Around the halfway point of Jack Tretton’s massive speech last week, Sony played a reel of assorted upcoming Playstation Network games, though did little to actually explain a lot of them at any other time during the press conference. So on Thursday morning last week, two days after the press conference, we hit the Sony room at E3 2008 to get some hands (er, in this case, eyes only) on a number of quickly mentioned games coming to Sony’s platforms. We sat down with Ted Price, President of Insomniac Studios, for a long talk about Resistance 2, got a walkthrough of Little Big Planet with Alex Evans, Technical Director at Media Molecule, we even talked to Caley Roberts, Assistant Producer of Resistance: Retribution for the PSP (all of which will get the preview treatment shortly) — and through all of that, the game that stood out the most in Sony’s lavish digs was the cutesy and humble Fat Princess. Read on for our impressions.

Assistant Producer Matt Morton is quite the gentleman. With all the smoke and mirrors (unnecessarily) floating around Sony’s appointment room he stood, quietly smiling, right next to the bubble-lettered sign for genre mashup game Fat Princess. Considering what we saw of the game at Sony’s Press Conference, we greeted him with an obtuse but necessary question: “First of all, Fat Princess: clearly the best name of any game at the show. Second of all: what the hell is it?” His answer? “Well, it’s a lot of things.” And ain’t that the truth.

Mixing up class-based gameplay (fighters, feeders, builders, healers — all with adorable names/avatars) with capture the flag, and an aesthetic/control method resembling the Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, Fat Princess caught our attention in bigger ways than just it’s hilarious name. Here’s the basic concept: there are two teams with five different class types and they are rallying together to capture the other team’s princess. The problem is that the princess, well, she’s fat. And fat things are hard to move, in case you didn’t know. And there’s the rub.

Each team has a limited number of respawns in which to defend their castle/the other team’s princess, fight off the other side’s defenses, and steal the other princess. It gets much deeper actually, as each class type offers different abilities — abilities which can also be leveled up to some extent, though we weren’t given serious detail — that compliment the other classes abilities (i.e. the bishop heals the attacker, thus granting invincibility to the attacker, a la Team Fortress 2). As to ease complication, classes are chosen by putting on different hats you’ll find laying around your base, as opposed to using a menu or deciding before the match begins.

While Fat Princess comes across as highly ambitious to us at QP, Matt told us, “We’re not reinventing the wheel… we’re using proven game mechanics.” That helps to explain the genre mashup feel described above, as well as the as-yet-unmentioned videogame character references embedded within FP. One character was named “Cake Eater” (Snake Eater, get it!) and another dubbed “Solid Cake” (if you have  to ask…), with promises that there’s a lot more cultural references we haven’t seen yet.

Shipping with 10 different map types and 32-player matches (16v16), Fat Princess is shaping up (get it, shaping up?!) to be another in the long list this E3 of different and exciting PSN games. Though Matt couldn’t tell us for sure, they’re looking at pricing the game in the $10-$15 range and are slated for an early ‘09 release. He did want to stress though that the folks developing the game at Titan Studios (formerly Darkstar Industries) are very much listening to what people have to say about Fat Princess and have plenty of time to put in more stuff, should the community request it. Which begs the question: what else do you want to see in your Fat Princess?

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