Zoe Mode are excited to announce that Chime Super Deluxe will be released and available to download from the PlayStation Store on 29th of March in the US and 30th March in UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. We just can’t wait!

So in the meantime, I would like to tell you a little more about what the game has in store for you.

To play the game, you have to place down irregular shaped blocks one at a time on the grid, fit them together 3 X 3 or more and you will build a quad. The quads score you points and this creates coverage, which fills the grid. The challenge is to fill the grid before the time runs out. This core rule set alongside multipliers, time bonuses, block fragment crashes and more create an addictive and mesmerising strategic experience.

But where does the music come in? Each block you place plays a note, and a different note depending on where it is placed. Every quad you create plays a longer musical phrase depending on the size and shape of it. The backing track is driven forward depending on how much coverage you have. The composition of the music is therefore remixed by you as you play.

When you hit 100% grid coverage, clearing and resetting the grid, you are rewarded with a brand new grid to play. This is one of the ways we have adjusted and improved the difficulty curve of the game. There are 5 of these to master on each level and each one is more fiendish than the last!

“Perfect quads” have also been introduced. If you create a quad and leave no fragments behind you get a bonus added to your multiplier. We’ve also rebalanced the scoring and balanced the game so you can play for speed and get extra points from the 100% coverage bonus or you can play neatly and be rewarded with huge multipliers.

The look
Although we loved the look of the original Chime we didn’t feel it was sharp enough for PlayStation®Network and wanted to create something more elegant. We decided upon a glassy and semi-translucent finish to the blocks and we have also added a hypnotic set of grid colours, lighting, effects and background videos.

Game Modes
Chime Super Deluxe also sees us introduce four-player, offline Multiplayer Modes for the first time. We have developed a Co-op Mode allowing players to make music together and play collaboratively and a Versus Mode brings another fresh dynamic to the game play experience.

The Co-op Mode is perfect for those late night sessions with friends and tasks players to crack their high scores together. The Versus Mode is a particular favourite of mine as players work against each other by stealing quads and destroying each other’s coverage. The aim is to cover the grid with your colour against a backdrop of backstabbing, musical harmony and visual chaos!

The Artists
For Chime Super Deluxe we wanted to work closely with the artists to create music designed for the game and we are thrilled to reveal the remaining line-up of brand new artists to accompany those already announced. The artists and their never before heard tracks include:

“Play With You” – 8-Bit and Chip Tune specialist, Sabrepulse
“Tender Hooks ” – World renown electronica duo, Plaid
“The Looping Song” – Beatboxer extraordinaire and World Loopstation Champion, Shlomo

Photo by Gabrielle Motola

The Zoë Mode studio has also contributed music to the game with tracks, “Machine Dream” from Nathan McCree, the guy behind the music in Tomb Raider and an orchestral piece, “Sympathy”, from Joe Hogan, completes the line up.

That’s it! There’s not long to wait now until the end of the month and we hope you are looking forward to getting your hands on the game and are ready to sample Chime Super Deluxe for yourselves!

In the meantime if you wish to know a bit more, here is artist, Sabrepulse, describing his experience of the game.

For the latest news please be sure to visit the website and join the Chime newsletter. Also join the community on our Facebook page or follow the Zoe Mode studio on twitter.

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Greetings, citizens of our beautiful gamocracy!

The Bearded Ladies are back to full capacity after last week’s unacceptable sickness. (This european gamocracy should really have better universal healthcare ).

So this here is a little of what we have been up to this week:

“Programmer admits error”

The week began with me admitting to a mistake. This is the first and last time this will happen .

The mistake(bug) in question broke old maps if new tiles/entities were added to the worlds in a certain order. This was discovered a few weeks ago but I pushed it aside claiming that we weren’t really going to make any real maps for a few weeks anyway.

Sadly those few weeks have gone and the art department (Kalle) was showing its fangs. So I had to spend the first part of the week rewriting large parts of the map and editor code which was a drag; but, like always, this allows you to add a few new features as well (iterative development ftw!).

After this “boring” part it really got much better. We nailed down some core design decisions (which we will show next week) and I got to play around with the winning entry from the last challenge: “The Magnet Hand”. I implemented the core features of the Magnet Hand and have working on level designs to complement it. I think it will work out great and we have some nice plans for it. One thing we most likely will drop however is the “swinging” part of the hand. We feel that the bouncy head already has the mechanics for most challenges where this would be used and restricting the magnet hand to vertical movement will complement the head better.

“Art Department is right… again!”

