albion, where snowy mountains sit side by side with lush green fields and treacherous swamps, doesn’t disappoint the diehard player. If anything, this is the best title in the series yet.

You play as either the prince or the princess of Albion, on a quest to gain allies for the nearing revolution to take back the crown from your evil brother Logan and herald a new golden age for the citizens of the world. Although this is the major storyline, you could spend your hours just traipsing around Albion looking for treasure with your trusty dog, killing enemies, amassing a real-estate empire or settling down to have a family. Your actions in the game determine what kind of ruler you will be. If you perform good deeds, your appearance will be pure and people will respect you. If you decide that killing citizens and committing other heinous crimes is more fun, then your appearance will be corrupted and people will fear your presence.

What’s more challenging about the non-linear gameplay in ‘Fable III’ is that you have to unlock special chests in order to be able to befriend or settle down with the people of Albion. Unlike its predecessor, you can’t advance in job levels easily and weapons and skills are harder to advance. This makes ‘Fable III’ stand out in its difficulty level. Other adventures would allow you to simply gain experience points, accumulate gold and advance at a much faster rate than enemies but in this game you are forced to think much more tactically, using a range of abilities to vanquish your foes. Combat is still very much a hack’n’slash affair, but the lack of a visible HP bar means it’s more difficult to judge how much damage you’re taking on board, sometimes meaning that you have to wait until the edges of the screen glow red until you can heal yourself.

Perhaps the true majesty of all the ‘Fable’ games lies in the landscape and people of Albion itself. While chopping the head off yet another hollow man can be fun, just taking time out from adventuring to see how detailed and realistic the world is can also be rewarding. In ‘Fable II’, the locations were beautifully rendered but ‘Fable III’ takes this a step further, making the layouts of towns and villages less contrived, and adding to the detail and look of the people. Walking around Brightwall Village for the first time is like stepping into a time machine: the sheer level of realism and detail put into the location is quite breathtaking, like actually being in an industrial town. This is added to by the talents of star names, such as Simon Pegg and Sir Ben Kingsley, who lend their vocal talents to bring the people of Albion to life.

The game is not hampered by a fiddly set of controls. All you really need to truly master the game is a few buttons to move around and participate in combat. The menu screen has also been taken a step further. Instead of the long and unmanageable lists that ruined the inventory system of ‘Fable II’ your items, weapons, status and achievements are stored in The Sanctuary, a place looked after by your butler and friend Jasper. It’s easy to move around, allows you to travel to destinations with ease and helps store all your gold, gifts and trophies in an ordered and easy-to-use manner that doesn’t feel separated from gameplay like contrived menu screens of most adventure games.

It’s hard to see where Lionhead could take the ‘Fable’ series next. No doubt they have a cunning ace up their sleeve to make Albion an even better place to go exploring but for now ‘Fable III’ is about as close as anyone will get to playing a fully-immersive, expansive and very challenging adventure. That’s no mean feat, and speaking as an experienced gamer this title will stand the test of time. Now it’s back to being a pie-maker.

Fable 3 is out now exclusively on Xbox 360 via Microsoft Games & Lionhead Studios. You can check out the trailer below.

Then things started to get interesting. Alex Garland, most famous for writing ‘The Beach’, joined the project as co-writer and Andy Serkis used his extensive motion-capture experience to bring life to the main character Monkey. He also voiced the grumpy brute. Nitin Sawhney was then brought in to compose the game’s subtle and somewhat eerie music. A great deal of hype was generated around the game as is went through the production process and for once that anticipation has lived up to expectations.

In the game, loosely based around the ancient Chinese scriptures ‘Journey To The West’, you control Monkey, a loner who gets by in a post-apocalyptic world by using a combination of technology and brute strength. At the beginning of the game he’s trapped in a cell on a slave ship run by “mechs”, the powerful robots responsible for overthrowing humanity. He freed by pure chance when fellow captive Trip manages to escape from her cell and overload the ship’s systems. After escaping, Trip places a slaving device on Monkey.

This is where the game really gets compelling. Thanks to the slaving device, Monkey has a duty to keep Trip safe: if she dies, he dies. So, like other tag-team games like ‘Ico’, you control the force of the operation while trying to keep the brains alive in a brutal world. You can tell Trip when to move, create a distraction or to help you buy upgrades but she is for the most part uncontrollable. Stray too far and she will activate the headband, causing you to lose health and be disoriented.

