ModNation Racers Hands-On

ModNation Racers impressed us when we got a first look at the cutesy PlayStation 3 racer back at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo. Taking a leaf out of another first-party PS3 title, last year's Little Big Planet, ModNation offers a wealth of user-generated creations, from drivers to the cars themselves. It even offers the ability to create whole racetracks from scratch. We got some hands-on time with the game at GamesCom 2009 in Cologne, Germany.

Before we took to the racetrack, we got a quick demo of the creation tools, which look both deep and simple to use. You can tweak a huge number of character features, including clothing, facial features, skin, hairstyles, and more. We also saw creations that resembled an emo, hipster, pirate, and even a yeti. You can add crazy effects to your skin, such as chain-link mesh, exposed flesh, and abstract patterns, and you can scale, rotate, flip, and skew most body parts. So depending on where you choose to place your ears, you might look like an elf, orc, or wingnut. In addition to body options, we saw 41 different helmet types, 21 face masks, and 46 shirts, as well as shorts, pants, gloves, glasses, and tattoos resulting in "virtually unlimited" permutation possibilities, according to the developer United Front Games. We were told you'll be able to save "probably hundreds" of mods on your hard drive, due to the small file sizes, as well as upload them to the PlayStation Network to share with others and allow them to edit and create new ones from your designs.

When it comes to kart creation, you first create a base go-kart from such designs as a sports car, tuner, classic hotrod, police car, off-road truck, garbage truck, or a good 'ol wooden go-kart. There's a wide range of parts you can customize, including paintwork, seats, suspension, engines, and much more. Creating a track is almost as simple as drawing a picture. You start off by choosing your climate, which in our case was an arid desert. Using the triggers as modifiers, you can easily raise the terrain or lower it to create water hazards. You can also change the area you're editing to affect the size of the changes you're making. There are plenty of different track surfaces, including asphalt, cracked earth, sand, grass, and dirt, and each of these affects your car. Once you've selected your surface, you simply hold down a button and drag it around the track with an analog stick to make the map, and you can mix and match surfaces to your preference. One important caveat, however, is that you have a limited amount of asphalt--which is represented by a gauge at the bottom of the screen. The editor intelligently guesses how your circuit will complete itself, based on your current design. You can tap a button to auto-complete it when you're ready or join it together manually.

Once we created a basic track around a few obstacles that resembled a smiley face, we dropped down a kart onto the track to give it a test drive. The handling and racing style felt similar to other karting games, and while it wasn't entirely realistic, it nonetheless felt fun. While it wasn't a proper race, the track was populated with some other racers before we drove around. All of the AI opponents in the game were auto-generated from random parts with literally thousands of possibilities. ModNation is racing onto the PS3 in 2010, and we look forward to delving into the promising creation tools more in the future. Until then, check out all of our coverage from GamesCom 2009 at gamescom.gamespot.com.