PixelJunk SideScroller is finally out in the world! This retro-styled side-scrolling shooter plays like a love note to the arcade games I grew up with in my youth, and serves as a quasi-epilogue to the PixelJunk Shooter series. Before you pick it up on the PlayStation Store, get a closer look with this handy new Q&A. Q-Games President and Executive Producer Dylan Cuthbert took to Twitter to answer your most burning questions. Read closely and you might learn a few helpful secrets!

From @wildbillhickock
How many levels?
A: There are thirteen levels (called “Sectors”) total. This includes four absolutely amazing boss battles (Note: Expect an “old friend” from the Shooter-verse to make an appearance, but you’ll be seeing loads of new faces as well). One thing that’s so great about SideScroller is that it has four difficulty modes, and the experience will change depending on what difficulty mode you select. New enemies crop up in Hard difficulty mode, and expect certain encounters to get a whole lot more harrowing because of them. Bullets fly at you faster, the overall look of the game changes, and for those of you brave enough to venture onto Brutal difficulty mode, expect to get “revenge” bullets flung at your ship every time you kill an enemy. Needless to say, SideScroller is a game you can enjoy on many different levels by giving it a replay or two (or three, or four)! Also, the only way to unlock the “true” ending is to complete the game on Brutal. Good luck!

From @VofEscaflowne
Is there still an emphasis on exploring, or is it more “on-rails” than the PixelJunk Shooter series?
A: SideScroller is a complete departure from the Shooter series. Instead of exploring and puzzle solving – staples of the Shooter-verse -, you’ll be using upgradeable weapons to spray bullets in every direction possible! Yes, SideScroller is more of an “on rails” experience, because we’ll push the player onward into really tense situations at a brisk pace. It definitely ups the tension. There are also scenes in the game where the scrolling stops and you have to defeat mini-bosses and any other enemies we throw at you. Mark my words: just because the scrolling stops doesn’t mean the game becomes any less intense!

AuburnRDM
Any unlockables and cool things to work for?
A: There are hidden items scattered through the entire game. For any collectors out there, searching for these items and finding them will certainly be a rewarding experience. They also net you a hefty amount of bonus points, which will be a big help to you competitive players out there who absolutely NEED the #1 high score on the Online Leaderboards! Also, don’t forget to keep an eye on your combo count. The skilled players out there will be able to string together combos from the start of every Sector until the end, so play strategically. If you’re good enough, you might even get a Platinum Medal for your efforts!

From @bergasche
Will my eyes begin to bleed because of so much awesome?
A: A resounding YES! Okay, okay, your eyes may not actually bleed, explode, or otherwise become unusable, but SideScroller has a whole lot of awesome contained within its digital casing. It’s on the PSN now, so what are you waiting for? Go and buy it!

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PixelJunk SideScroller is not far from your hands! Yes, it has kind of crept up upon us, but the release date is 2nd of November in Europe. I really can’t emphasize enough how really, really good old school fun SideScroller has turned out to be. I’m sure some of you have played the “bonus” stage in PixelJunk Shooter 2 called “The Road to Dawn”, well that is what gave us the urge to make an entire side scrolling shoot-em-up game! Back in the day I used to love games such as R-Type and Darius, and going even further back there were games such as Scramble and Defender that inspired me as a child. So… we decided to dip our toes in and see what PixelJunk could bring to the side-scroller world.

We used the same engine as for the two Shooter titles, but the game itself is entirely different. To begin with this is a single-stick controlled game rather than the dual-stick control we had in Shooter, which makes it even more addictive and easy to control. And of course, you can only face to the right as you fly your craft! The only similarity really is that a handful of enemies from Shooter have been “re-imagined” for SideScroller, but to add to them we created a whole slew of new enemies and bosses for you to try to destroy also.

The back-story of the game is that SideScroller is the game the pilot of PixelJunk Shooter is playing on his old computer console in his ship on the way home to Earth after the ending of Shooter 2. This explains the cool “retro” look we have designed with the curved CRT (cathode ray tube) screen and the monochrome look of the interface. However, during its orbit of Apoxus Prime perhaps the computer has been infected.. a little?

Some people reckon PixelJunk games are a little tough, and well.. yes, they are a little because I think games should be a challenge. However, what we’ve done this time is scattered loads of checkpoints so even if you do die you’ll restart really close, and we also give you the option to downgrade your difficulty setting if you get a Game Over too. We’ve created 4 difficulty levels so everyone is catered for (I hope!).

Oh and did I mention, the bosses are AWESOME! Maybe I should mention that again…

I’ve got to head off and start finishing off PixelJunk 4am, so I’m going to leave you with this really cool trailer for SideScroller we created. Definitely check it out, because you might be able to spot one of the AWESOME bosses in there!