The environments are simply stunning to walk around. Every plant, creature, abandoned car and ruined landmark are rendered in minute detail, giving the most vivid sense yet that you are actually part of a world that is simply beautiful and awe-inspiring on the one hand but deadly on the other. The motion capture effect used with Monkey in particular gives the most realistic human effect in a video game that I’ve ever seen. For all that CGI cut-scenes can create a basic look of a human, such as in the Final Fantasy series, ‘Enslaved’ takes it a step further. You can actually see each muscle and section of skin moving when he frowns (which he does a lot).

Overall gameplay is actually quite basic. The controls are simple with only a few buttons needed to control Monkey’s actions. This means it’s easy to get used to how it works but because the overall difficulty level of the game is quite high, even on normal mode, the game forces you to think before acting, a trait not often associated with your average adventure game.

My only slight criticism of ‘Enslaved’ is that sometimes the active camera will swing in such a way that Monkey will occasionally head off in the wrong direction when moving, although instances like this are quite isolated and it hasn’t once detracted from my overall enjoyment of the game and the story. People who are less confident with the workings of platfomers might find this slight glitch disorientating though.

What Namco Bandai and Ninja Theory have achieved with ‘Enslaved’ is to set the bar just that little bit higher for all platform-adventure games. In terms of graphics it can’t be beaten and the overall gameplay experience is completely compelling, keeping you gripped from start to finish. Who needs first person shooters?

Enslaved is out now on Ps3 & Xbox 360 via Namco/Bandai games. You can find out more info here or check out the trailer below.

I immensely enjoyed the first Crackdown and even though the only reason I bought it was to play the Halo beta, I thoroughly enjoyed the game and was heavily looking forward to the sequel. Crackdown 2 features all new 4 player co-op, some new weapons and gizmos, a few new vehicles, a few new mission types, as well as a mammoth 16-player arena combat mode. Sadly that’s all that’s new; Crackdown 2 is set in exactly the same city, the graphics don’t seem to have evolved and it is basically the same game. But is it still fun to play? Hell yeah.

In the world of Crackdown 2 hordes of zombies/mutants have taken over the city and are destroying everything in their path and anything they miss is being destroyed by the looting terrorists “The Cell”. It’s your character’s job as a general badass and member of superhero collective “The Agency” to put a stop to it all. You start the game with above average abilities, a decent car and a fair selection of weapons, progress through the game and by the end you’ll be throwing cars, leaping from roof to roof, flying and dropping piles of homing missiles on your enemies. How do you do this? By collecting “Orbs”. Orbs are the games rewards and development system, and essentially the whole point of the game – the more orbs you have the more insane your character becomes. Don’t get me wrong though, Crackdown 2 isnt a game of just collecting, most orbs are in high to reach places, and they improve your agilty, this is an open world-action based-platforming game that requires more focus on your abilty to climb and fly and fight than it does on being able to seek out hidden treasures.

If you enjoyed the first Crackdown then you will enjoy the sequel, but you may find it a bit samey and too similar to the first. If you’re new to the franchise then Crackdown 2 does its best to fill the holes that the first one had and provide a more complete experience.

You can find out more about Crackdown 2 here or check out the trailer below.

So first up was Microsoft. Their briefing was the usual Microsoft “hand in the cheque book” extravaganza which we’ve come to expect from the newest member of the gaming industry. It focused mainly on their new motion control technology Kinect (previously called Natal).

Kinect is very different from the Nintendo Wii’s motion control which relies on an accelerometer and optical sensor to detect movement of the controller. Microsoft’s Kinect uses a two camera system developed by an Israel based tech firm called Prime Sense. One camera takes a full colour shot of the room and another measures the depth of objects in view and the console uses the combination of the two to map the human skeleton. Wow, geeky…so lets get to the important bit…the games.

They unveiled a list of no less than 15 confirmed games than would be compatible with the hardware, its a mixed bag that ranges from boring nonsense meant to show off the hardware that might entertain your mum for 30 minutes and genuinely interesting and challenging looking games.

Lets start with the bad. Kinectimals is a pet sim, except instead of those boring old cats and dogs everyone has you get to pick from Lions, tigers and 50 other animals to adopt. It looks very very basic and only serves so show off the cameras interactive features on a simple level to a younger audience. Its this kind of simple shovelware that plagues the Wii’s game catalogue and the kind of thing I hope Microsoft strives to avoid later in their expansion or only make available over Xbox Live for a much lower price tag.

