But that's not necessarily a bad thing. A developer doesn't always have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to hardcore shooters, and SOCOM is about as hardcore as they come.

The team did talk up a few of the changes coming to this latest iteration while they were showing SOCOM Confrontation off during last Friday's SCEA Pre-E3 Judges Day held by Sony in Hollywood.

In SOCOM Confrontation, you can now fully customize your character, tweaking the look of your character head to toe, with the type of special force unit a gamer chooses providing them access to different bits of customizable gear. Customization includes the ability to add armor to your character, though the more body armor you wear the slower they move.

Players can now sprint in game. Running, something that long ago became a mainstay of most shooters, has somehow never shown up in SOCOM titles before. Now that it's in the game, I'm not super impressed with the way it's being implemented, mostly because it doesn't allow you to change directions as you run. It's an odd choice, one that seems to indicates that Slant Six isn't really behind adding sprinting to the game.

The biggest change to actual SOCOM game play would have to be Slant Six Games' use of the Sixaxis motion controls in the game. While you're never forced to use them, you can use tilting and up-and-down motions to go prone, squat or lean. Leaning with the Sixaxis took a little getting used to, but seemed to work well. It was a little unsettling that players don't lock to cover, as with most games that use a cover system, but the end result felt far more organic, and, I suspect, true to life.

These few changes, Sixaxis controls, character customization and running, are so slight that they're not really noticeable. Instead the chief focus of the team, it seems, is to create a next-gen version of the popular PlayStation franchise that emphasizes graphics over any significant shift in gameplay.

And the graphics are a significant step up from the PS2 entries in the series. They don't however leave other PlayStation 3 titles in the dust; instead they seem to be about on par with some of the better titles I've seen hitting the console recently.

The thirty minutes I spent with SOCOM Confrontation was liquid fast, interrupted only occasionally by in-progress bugs. The map I played on, a next-gen version of classic "Crossroads," is as deep as I remember it, with the ability to go through most doors, access most rooftops, and create choke points by blowing select access points. The map is packed with nuance, lots of tiny little details that breath life into it.

But most of the changes I noticed on the map and in the game were cosmetic, changes to the look and, perhaps, the depth of the game, but nothing that really changes the way you play the game, for good or bad.

I think this, coupled with the fact that SOCOM Confrontation is online, multiplayer only, will feel more like a title meant to tide SOCOM fans over until the next full installment hits, rather then quench their thirst for some Playstation 3 SOCOM gaming.

The game is fun, and it's cute—no, strike that, it's fucking cute—and last week I got a chance to sit down with Alex Evans, technical director for the game, and go to town with LittleBigPlanet's "Create" function.

We've all seen the sped up videos of someone whipping out custom levels for the game in less time than it takes to start most games up, but I wanted to know just how easy or hard it was for someone with no experience.

After quickly walking me through the basics of design, Evans set me loose in the world.

My first step was creating a rag doll. The rag doll is one of the few things in LittleBigPlanet that have any sort of limitations on them. The sorts of things you can select to decorate and animate the sackcloth figure is limited to what Media Molecule provides, but they provide a lot.

I, for instance, created a blood-red doll with devil horns, a devil tail, a stitch for an eye, a patch over the other, a pointed goatee, a shock of long hair and a puppet on his left hand. (Later I discovered that you can use the game's control to have your rag doll open and close the mouth of the puppet on his hand.)

Evans stuck to a simpler looking doll, but then placed a piece of cardboard on his head, like a mask, and used a PS3 camera to take a picture of my head, which he proceeded to stamp onto the piece of cardboard, so the doll had my smiling face.

Once we created our dolls we hopped over to "My Moon" which is essentially your PS3's hard drive, the place where all of the custom maps are stored and where you go to start with a blank slate.

Evans dropped a background down for me, one featuring a forest scene, and then I got to work. First I selected the material I wanted to work with, I selected sponge so the rag dolls could grab them. Then I choose to make it a circle. Initially I just dropped a circle of red sponge on the floor of the map, but then I used my controller to drag out a shape of sponge that sort of looked like a large oak tree.

Evans then dropped down sections of rock wall. Since physics effect everything in the game, you can't just float objects in the sky, ala Mario, but have to start with them embedded in the ground.. After Evans placed rock walls next to and over my tree in the shape of a giant upside down L, I created a second section of rock connected to his, holding down a PS3 button and painting the rock out with a thumbstick.

Next, Evans used the same square shape he had been building with to cut out stairs in the rock. Removing chunks of things is as simple as pressing the X button.

Then Evans decided to show me how you can create moving objects, placing a spinning wheel of sponge on the rock. While he was talking I grabbed a hold of the spinning circle of sponge and then let go, sending my rag doll shooting straight up into the air. Evans was intrigued. "Let's create a vertical level," he said.

So we did, in about five minutes, copying the spinning sponge shape, we pasted more of them up the wall and then dropped down a starting line for a race at the base of my red tree and a finish line up top on a precipice of rock.