Remember everyone – Oct 26th!

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The wait is almost over. PixelJunk Shooter will finally be available on the PlayStation Store tomorrow, Thursday, December 10 for £6.29/€7.99…just in time for the holidays! (And another great gift is PixelJunk Monsters Deluxe for the PSP. Remember you don’t need a PSPgo to play Monsters Deluxe. It plays great on any PSP! That’s something we’ve had a lot of mails about.)

As all you PixelJunk fans are aware, music plays an important role in all of our games. For Shooter, we worked very closely with High Frequency Bandwidth and we really hope you enjoy the music as much as we do.

I might as well use this blog entry as an excuse to talk a little bit about the response PixelJunk Monsters Deluxe has been getting – it has been awesome! Metacritic currently ranks us in the top 10 of all-time best PSP games (at the time of writing), which is absolutely incredible for us! It seems most people are playing the game in offline 1p mode (which of course is engrossing to the extreme), but everyone should definitely try out the online play. It’s a lot of fun and there are lots of like-minded Monsters fans out there to “parlay” and boogie on down with. It’s also surprisingly fun to simply hang out in a one of the lobbies and watch the blow-by-blow tickertape commentaries of other people’s games.

As always, send us comments!

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We know you’ve been patiently waiting for your chance to finally go hands-on with the fourth game in the PixelJunk series. So let me lead off by formally announcing: PixelJunk Shooter will become available on the PlayStation Store next Thursday, December 10th.

We’ve been holding on to this video interview with Jem and me until we were ready to announce PixelJunk Shooter‘s release date. With that out of the way, hit “play” below:

I was a bit tired during that interview, which is my excuse for the over-use of the adjective “cool” (the game *is* cool though! *Very* cool cool indeed)! Here’s the story behind that:

The time was 12am midnight and it was a warm early Autumn night and my heavily loaded car was waiting for me to drive it from Kyoto to Tokyo (estimated 8 hour drive). This was the start of our journey to the Tokyo Game Show to set up our very own booth for the first time ever. To cut costs wherever we could, I decided I would drive overnight, lugging the heavier stuff (big TVs, free give-aways, PS3s etc) and saving on train tickets too (by including a couple of Q-Gamers in the drive too). The car was ram-packed full and weighed heavily down! Luckily it is a Murano so fairly large and sturdy in the first place, but it’s a wonder the police didn’t pull us over during our trip.

In Japan the freeways aren’t “free” but recently there is this “ETC” deal which lets you drive on most of them for a single charge of ten bucks or so. Oh and some stretches of road are only 2 lanes (because of the mountainous nature of the country), so as you can imagine there were a few bottlenecks on the way, and one accident that had occurred only a few minutes before we passed it near Mt. Fuji just as it was getting light, that wasn’t the greatest thing to see in the wee hours! We arrived in Tokyo safe and sound though!
(more…)

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PixelJunk Shooter is one of the many titles drawing crowds to the PlayStation Stand at this year’s E3. Q-Games’ Dylan Cuthbert is here to tell us a bit more about the two-player mode in this ingenious PSN title that’s as much an addictive puzzler as it is a shooter.

After talking about the co-op in PixelJunk Monsters Deluxe for the PSP, it’s now time to talk a little bit about the two player mode in PixelJunk Shooter which we hadn’t mentioned before.

In true PixelJunk fashion we have made the game co-op, so get a friend around, grab an extra controller and anyone can just dive right on in. We’ve tried to make co-op as de-stressed as possible, so even if your player’s ship gets hit by something or overheats and starts crashing towards the ground, you can pop out your extendible hook thing (no official name for this yet – “Grabber” perhaps?) and grab your friend (he’s a bit heavy tho, so watch out), then you can carry him to the nearest pool of water and dunk him in to restore his health. If you don’t manage to grab him in time, he’ll just re-spawn near you and you’ll be docked a life.

The game is an old-school shooter at heart (hence the name), it is the PixelJunk take on those old retro shooting games such as Defender, with a little bit of Choplifter and Thrust! thrown in for good measure. We have giant bosses for you to fight against, multiple weapons to pick up and try out, shields you can grab, all kinds of stuff to give people with an itchy trigger finger a lot of fun.

However, at the same time we have added a puzzle element (that we tend to do with most of our games) so even those without an itchy trigger finger will be able to play the game and have a lot of fun. This puzzle element obviously revolves around the sandbox fluid simulation we have implemented, and it is incredible to watch in action.

As with PJ Monsters Deluxe I’m not sure what the release date will be, but we are working very hard on it so hopefully it won’t be too far off!

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