Similarly Kinect Sports looks like a simple set of mini games created to push the idea of motion control into new hands. Its also hard to look past that its a blatant copy of the Wii Sports disc shipped with the console. It has six games – Soccer, Volleyball, Track & Field, Bowling, Table Tennis and Boxing – all with Full Body Input. The major redeeming feature that the Xbox version has over the Wii version; Gamerscore, your efforts to defeat the computer characters will be awarded with points and you can progress up online leader boards. Couple this with expected full online play and Kinect Sports will be everything Wii Sports should have been, a sports sim that emulates the purpose of sports…to win!

Speak of Wii-a-likes…Your Shape is the Xbox version of Wii Fit, and in a similar vain to Kinect Sports, it looks to be a massive improvement. More of a focus is placed on the console providing the actions you need and want than forcing you to adapt your work-out routine to the plastic step on the floor. Its been developed by Ubisoft and features a host of routines developed by “famous” fitness instructors. Its not my kind of thing, i’d prefer to just go for a jog, but I can see its value, and like before it has the ability to incorporate the rewards system into its structure very well.

Kinect Adventures is a outdoor adventures themed set of 12 mini games that focus on team play and team interaction – coupled with a heavy focus on traditional high score gameplay. There’s not a massive amount to tell you as individual details of the games havent been released, but the clip below shows off some of the action they played through and includes the very very impressive “walk on player & join” moment, which if it works as well as looks to do on screen, is a huge development.

Had enough of Kinect? Well there is a lot in development for it and the whole system looks pretty impressive, lets hope it works as well as it looks to do on screen and in Microsoft’s little skits. I for one cant wait to get my hands on it.

There was a slew of obvious announcements, like Halo Reach, we got to see the first single player in game footage, a detailed glimpse of the games setting and an out of blue moment, where lead character master chief launches into space and engages in seemingly playable space combat, not unlike the average dog fight in Star Wars.

Call Of Duty: Black Ops is just more Call Of Duty, not that that’s a bad thing really. It is however a completely new setting for the franchise as the story revolves around the Cold War and most of the action is set in Vietnam. Microsoft pulled a nice surprise at the end of the gameplay video by confirming that all expansion packs and downloadable content will be exclusive to Xbox 360 for all Call of Duty titles first, for the next 3 years.

New business announcements included a landmark deal with ESPN that will see over 3500 live and on demand events streamed free for gold members over Xbox Live. The ESPN sports centre anchors came on stage to show of the technology and the impressive built in Kinect voice command system, which allows you to trigger replays and pauses just by talking to the Xbox system. We spoke to Microsoft earlier and they confirmed that a similar service will be rolled out in the UK with Sky Sports.

“‘Xbox LIVE delivers exciting global and local sports content with industry-leading, regional partners, including Sky Sports (BSkyB) in the U.K., which offers industry-leading coverage of the Premier League and Champions League soccer.’” – Microsoft PR.

Couple this with a music subscription service via the current Zune interface, not dissimilar to Spotify that will allow users to stream a library of over 7 million tracks through there Xbox 360. No prices have been confirmed for the service, but id say look for a competitive price tag of around £7.99 a month. All in all, business is good for Microsoft right now.

Perhaps the biggest announcement to come out of the conference came right at the very end when they unveiled a brand new version of the Xbox 360 console. It includes a 250gb hard drive, a built in wireless adapter and full support for the Kinect system. It has also had a full re-design, which you can see in IGN’s full un-boxing video below. It ships to the UK June 16th and will retail for only £199!

Anyway, that’s about it. A fairly good, if not a bit pedestrian set of announcements. Its left us with plenty to look forward to and a host of exclusive games and items to look forward. You check out our full report on the Playstation conference and the Nintendo conference over the next couple of days.

Skate 3 continues the great groundwork laid down in the previous two titles, carefully expanding the unique control system and keeping focus for racking up points on stringing together tricks in lines. Where it differs most majorly from the previous two titles is in two ways; firstly by placing the action in the entirely fresh location of Port Carverton, but also by completely reinventing the multiplayer aspect. Yeah, the new city is great to skate around, finding new lines and secret areas, and it does have a much stronger vibe than the previous two cities. It teems with atmosphere, from the billboards that change to reflect your progression through career mode, to the screams and shouts the pedestrians let out as you weave through them towards an unachievable grind spot.