Apart from finding bugs, I spent most of this week creating art assets for the first world in the game. At the moment it includes rooftops, streets and a subway tunnel. All the sprites can be combined in lots of ways to build different variations of the buildings. That way I can easily add a new type of window or wall-detail to a building later on. The levels feel a bit empty as I still need to make the background art and more “stuff” to put on the streets to make the city really come alive.

Making new art is fun… if it wasn’t for that .txt file where every single sprite (276 at the moment) needs to be manually labeled with coordinates and other data. I can’t recall that in the job description!

Taking of my whining-hat for a brief moment, I’m really looking forward to improving the H7 animations (and tweaking the design a bit) and starting working on the art for the jungle world.

Don’t forget to keep the submissions coming in – you can enter and check out everyone’s entries over at your local official PlayStation forum: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Scandinavian languages. You can also get involved by casting your votes over at the Bearded Ladies facebook page.

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Heavy Rain and God of War III are just two of the PlayStation 3 exclusives that have been lauded by critics and loved by you, the PlayStation fans, in the last year. Both can now add recognition from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) to their list of accomplishments as Quantic Dream’s interactive drama won the awards for Technical Innovation, Original Music and Story, while Kratos’ rampage of revenge scooped the gong for Artistic Achievement at the BAFTA ceremony in London’s Mayfair.

Comedian Dara Ó Briain was the event host, a popular choice as he clearly knows his games and he cracked a few knowing jokes that had the crowd laughing, including one about going to the doctor complaining about loss of movement and blood pouring over his eyeballs, and being told to go and crouch behind a wall for five seconds. You probably had to be there.

Heavy Rain was the success story of the evening, winning more awards than any other game, and I managed to grab an interview with its writer and director David Cage, which I’ll aim to post tomorrow.

God of War III was recognised for its art direction and sense of scale, and Game Director Stig Asmussen was present to collect the statuette on behalf of SCE Santa Monica Studios.

Here’s the list of Video Game Bafta winners in full:

• Best Action Game: Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood
• Best Family Gamers: Kinect Sports
• Technical Innovation: Heavy Rain
• Social Network Game: My Empire
• Use of Audio: Battlefield: Bad Company 2
• Handheld: Cut the Rope
• GAME Award: Call of Duty: Black Ops
• Original Music: Heavy Rain
• Strategy: Civilization 5
• Artistic Achievement: God of War 3
• Ones to Watch: Twang (That Game Studio)
• Gameplay: Super Mario Galaxy 2
• Sport: F1 2010
• Multiplayer: Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit
• Story: Heavy Rain
• Best Game: Mass Effect
• BAFTA Fellowship: Peter Molyneux

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Is there a better time of year to be a football fan? The UEFA Champions League is back after the winter break and the battle for domestic honours in League and Cup competitions around Europe is well and truly on. Every game you go to or watch on TV is vital and hopes and dreams can be realised or shattered by just one goal or decision. Just ask Arsene Wenger!

We love this time of the season here at Premier Manager Towers, almost as much as we loved the epic January transfer window earlier this year. Despite many Managers’ across Europe expressing their dislike at being forced into panic buys at inflated prices, a huge amount of deals went through and spending, particularly in the English Premier League, hit a record high.

Whether or not the Managers got value for money from the flurry of deals is yet to be seen; we’ll only really know at the end of he season. We read that it would have been cheaper for Chelsea to buy a life size Fernando Torres made of solid gold rather than the real thing… on current form it might have been a better investment! Perhaps unsurprisingly, Torres doesn’t make it into our top five deals of the window, we’ve gone for some that might offer a little more value for money:

• Giampaolo Pazzini – Sampdoria to Inter (€12m) – The Italian striker scored two goals on his debut and could be the man to help catch city rivals Milan in the Serie A title race.
• Luis Suarez – Ajax to Liverpool (€26m) – Uruguayan striker whose goals and assists have made him an instant hit with the fans at Anfield.
• Patrick Helmes – Bayer Leverkusen to Wolfsburg (€8m) – Striker signed to replace Edin Dzeko. If he can stay injury free he could prove crucial in the Bundesliga relegation battle.
• Luis Gustavo – Hoffenheim to Bayern Munich (€15m) – 23 year old combative Brazilian midfield player who will more than fill the gap left by Mark Van Bommel.
• Steven Pienaar – Everton to Tottenham (€3m) – Attacking midfielder signed towards the end of his contract at Everton, his eligibility for the Champions League makes him an even more important signing for Spurs.

Some of you may disagree with our top five deals, we’ll be happy to stand corrected or proved wrong because that’s the beauty of football – it’s all about opinions. Either way, all the activity meant a very busy month for us as we prepared our first ‘Transfer Window Pack’ DLC, which we are delighted to announce is now available to download from the PlayStation Store. Despite the millions spent by Clubs on acquiring new talent, you can get your hands on all the latest data for the game for just £1.59/€1.99.