Next we through down some rock off to the right and turned it into ice. When touched, ice objects freeze your rag doll into a block of ice until you can break them free by vigorously shaking your controller. You can also set things on fire, touching these objects will turn your doll into a puff of ash; or electrify objects which also destroys your doll when touched.

While Evans was busy turning peripheral objects into ice, I decided to go ahead and set my pretty tree on fire. Now we had a level.

Saving the level we created Evans dropped out of the create mode and let us play it. The starting line includes a little countdown that starts once both dolls stand on it and a gate that pops open when it's time to start racing.

The level, it turns out, was painfully difficult, so difficult in fact that Evans was growing increasingly frustrated trying to get to the finish line. Nothing feels better than frustrating a game designer with your diabolic game design... nothing.

We ended up going way over the amount of time I really supposed to be on the game, as the two of us kept vying to make it up the rock construct without either falling on the flaming tree or getting shot into the ice blocks.

Finally I managed to reach the summit and the race was over.

Evans reminded me that while user-created and shared maps are a big part of the game, they're certainly not the only part. In fact, LittleBigPlanet is going to ship with it's own robust, story-driven campaign which can be played solo or with friends.

And the game continues to impress on the cute level too. I was able to catch a glimpse of the menu interface for the first time last week and it's just painfully adorable. You and your friend's rag dolls are hanging out in what appears to be a cardboard cut-out rocket ship. The ships three windows will eventually, I suspect, all show options, but I only saw out one window.

The window neatly framed a hanging moon, the My Moon of your personal content; a felt-decorated Earth, the Craft Earth where other users creations will be shown by location; and a chunk of material currently called the info fridge where you can track your friends and news.

Neatest part? There's a Playstation 3 controller sitting in the rocket ship with you and when you use your controller to move around between the menus your rag doll uses the almost-life size controller to do the same thing in real time. It's this loving attention to detail that lets me know this game is going to continue to impress through launch and beyond.

He has to. Resistance 2 online play will support up to 60 players on one map, and without some way of sorting through some of those problems the matches just wouldn't be any fun to play.

If you really don't care about the confusion of such a mighty match, if you revel in the disorder, you can still play the matches you want, but for the rest of us Price and his team has some pretty neat ideas.

As he announced in Europe, Resistance 2 will feature a multiplayer mode that breaks those 60 gamers into smaller squads. While the matches I saw and played through featured ten squads of six, Price said that other size squads will also be used in the game.

While the members of the squad don't have to stick together, they do spawn together and it pays to stick to your group. Once spawned, the game's AI looks at the larger battle taking place on the map and issues automatic orders to your and your squad, marking your new objective on the map with a star in a circle.

Objectives can include taking a control point, defending an area, even coming to the rescue of another squad under heavy fire or taking out one particular member of an opposing squad.

Resistance 2 automatically matches you up with an enemy squad, making sure to give the two opposing forces the same sorts of orders so they're always fighting one another. The AI also does it's best to make sure that when possible your objectives and the objectives of other squads in the larger army aren't near one another, so team mates will be more inclined to stick together and follow orders.

A player can decide to just run around the map attacking other enemy squads, but an in-game point system awards far more points for doing what you're told and for getting kills on that squad matched to you. And not only do those points let you get in-game buffs of sorts like a shield, but they're also used to help permanently rank up your character outside the game.

There are some other really neat tweaks to squad play as well. For instance, the enemy squad your team is taking on will be marked to make them more identifiable. (In the build I played they were tinted red, but Price says that something more subtle will be implemented by launch.) Those enemy players who are doing well will be marked with a large red star over their head. The longer they are on a kill spree, the more successful they are, more points someone will get for killing them. This bounty-like system can award up to four times the normal number of points for taking out these skilled players and will likely go a long way to help balance the game for new players and make it more challenging for skilled gamers.

I'm a long-time fan of first-person shooters, and like many of my ilk, can get a little touchy when someone starts messing with the formula, but playing through a couple of matches on one of Resistance 2's enormous maps populated with 60 gamers made me a believer.

The spawn locations, the use of orders, the tight-knit squad system, all made me feel as if I was playing a much smaller, more manageable match, more importantly it made me feel as if my effort meant something, instead of it being lost in a frenzied 60 person free-for-all.

While I loved the system, I think it's just as important that Price and his team aren't forcing people to use it. Not only can you choose to play traditional matches in the game, with 60 people on board, you can also just ignore what you're asking to do in the squad play and go-it alone. Player choice is an important factor in shooters, guiding players to make smart tactical decisions is a great thing, but not forcing them to do so is even better.

While the version of Resistance 2 was missing a bit of polish and quite a bit of features, I was still impressed with how far Resistance multiplayer has come since the first title hit. Visually, the game seems a bit grittier, and the play more fluid.

Price wasn't showing off the single player campaign at last week's event or the eight-player co-op, but what I did see of the title left me both impressed and eager to see more.