The real focus here though is on Skate 3 being a much more social game. While the multiplayer aspect of the previous titles wasn’t flawed, it also wasn’t particularly polished. Games could quickly become pretty lacklustre, failing to fully translate the elegance and vibe of the singleplayer experience. In Skate 3, the overhaul of multiplayer makes it a much more integral part of the package, seamlessly blending in to the singleplayer game, much as Grand Theft Auto IV’s multiplayer does. You get better tailored group challenges, the ability to link different players together and create your own in-game skate team, as well as a refined voting system for choosing game modes.

Putting all this together, Skate 3 is a well calculated step forwards for a series with a solid pedigree. The city of Port Carverton is well executed while the new modes in both online and offline multiplayer and the refined career mode all combine to make this the most solid entry in the franchise yet. Team up, throw down.

Skate 3 is out now on EA Games for both PS3 and Xbox 360. This review is based on review code of the Xbox 360 version of the game.

It’s pretty hard choosing a new phone, especially if you’re trying to do it with a Carphone Warehouse salesman breathing down your back. Not nice. However, one of the things that should totally weigh upon your mind is if it’s made by HTC. The Taiwanese giant is responsible for some incredible bits of kit, from the Windows Mobile classics like the HTC Touch and Touch Pro, through to groundbreaking Android devices like the T-Mobile G1 and the HTC Desire. That greatness is defined by two things though, solid and sleek hardware, and slick, useable software. Their Windows Mobile efforts excel because of that marriage of form with function, custom skins running over an arguably dated operating system. Likewise their best Android efforts such as the Hero or Desire rely on their custom user interface, known as HTC Sense.

It’s deployed on the HD2 with pretty great aplomb. At first glance, the visual synergy between this and say the Android-based but HTC Sense-skinned Hero or Desire make them hard to tell apart. From an intuitive homescreen covered in clock and weather widgets, through to a series of tabbed information screens controled by a slider along the bottom of the screen, the Sense experience is as slick as ever. In fact, the Sense customisation of the HD2′s underlying Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system expands to the messaging, contact management, and calendar applications. If anything though, the fluidity and usability of the Sense UI just serves to show how dated the underlying Windows Mobile 6.5 system is. As soon as you delve deeper into the function of the phone, from settings menus to the bundled Office Mobile software, you’re met with an interface that seems to exist in a world where modern standards like gestures based navigation and simple user-friendly usability never happened. It becomes clear that the underlying OS was designed in an era of stylus’, long before touchscreen smartphones were designed for or expected to be used by people other than infinitely busy businessmen.

It’s a shame that the failings of the HD2 revolve around the OS that it’s based upon, as HTC have done an incredible job with both the hardware and their parts of the software, both of which you can see showcased in the video above. Encased in an almost obscenely thin shell, the expansive 4.3 inch screen is simply divine for viewing videos, images, and frankly anything. It’s sharp, crisp, and works really well when viewed from a range of different angles. When I was using the phone, I had the brightness on about 70%, leaving the display still bright and completely usable even in direct sunlight. However, don’t whip out an incredibly thin and sleek phone at the bar of a country pub unless you want to be treated to a mind numbing 10 minute missive from the barmaid on how here mate has a Samsung “that dus fings on like, bebo and stuff”. Testament to how good the HD2 looks? Probably. It’s slimmer than the barmaid, brighter than the barmaid, and probably takes better pictures than the barmaid. Sure, 5mp with dual LED flash isn’t particularly ground-breaking, but the daytime shots come out looking pretty swell and crisp. Try using the flash in a bar or something though and you’ll be left with over-saturated shots and blinded friends. A shame really, seeing as the rest of the hardware is really up to scratch.

It’s worth mentioning just how solid the HD2 feels, from the brushed aluminium backplate to the sharp edges and angles that make-up the body of the phone, it’s a remarkably polished product. But god does it need to be, that 4.3 inch screen makes the phone quite a stretch for even the most liberal skinny jeans – you’ll certainly want to be taking it out of your pocket everytime you sit down. Lets not beat around the bush, this is one of the best presented and most capable Windows Mobile 6.5 handsets available, and if it’s that OS that you’re looking to get on board with, then picking up the HD2 is a no-brainer. Put it next to Android handsets such as the HTC EVO 4G or the Droid Incredible though, and it seems like a far less sensible choice. Although the hardware is entirely desirable, it’s the OS that lets it down. Despite the polish that HTC have put on it, Windows Mobile 6.5 is still too many steps behind Android, BlackberryOS or WebOS to justify getting on board with. Plus, with the release of Windows Mobile 7 just around the corner, you’d risk missing out on Microsoft’s next evolution of its mobile platform.

