Happy belated New Year to all our friends and fans on PlayStation Network! This is Tatyana from Creat Studios here but I speak for the whole team when I say that we are incredibly excited to announce our latest game, the minis title Mecho Wars, is coming to the PlayStation Store for €4.99 on January 25th as well as to PlayStation Plus on February 1st at a discounted price. Based on the characters, world, and distinctive visual style crafted by Luc Bernard, Mecho Wars is a turn-based strategy game where you command your troops to expand into enemy territory, control and collect resources, and conquer your enemy’s structures.

Jump into an exciting war between the Winged Crusade and the Landians! The story of Mecho Wars details the rise of the Winged Crusade in the distant land of Divination Deserts. This is not your typical desert, however, as there is plenty of water that separates land masses. To sustain your army capture factories to expand your maximum army support, take-over cities to earn gold from the rich economic hubs, and defeat the enemy by capturing their HQ building while simultaneously defending your own. Don’t forget strategic unit composition and troop positioning as each unit type has its own strengths and weaknesses. The game even features a day/night cycle where the water that normally restricts your movement paths during the day freezes at night, allowing for unexpected skirmishes and ambushes. In addition to the rich, story-driven campaign, the Mecho Wars minis title features a new and extended soundtrack, a special set of individual challenge maps, and remarkable local multiplayer support on a single device for both the PS3 and PSP!

Mecho Wars achieves the perfect balance between the intense competitive strategy of army composition and troop placement and the invitingly casual and leisurely gaming experience lent by its turn-based combat system. The beauty of Mecho Wars is you can spend hours on end formulating the perfect strategy, unit composition, and battle placement tactics to best defeat your foe, or you can take your time and casually complete a turn every once in a while as you eat lunch or watch the news.

Everyone here at Creat absolutely loves playing Mecho Wars and we believe that, if given a chance, it can become one of your favorites as well. Thank you for the continued support you all have given us and we will continue to work our hardest to deliver awesome and ridiculously fun games to you guys. We always value fan feedback so leave us a comment below or get in contact with us on Facebook or through Twitter for all of our latest news and announcements.

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It’s Christmas!!… (almost) and to celebrate the festive season, the PlayStation Store brings you some outstanding offers on over 100 titles for the Festive Sale which starts on the 23rd December and runs all the way to the 11th January 2012. With Blu-ray Disc games and PlayStation Network games, PS3 add-ons and PS one Classics, PSP games and minis: there’s something here for everyone.

Here are some titles to give you a taste of what delights we have on offer:

PS3 Games

• Premier Manager 2012 – Save up to 66%
• Playstation Move Heroes – Save up to 60%
• Rayman Origins – Save up to 33%
• Midnight Club LA Complete – Save up to 28%
• Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken – Save up to 30%
• The Baconing – Save up to 54%
• Zombie Apocalypse – Never Die Alone – Save up to 50%
• Castlevania: Harmony of Despair – Save up to 47%
• L.A. Noire Complete Edition – Save up to 10%

PSP Games

• Metal Slug XX – save up to 73%
• Worms Battle Islands – save up to 65%
• Blazeblue Calamity Trigger Portable – save up to 57%

And much, much more…….

But that’s not all!!

For all you minis fans out there, we have the Minis Pick and Mix. This is your chance to grab five fantastic minis of your choosing from a range of 50 popular titles: all for one low price of €3.99/£3.19!

Here are some of the games that are on offer:

• Carnivores: Dinosaur Hunter

• ME Monster: Here Me Roar!

• The 2D Adventures of Rotating Octopus

• I Must Run!

• Fighting Fantasy: Talisman of Death

• OMG-Z

• Pix’n Love Rush

How does this work??

Simply purchase the mini Pick & Mix ticket, once purchased you will be taken to a screen to pick which five games you want, its that simple!

However if you leave the PSN Store before you decide what games you wish to purchase, you can go back at any time by following the below procedure:

1. Go to Playstation Network on the XMB
2. Go to Account Management
3. Go to Transaction Management
4. Go to your Services List
5. select the minis Pick & Mix title
6. Select the minis Pick & Mix entitlement again
7. You will then view how many picks you have remaining on screen
8. Click on ‘Select Content’ – this will take you back to the minis Pick & Mix catalogue where you can browse 50 minis
9. Make your minis selection

So don’t miss out on some great one time offers – take a sleigh ride over to PlayStation Store for the Festive Sale.

