Tis a joyous time. Summer is here. The birds are singing. The Bees are buzzing. Flowers flowering. However… we don’t care about that nonsense. Oh no. What we say is: Draw your curtains. Turn on your PS3. Grab a pair of super friction thumb protectors… and a spare joypad… or four. Make sure you have 5 quid / 6 Euros in your store account come July 6th… and prepare yourself for one of the most ridiculously intense shoot-em-ups ever… or at least since PomPom made their last Playstation game.

But first, a dash of history. Last year PomPom made Alien Zombie Death on PSP minis. Heralded as “pacy, mean-spirited, and delightful.” By EDGE magazine. It was a simple, extremely focused platform shooter. We loved making it. Anybody with the required skill set loved playing it. Those who didn’t clearly play too much backgammon.

Now, on PS3, we have the official sequel to Alien Zombie Death! We’ve taken the original game, pulled out a big jar of MEGA, and gratuitously poured it all over. The result? Alien Zombie Mega Death!

List of loveliness:

• Levels? … 70 of them!
• It’s a platform game, with a lot of shooting and explode-y stuff… and we mean, A LOT!
• Multiplayer? … Oh yes!
• Game types? … Survival levels. One-shot levels. Decoy pods. Jetpacks. Bomb disposal. Space baby rescue.
• Beasties? … A whole menagerie of cute yet ugly little blighters to feed with laser death!
• Fancy a new space suit? Plain white doesn’t do it for you? We have a catalogue of snazzy threads available as well as some fancy suits tucked away, waiting to be unlocked.
• A medal award system with over 280 unique medals to earn spread over all the levels.
• Weapon power-ups, for those sticky moments.
• Online leaderboards.
• Guaranteed thumb blisters.
• All wrapped up in our Super PomTech Mega X Engine of Doom.

… and finally, It’s made by proper, salt of the earth, independent game developers. In other words,
just two dudes sitting in dark caves somewhere in the UK. All by ourselves. No help from no one… apart from a sound engineer we keep locked in the shed.

Buy it! Its cheap! It’s mad! It’ll make your fingers fall off.

Peace.

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Hello all. I’m Michael Michael of PomPom Games. I thought I should get the absurd name out of the way before commencing with the meat and bones of what I’ve got to say. Yes, it is my real name. No, I don’t know what my mum was thinking. I would change it but I’m worried I’ll lose my super powers.

Anyway…

We are PomPom games. Independent developer of some of the finest retro-yet-modern-kind-of videogames since a very long time ago. We are just 2 guys ( silly name and Miles Visman ) with some help from a rather excellent sound dude, James Drabble. PomPom games are but a whisker away for their latest slice of RSI inducing, finger twisting, brow soaking shoot-em-up action called…. ALIEN ZOMBIE DEATH on PSP minis.

We were kind of digging this new-ish breed of game : the survival shooter, and wanted to have a go. We have also had a bit of a longing for doing something platform-y ( when I say we, I mean me throwing a strop at Miles, when I don’t get my way ) so “we” concocted this scenario:-
“Somewhere far far away in a random solar system, a lone space man dies… horribly. Take control of said fateful space man as he battles to his end against the dreaded Alien Zombies! Using a standard laser gun and a few pickups along the way, make sure you take at as many of those Alien Zombie suckers before they take you down. It’s that simple. It’s Alien Zombie Death.”

The game involves jumping around a bunch of platforms floating in space battling endless waves of Alien Zombie until you meet your demise. The platform layouts are very simple, with the focus on creating the space for the ensuing battle rather than complex level layouts.

As per usual we went completely over the top. We originally wanted a single level you could play that got hard very quickly and that was that. Sell it cheap as nuts and hope people dig it.

But… 2 or 3 enemies became 9 or 10 and one level became 14 and before we knew it we had weapon power-ups, score multipliers, coin pickups, bonus UFOs, a menagerie of different beasties and lots of medals to collect.

Oh well. It turned out rather fabulous and we can’t wait to introduce the world to Spaceman Death… via Alien… Alien Zombie.

Oh my.

All goes well, Alien Zombie Death will be hitting the PSP minis channel January 2010. It’ll cost something cheap. £2.50 GBP, or something similar if you fiddle with a different currency.

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