The HTC HD2 is available on various tariffs from all the main carriers. For the best deal, check out Carphone Warehouse.

So what is this thing? An oversized iPhone? A keyboard-less and stripped down Laptop? Well, its both really.  On one hand the tablet feels as restricted as the iPhone, a structured menu and app system that pigeon holes the users experience for them and doesn’t allow much modification; Like the iPhone and iPod Touch, the iPad is controlled by a multitouch display — a break from most previous tablet computers, which used a pressure-triggered stylus. On the other hand, the apps available are alot more fully formed that the iPhone equivalents and Apple have done well to port alot of their signature software such as iTunes, Safari and iWork into a very useable format on the iPad.

With a promised 140 hours of battery life (when using Audio) 10 hours (video) and more when on standy the battery does perform very very well, although when testing we did find that the reported 10 hours was a generous estimation and after watching two films on it, we had very little power left.

One of the main let downs is the lac of storage on the device, its available in 16, 32 & 64gb models, which in comparison to essentially every laptop on the market for the last 3 years is very poor, but is this a cunning trick by Apple? they want you to use the iPad to download music, but they don’t want you to store it here, you should probably by an iPod for that! They want you to use this thing to purchase films and browse your photo collection, but a Macbook or Desktop is the best place for you to store them. Hmmm cheeky.

After hours of fiddling and delving as deep into the features and inner working of this impressive piece of kit, we came to this simple conclusion. This isn’t a glorified phone, this isn’t a laptop, this is a laptop for people who don’t need a laptop – confused? Lets put it this way, my mum doesn’t need a laptop, she uses the web to check her emails, look at things on Amazon and occasionally she google’s holiday destinations. She is too afraid of technology to attempt to do it on her phone (even though she can) and the laptop she bought is wasted on these weekly visits online. The iPad is perfect for that level of technological engagement. Now i’m not saying the product is JUST for that type of consumer, it would suit a heavy internet user as well, but one that likes to do a bit of surfing whilst watching TV or find themselves on trains alot, the iPad boasts the convenience and simplicity factor.

Would I buy one though? No its too bloody expensive. For the 16gb version with just wi-fi (no 3g) your looking at just shy of £500.  For the model i’d actually want, your looking at close to £700. A figure i just can’t justify spending when I already have a decent laptop and smart phone; like most people.

You can pick up the iPad from now, starting at roughly £440. You can also view the very cheesy trailer below.

Nokia has the market share when it comes to mobile phones, they are the largest manufacturer of mobile devices in the world by a huge margin. They have the high end smartphones, but they also have the low-end functional phones like the Nokia 1100 which still stands as the best selling phone ever. For the most part they all run on Nokia’s secret weapon of a operating system Symbian S60; their triumph and their curse all in one. Nokia threw all their eggs into one basket and made S60 a market staple; for which they reaped the rewards. But the eggs slowly started turning mouldy; Google’s Android platform, Apples revolutionary iPhone OS and a revived Palm grew and grew to dominate much of the public’s comprehension. The N900 looks to shake things up with the introduction of Nokia’s new Linux based operating system; Maemo.

So lets dive right in. The N900 has a massive 32gb internal storage with space for another 16gb memory card, full web browsing and email integration, full media player functionality for both music and video, as well as Nokia’s always impressive tv-out (via headphone socket) facility. It features both full touch screen functionality (although resistive touch screen; which I’ll touch on later) as well as a slide-out keyboard. It has an impressive 5mp camera with Xenon flash, which doubles as a fairly competent video device, and as this is designed to be a strongly web-enabled device, it includes as expected full Wi-Fi access, impressively fast 3G and Bluetooth.