Are you new the Playstation Network?

If you are new to the Playstation Network and want to understand how our store works better, visit us today on your PS3 and look out for the above banners for guidance.

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Every so often the team at San Diego Studio allow me up from the basement, favorite red stapler in hand, to take a peek at the upcoming week’s new features. I’ve learned to “extend” my gameplay sessions with “coincidental” occurrences of…

1. Free highly-caffeinated energy drinks and donuts in the break room.
2. A sudden rash of car alarms blaring from the parking lot like a jet plane just grazed the roof top.
3. A bogus announcement over the company P.A. system that Kevin Butler has arrived on campus.

These events usually buy me an additional hour or so with the game. This is a purely selfish endeavor as it really only takes a few minutes with the game to see and understand the brilliant, creative, and subtle, yet powerful features of ModNation Racers: Road Trip. I have yet to (voluntarily) set the game down and not walk away saying, “now that was just flat out fun!”. Indeed when it comes right down to it that’s what ModNation Racers: Road Trip for PS Vita is… a flat out fun kart racing game!
Let me share with you a little of what I experienced…

1. Controlled Drifting
An essential element of any great kart racing game is the drift mechanic. In ModNation Racers: Road Trip drifting is no longer solely about building up your boost meter to gain acceleration or as a cache for shielding from weapons or hazards. Though these abilities are still a large asset of drifting in the game, we have made many improvements allowing players more complete control of their racing lines. In a correctly-executed drift your forward momentum is increased while your outward momentum (inertia) can be managed (or decreased). You will find your kart easier to hold a desired line by being able to carve and progressively link drifts together without over- or under-steering into walls, guardrails or flying off the track. This refinement allows veteran racers to rely more on their racing skills as well as allows newbies a greater sense of control.

2. More Forgiving Collisions
Now racers will notice fewer if any “dead stops” brought on from an opponent’s attacks. Racers will also find it easier to get back into the pack if they happen to land a jump a little off kilter or accidentally slam into a wall with the new auto-correct feature built into the racing controls. It can be frustrating in any racing game to have the slightest error result in what seems like an eternity of reverse Y-turn after Y-turn to get you back in the race. ModNation Racers: Road Trip = problem solved.

3. Refined Braking
Braking? What’s braking? I don’t need no stinking braking!
Sure you can still go all out and avoid your helpful little friend (the brake button) but if you truly desire to master the art of racing in ModNation Racers: Road Trip you will appreciate the ability to finesse your level of control with the a reworked braking system. Players can now use the brakes to adjust steering controls while drifting and this does not stop or cancel the drift.

4. The Best For Last!
These “tweaks, changes, and improvements” not only improve the experience for all Vita-centric tracks but also insure that all PS3 user-generated tracks played on Vita would enjoy the same enhancements. This means a brand new exciting racing experience on all your favorite PS3 tracks. That ModNation is quite frankly awesome! We hope you’ll agree!

Have a great week everyone!

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Hi, this is Luigi from Playerthree. We are delighted to announce that our new minis title, Rumble Trucks, is released today. Our previous minis title was the 2D sidescrolling shoot’em up – Apache Overkill, but with Rumble Trucks we decided to do something completely different, a 3D stunt racing game.

Rumble Trucks is not your classic racing game. Playing it feels like a rollercoaster ride: high speed, steep hills, huge jumps.

Big jumps allow for big tricks, perform them and you’ll gain a speed boost, use it wisely and reach the end of level as fast as possible to win a medal. On the way to the finish line don’t forget to collect the stars scattered around the levels as they give you a time bonus.

You’ll be able to choose between nine vehicles with different stats and then race on one of the twenty four levels divided in three worlds. Obviously you will need to unlock the trucks and the levels before being able to play on them.

Reaching the final level in each world unlocks the next world, but those final levels are so tricky that it’s hard enough just trying to get a gold medal and collecting all the stars. It’s a real challenge, but you will enjoy it.

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Hi – I’m a game designer at Die Gute Fabrik, a small Indie Studio based in Denmark. We are just about to release our debut on PlayStation Network minis (PS3 and PSP). It’s called “Where is my Heart?”, and it’s about a family of monsters lost in the woods. In the game you have help them find a way back to their home – a mysterious tree with a heart in its branches. The whole story is set in an 8-bit style environment made up of woods, mushroom caves, crystal rock pools, fern fringed creeks and waterfalls.

