At first blush, you could be forgiven for thinking that KickBeat is a new riff on Beats, that seminal PSP downloadable gem that transformed your MP3 collection into an engaging button-tapping rhythm challenge. Much like Beats, KickBeat awards you points for accurately tapping combinations of the four face buttons (or four quadrants on the front touchscreen) in time to the music and subtle visual cues.

But KickBeat is a far more ambitious game, both mechanically and aesthetically. Abandoning the abstract icons that clutter the interfaces of many music games, KickBeat reimagines the rhythm game as a chop-socky fighting scene with an agile protagonist battling hordes of incoming goons in a circular arena. Each successive hit you land yields a bigger bonus multiplayer and more points, while missing an incoming attack diminishes your life meter. The game ramps up slowly but surely. Smacking down the most basic yellow enemy type is easy enough, but the action quickly accelerates as new enemies types are introduced — red enemies attack from two places at once, while blue aggressors come in with a tricky one-two combo. Before long, you’ll be working up a sweat as you fend off blistering volleys of incoming enemies to the pounding background music.

After I spent a few minutes warming up with the controls, I settled down to kick some duff in the game’s Story mode. I found my rhythm through the first few songs, powering through Celldweller’s ultra-catchy Switchback and Marilyn Manson’s thundering opus The Beautiful People. The pace steadily ramped up through Southpaw Swagger (It’s Showtime) and Papa Roach (Last Resort) until I tapped out on a song by an Australian drum-and-bass act called Pendulum. The high-octane, pumped-up electronic-infused metal soundtrack was alarmingly infectious, but once the final version of the game lands I’ll be interested in importing some MP3s in the “Beat Your Music” mode to see how KickBeat keeps up.

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I know you have all been anxiously waiting for a Zen Pinball 2 release date, and today I am happy to tell you that Zen Pinball 2 will be available for download from 5th September on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita!

In addition, we have a great surprise for you! Our latest table creation, based on a PopCap Games mega-hit (and I do mean MEGA), will be releasing as new DLC content the same day! What might this table be? All details will be revealed later this month during PAX Prime! If you are at the event, we invite you to stop by PopCap’s booth and get first hands-on with the table!

As you all probably know, we take pinball very seriously here at Zen Studios, and we see pinball development in two different parts. On one end you have the actual pinball table, which better be fun and entertaining. We have worked hard to make sure you have an awesome selection of themes and table designs, the most advanced physics as well as stellar looking tables.

On the other end, you have the game presentation, features that make it competitive among friends (beating your own score over and over is fun, but beating your friends is SO much better), and the overall experience. We have worked really hard to make Zen Pinball 2 the finest pinball platform available! Here are some of the features you can expect:

• Zen Pinball 2 is cross platform entitled. Any content you buy will be playable on both PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita at no extra charge!
• Zen Pinball 2 is a free download for everyone, with trials available for each table so you can try each table before you decide to buy.
• For those of you who already own Zen Pinball or Marvel Pinball content, you will be able to import your purchases into Zen Pinball 2 for free, receiving graphics, physics and social system upgrades at no extra cost!
• Zen Pinball 2 will launch with 26 different pinball tables, including the mystery PopCap table!
• A beautiful layout and design featuring all Zen Pinball tables under one roof.
• New trophies for all tables!
• A new social system with in-game score notifications, challenges, Facebook posting, ProScore (personal performance across all tables) and TeamScore (a combined score ranking you and your friends).
• New rule sheets to help you better understand the tables, while still providing opportunity for discovering the secrets of the table on your own.

As you can see, Zen Pinball 2 is set to take pinball games to the next level.

So, any guesses on what PopCap game is coming to pinball?

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Brand new Marvel Pinball tables will be available on Wednesday via PSN on PlayStation 3!

Marvel’s The Avengers, based on Marvel Entertainment’s BILLION dollar movie, World War Hulk, The Infinity Gauntlet, and Fear Itself make up one of the most exciting videogame pinball releases ever. Each table is based on a huge event in the Marvel Universe, and I cannot hide the fact that we are so proud of these tables! We have taken major steps forward with our pinball craft and of course, I could go on forever and ever about how great I think the new tables are, but I’ll let them do the talking! Check out the trailer below for Fear Itself.
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Hello, PlayStation fans! I’m Neil Sorens, the Creative Director at Zen Studios, and I’m very excited to tell you about our new game: KickBeat.

KickBeat is a music game; it just doesn’t look like one. Check it out, and then after the jump I’ll tell you about how it works and some of the development history.

Music games have a long tradition of innovation. From the peripheral-based games like Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution to controller-based ones like Frequency and Patapon, these games allow us to experience music in new and often unexpected ways.

KickBeat follows in the tradition of this type of music game. Although its beat-matching mechanic is not complex and will be familiar to fans of the music game genre, KickBeat does a couple things that make it different from anything else you’ve played…and with publishers afraid to do anything except sequels to dance games, what better time than now to give the genre a kick in the pants?