Now all those features rack up to be one impressive media/internet device, but sadly it’s the actual phone aspect of the N900 that lets it down. The phone is huge, it’s weighty and bloody thick. It’s constantly in landscape mode, which for me was always massively awkward when pulling it out of my pocket for the 2 weeks I’ve been using it. The keyboard only features the qwerty set up so that first number you dial always involves a shift key press first and if you opt for the touch screen dialer you will have to grab the stylus before you start because…

The touchscreen is resistive. If you dont know, there are two types of touchscreen; resistive (responds to how hard you press) and capacitive (responds to static in your fingers). The latter is used in the iPhone series, most of HTC’s devices, as well as some Windows Mobile phones. So why opt for the resistive option? It’s alot cheaper, it allows greater profit from each unit, and it’s easier to repair. The N900′s touchscreen is probably the best resistive screen this side of the Nintendo DS, it functions well, but only when using the stylus. When deep in the throws of reading what’s going on in the election on the BBC’s site, the stylus/resistive combination works perfectly and the overall experience is brilliant. Secondly, when flicking through photos or playing music the stylus led controls work perfectly, but it all comes back to the lack of functionality as a phone.

The look and feel of the phone is very Nokia and anyone thats used one over the years will be familiar with its setup and design. The outside of the phone houses the buttons, quite a few of which don’t feel like they’re in the most natural location. The top of the phone (when held in the landscape format, which you’ll be doing 99.9 per cent of the time) has, from left to right, the up/down volume key, the centrally placed square power button and the camera shutter.
And – we know you’re going to love this – there’s an infrared port on the N900 as well. Infrared! We haven’t seen that in years, and we’re not even sure if it was ever really needed on any phone. Ever.

Head round to the right-hand side and you’ll find the lock key, which is a little spring-loaded slider button. This is where we have the biggest issue – finding this button with your finger requires you to shuffle the phone in the hand a little bit.

Below that there’s the headphone socket, which is raised slightly to allow a flush connection with the jack. Given the amount of phones these days that have a curved socket, leaving the headphone connection exposed, this is a welcome change. However this did bring up one problem in that when holding the phone with the headphones plugged in, it was very uncomfortable, with the plug right in the way of where you would naturally want to hold it.

This review is pointing to one thing, great device, poor phone. For the latter half of my experience with the Nokia I removed my sim and placed it back in my HTC Hero/G2 Touch, utilising the N900 as i see it, a mini iPad. I found my self using it to browse news or check Facebook over breakfast, instead of booting my laptop. I sat with it on my lap on train journeys watching Youtube, playing games and viewing films on its large screen. I never felt like it was a phone and started to view it as a more open and customisable iPod touch or a mini iPad.

The N900 is available now from free on selected tariffs on a variety of carriers. You can also buy direct from Nokia here. For more information on the Nokia N900 check out its dedicated page at the Nokia site here.

No matter how much people blow their rocks to Halo and all it’s spin-off packages, I just can’t get on board with something so cold and lifeless. Some games do alien worlds well, just take a look at the Half Life series; even the first one painted a more believable and interesting picture than the most recent Halo game. It takes spark and flair, a silent appreciation for the underlying intelligence and whims of the player, to make a game truely shine. This, Halo doesn’t have. But it’s not just Halo; year upon year games trot out onto the market expecting to walk off the shelves with their hollow promises of innovative gameplay but instead fall by the wayside in a twisted mess of vaguely executed ideas. When you treat consumers like idiots, you eventually end up creating games that only idiots like. However, with a healthy dose of fresh ideas and a bucket full of charm Media Molecule managed to create one of the most endearing games of this, if not any, console generation.

Put simply LittleBigPlanet is a platform game; point A to point C while acrobatically avoiding all the horrors at point B. It sets itself apart in two ways though; firstly with it’s heavy reliance on physics to structure and indeed create the perils along your journey, and secondly in it’s creation tools which basically let you create whatever the fuck you want using all the textures, objects, and weird little stickers you find while playing through the main story. But it’s the limitless charm exhibited in the levels of the story mode that really draws you in; from the nodding giraffes in the Africa levels that form bridges for you to cross, to the gently hiccuping bridegroom who’s run away on the eve of his wedding. It’s all constructed so lovingly and so delicately that you can’t help but smile to yourself as Sackboy (he’s the protagonist you play, he’s made out of cloth) hops along to your commands. It’s escapist gaming in it’s most joyful form, clearly created by people who believe in the power of their own imaginations with a driving desire to see every wild dream come to felt-covered animated life. Sucks if you’ve got an Xbox though…

LittleBigPlanet is out now for PS3 & PSP from £17.99 via Amazon.co.uk.