Nils, our artist, is going to talk more about the concept art and environment design of the game below. As for the game mechanics: the basics play just like a usual platform game, but the world is visually sliced into rectangular fragments (or panels) which are placed on the screen at unexpected locations. With this game mechanic – the messed up way of representation – I attempted to evoke the sensation of being lost. On top of that, the visual slicing also allowed us to add further mechanics to the game. These mechanics make use and build upon the visual confusion caused by the panels. One of these game-play elements is the ‘panel rotation’.

The Rainbow Spirit -one of the monsters- can use this mechanic to its advantage. When the player presses the L and R shoulder buttons of the game controller the Spirit can make the panels spin around the screen center. This allows the Spirit to hop from frame to frame, outside of the physical game world. It’s a bit hard to describe. Looking at the trailer above will fix this – it’s easier to grasp when seen in action. Playing around with the Spirit Rotation was a very satisfying experience to our testers. We spent a lot of effort into making it feel just right. It’ll make the puzzle muscles in your brain as sore as legs after a marathon.

The game is loosely based on an experience I had with my parents three summers ago. We were hiking in the woods near our home. And guess what – we lost our bearings, got really frustrated, and started bickering with each other. That’s the short version of it. The long version entails family issues and the dark sides of personalities. If you’re interested in reading more about the game’s source of inspiration, please go here.

By the way we also had our first review by eurogamer and they gave us 8 out of 10.

I’ll pass on to Nils now, our artist.”

Nils Deneken: Hi, I’m the graphic artist here at Die Gute Fabrik. In 2009, after the first Where is my Heart? prototype was displayed at the Independent Games Festival, Bernhard asked me if I wanted to do the artwork for the game. Already the prototype that Bernhard had submitted to the IGF 2009 had a very distinct art style. Obviously it’s a game that uses pixel graphics and thus refers to games from the creator’s childhood, but it has some aesthetic twists that sets itself apart from the games of yore (and just as much from the games of today).

One visual twist is the representation of the game levels as comic panels. It is one of the basic mechanics of the game which has both a strong influence on the level designs and the visuals of the game. The other distinctive visual element is the bold choice of colors, which is quite unusual for games in general.

While other games tend to use fairly realistic colors to represent their environments, Bernhard chose a strange palette of pastel colors. The grass wasn’t a saturated green, like it is in most game graphics, but a very light green, which seemed to glow almost neon-like in front of the browns and grays of the rocks. The sky was light purple instead of sky-blue and sprinkled with yellow stars that would fade in and out. Then there were the three little monster characters and a big tree with a face, whose emotions were ranging from grumpy to sad. The old tree, the Heartboxes, which the player has to unlock to progress, and Antler Ancestor, which the Brown Monster turns into, seem all to be taken straight from the traditional German fairy tales. The heart boxes remind us of the gingerbread house from Grimm’s “Hänsel und Gretel”, while the Antler is clearly derived from a Bavarian mythical creature called the Wolpertinger. Their representation, however, is more inspired by Japanese anime, games and pictogram culture. The whole strangely coloured mix of Japanese cuteness with German fairytales distinguished it as something very contemporary.

I was excited. It was liberating not having to do world and character concepts from scratch, but to work with the constraints that came with Bernhard’s prototype level concepts, to refine them and build new worlds with that feel and colour palette that he had introduced.

The locations the levels are taking place in are all tied to the overall topic of getting lost in the woods. The environments, even though fantastic with flying platforms and such, are rooted in a moderate climate. They are believable settings for the fiction we created around the three monsters. Besides the forest, I added different kinds of caves to the environments, since they would bring variation to the levels without breaking the overall theme of the game.

Some environment designs required night settings. We decided to have the scenery change into night time, when the Brown Monster transformed into the Antler Ancestor. We aimed for the most satisfying feedback that comes with his transformation, where he would literally step into “the Land of Fireflies”.

When the grey monster transformed, he would open a window into a dark parallel world, the “Land of the Bat”, where he could use different platforms and secret passages, which meant that some levels needed a land-of-the-bat version as well.

The three family characters Bernhard created in his IGF prototype were interesting and had a lot of personality already, but I took the liberty of changing some of them a little to make them more distinguishable from each other and more coherent with the game style at the same time.

For more information about the Artwork of Where is my Heart and other projects, feel free to visit http://gutefabrik.com/.

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