The first thing about KickBeat that is immediately visible is its fighting theme. If you watch the old Hong Kong kung fu movies, you’ve probably noticed that the fight choreography is heavily rhythmic. We noticed that too, and figured it would be a good theme for a beat-matching game. Combine the martial arts theme with heavy, aggressive music that goes well with punching and kicking, and you’ve got a game with a little more edge than the ones where you get jiggy to the latest autotuned pop hit (not that there’s anything wrong with that, especially with friends and/or limited sobriety).

Second, we got rid of the bars, arrows, and button icons that other music games rely on for action cues and replaced them with fully 3D animated characters. Instead of just seeing characters in the background moving to a preset script as eye candy while the actual gameplay takes place in an abstract 2D interface, you actually control and react to those 3D characters. That means you actually get to focus your attention on what those characters are doing! As you play the game, you’re creating your own fight sequence with your button presses (or screen touches). We even let you get rid of all the other interface parts (such as score) if you like, so that there are no distractions from the action.

As you may have gathered from the trailer, enemies circle around you before attacking from one or more of the four cardinal directions. Their attacks are synched to the song’s beat and to other high-energy moments in the music: guitars, vocals, and so on. To defeat one, you just press the button corresponding to their direction at the correct time (right as they move in to attack you). For example, when an enemy attacks from the right, you press the right direction button or the Circle button to send them sprawling. You can also just use the touch screen – tap the portion of the screen where the enemy is attacking from, and you’ll get the same result. Two or three enemies at once? No problem! Just press all the appropriate buttons/regions at once. You can use both the directional and face buttons simultaneously, an essential skill to learn once you get to the expert difficulty levels and you’re beset by a constant stream of enemies.

Now that you’ve got the basics, let me tell you a little bit more about the game’s history. It’s been around in idea form since 2006, and we started development on it in 2009 – an exciting time for me, as it’s my first original game idea to be put into production. Yep, KickBeat is my baby!

Although the game concept is a very simple one, it turned out that it’s a really, really hard game to make. Because animations take a certain amount of time to play, it’s very difficult to give them the instantaneous response time that you need in a beat-matching game, while still keeping the motion believable. We started out by motion-capturing a martial arts champion, only to realize later that none of it would be usable for the game. Essentially, we had to start over on the animation system – but this time, we knew the problems we’d come across and designed the system to overcome them. As a result, almost 100% of the animations in the game are hand-animated, no small task for a game that needs as many animations as ours. And I think the animators did a fantastic job of creating a martial arts style that is acrobatic, fluid, responsive, and just plain fun to watch.

Selecting the music for KickBeat’s hard-hitting soundtrack was an equally daunting task, but very rewarding when you manage to find that perfect track or hidden gem and get a deal signed. We didn’t get every song we wanted – I really wanted the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” for example, but it didn’t work out. However, those setbacks just made us look harder to find great music in unlikely places. We ended up with 18 tracks across multiple genres (mostly drum & bass, rock, and hip-hop), from big names like Pendulum and Rob Zombie to some stuff you probably haven’t heard before. The most unusual? A track from Shen Yi, a Taiwanese rapper – yes, it’s in Mandarin, and yes, it is awesome.

We also thought it would be fun to be able to put your own music into the game – that was my favourite feature in Audiosurf. We’ve got a feature that will allow you to do just that, with no scripting on your part required – just put in a couple pieces of info, customize a couple settings to your taste, and the game creates a new level for you to play.

One other part of the game I want to mention is the story. Because we’ve put all this effort into making characters a central focus of the game, we needed to give these characters a human touch. Otherwise, they’re just animated props. Our story revolves around a lovestruck and unlikely hero drawn into a battle for control of the world’s music. Its light-hearted fare, but we’ve done a bunch of hand drawn and fully voiced sequences that really bring the characters to life.

Well, there you have it. KickBeat will release this year, exclusively on PS Vita. It’s a real thrill to finally be able to talk about the game after working on it so long, and I can’t wait to see what you all think of it! We will be showing the game at E3, so there will be more news surfacing soon.

Thanks for reading!

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Hi all you ZEN Pinball fans!

ZEN Studios has locked down this Thursday, 15 April, 2010 as the official release date for Excalibur, the latest expansion table for ZEN Pinball! Fans can pick up the awesome new table on the PlayStation Store for £1.59 / 1.99 EUR. Check out the exclusive sneak peak of the new Excalibur table with the trailer below!

This trailer is only a taste of what the Excalibur table will deliver! Earn your seat as a respected knight of the Round Table of Camelot as you duel the other knights in effort to retain the “King Champion” title. Hit swinging targets, utilize Merlin’s tips and suggestions to start up the Magical Multiball, and participate in jousting tournaments to earn extra points! Check out the exciting new Excalibur table tomorrow, and for more information, you can always check out previous ZEN pinball posts on this blog or visit the official ZEN Pinball website at ZenPinball.com.

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