The update includes all of the permanent transfers from around Europe up to the end of January, as well as changes to many player ratings based on their form in the first part of the season. We’ve also included some logical changes to the transfer system and match engine to make the game even more realistic and enjoyable. If all that isn’t enough and to prove that football management isn’t all about multi-million pound transfer deals, we’ve also added the English Conference as a manageable league.

Of course to take advantage of the brand new update, you’ll need to own the full version of the game. If you don’t already, it’s currently available for just £7.00/€9.00 for PlayStation Plus subscribers until the end of March so it’s a great time to get your hands on the PS3‘s only dedicated Management Game.

Enjoy the rest of the season; I hope it’s a successful one for your team!

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It’s been a while since I have tried to rhyme in my title… and I’m still pretty bad at it, but no matter, it may not rhyme but it ain’t no lie. This week we have three, yes three 80′s bands to feature with Depeche Mode continuing our live series and Duran Duran and The Human League releasing new videos (which also gives us an excuse to feature their old ones!)

We also have new stuff from Jennifer Lopez, Dr Dre and Cage the Elephant, some über cool Ones To Watch in the shape of Maverick Sabre and Armistice and some Paddy’s Day festivity fodder. Read on and enjoy!

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If this section was a curry it would be magma infused Phal, if it was a colour it would be neon gold, if it was a letter it would be an exclamation mark. This week including Jennifer Lopez ft. Pitbull ‘On The Floor’, Take That ‘Kidz’ and Jonathan Jeremiah ‘Happiness’

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This week our OPM friends have decided that Cast – Walkaway, Rihanna – Rude Boy, Rick Astley – Never Gonna Give You Up are good enough to attach their name to. Enjoy.

St.Patricks Day (UK, Ireland)
Everyone’s favourite patron saint’s day is back and what’s better than intrinsically Irish music videos being your sound and vision track to the festivities. Featuring the best Irish bands out there including U2 and Bob Geldof

Echo Music Awards (Germany)

Featuring the best videos from this year’s nominees including Helene Fischer, Ich + Ich and Kastelruther Spatzen

ON DEMAND

Artists Of The Week
This week’s highlights are of course the incredible Dr Dre Featuring his new video ‘I Need A Doctor’ with Eminem & Skylar Grey. We also have Cage the Elephant featuring their latest video ‘Shake Me Down’ as well as Jena Lee and Aloe Blacc. See the pic’s for who get’s who!

Depeche Mode Live

Our live series continues with 80′s genius that is Depeche Mode (I freaking love them!) Featuring live performances from ‘Enjoy The Silence’, ‘Personal Jesus’ and ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’

Duran Duran Greatest Hits (UK, Ireland)

More 80′s Genius this time from Duran x2 Featuring their new video for ‘All You Need Is Now’ as well as all you old favourites (I freaking love them!… Woah déjà vu!)

One To Watch – Maverick Sabre (UK, Ireland)

London born, Irish raised singer songwriter Maverick Sabre is generating a lot of interest; check out the video for his debut release ‘Look What I’ve Done’.

One To Watch – Armistice (France)

It’s about as cool as you can get… Jay Malinowski from Bedouin Soundclash and Coeur De Pirate team up to release the video for ‘Mission Bells’

NEXT WEEK

Live in Concerts: The Best Of
To round our live series off nicely, we are featuring a selection of the best performances from our Live Series including Coldplay, Iron Maiden, Evanescence and more! We have loved this series and we hoped you have too.

Velvet Live in Concert (Italy)
As an extra bonus for all Italian Velvet fans we have a filmed performance from their Milan gig in February 2011 for your enjoyment.

Greatest Hits – Jennifer Lopez
With the release of her new video ‘On The Floor’, we thought we would celebrate all that has been J-Lo’s career with all of her greatest videos in one place including ‘I’m Real’ and ‘Love Don’t Cost A Thing’

Greatest Comeback – The Human League (UK, Ireland)
More 80′s comeback madness, this time synth pioneer legends, the Human League featuring their new video ‘Never Let Me Go’

One To Watch – Kitty Kat ft. Megaloh (Germany)
Berlin born Kitty Kat is going solo after work with Aggro Berlin and proves she doesn’t need anyone else to sound good. Featuring new video ‘Fliegen Über’

OTHER STUFF
Remember to check out our ever changing Video Of The Day which you will see as soon as you open VidZone and as ever, if you want to contact us about anything then use the following channels below:

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I’m off to party like its 19-8-0

Ben

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