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So you are probably thinking “Mutant Blobs Attack? Never heard of it. Why should I care about this game? Also, why does Reddit always have so many cat pictures on the front page?” Well, the first thing you need to do is unsubscribe from /r/aww. After that’s done, let me tell you a few reasons you should care about Mutant Blobs Attack.

First, you enjoy platformers but are maybe a bit tired of the typical offerings, and are looking for something fresh. You were thinking of buying a Vita, and need something fun to play in between your sessions of Michael Jackson the Experience. You also have a sense of humor and are tired of games that take themselves too seriously. Maybe you also enjoy monster movies that feature the destruction of all mankind, or perhaps have a slight Blob fetish?

And, if all of the above items apply, then this is REALLY the game for you.

Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack is a follow up to Tales from Space: About a Blob released early 2011 on the PlayStation 3 (via PSN). Mutant Blobs Attack differs from its predecessor in a number of ways. We want to leave SOME surprises for those who buy the game, so without giving too much away here is some more info about what’s in Mutant Blobs Attack.

This time around the Blob has some new abilities that were designed to take advantage of the Vita’s inputs. The first of these is Telekinesis, which allows the Blob to move objects/platforms around in the game world. These objects are indicated to the player with a green dot, which can be touched and dragged on the Vita’s touchscreen. Having movable objects in the world allows us to challenge the player with unique platforming puzzles.

The second new ability the player will encounter in the game is Rocket Mode. While in this mode, the Blob begins floating in the air, and is controlled using a rocket thruster. While flying around, the back touch pad of the Vita can be used to apply an additional “boost” of speed to the Blob.

Those of you that played Tales from Space: About a Blob will already be familiar with the Magnetic power, which is making a return. Magnetism allows the Blob to stick or repel from fixed metal surfaces, and also pull / push smaller metal objects that are not fixed in place. This power is often used in the game to solve puzzles.

As a break to the normal platforming gameplay, and utilizing another input feature of the Vita, we have spread tilt-based bonus levels throughout the main story. We made these levels all take place in unique and interesting environments like a wooden labyrinth, an old-school retro hand-held device, and maybe even Tom Selleck’s moustache (Editor’s note: Tom Selleck moustache level is not actually included in the game).

We are really proud of how the game turned out, and can’t wait to share it with the world! With the Vita and the game coming out very soon, we really hope that you guys & gals will take some time to check it out.

For up-to-date development news, make sure to follow us on Twitter @DrinkboxStudios and @MutantBlob, and check out our blog at www.mutantblobsattack.com. Also, feel free to shoot us any questions you have in the comments below, and we will try to answer them the best we can!

PSP news

Check out photos from the PlayStation Vita launch in Japan.
XTREME PSP

It’s been a great year for Irrational Games, thanks in no small part to our wonderful PlayStation fans. While we’re in the midst of working on BioShock Infinite, we wanted to take the time and thank everyone for all the great support you’ve given over the years by helping spread the holiday cheer. From all of us at Irrational Games: Season’s Greetings!

PSP news

Happy Holidays, PlayStation Bloggers! (Or are readers considered to be “bloggies”?)

We just hit a major milestone on Journey, and are super excited to take a brief break – when we return it will be pedal to the medal to finish it up and get it out to you! Thanks to everyone who has been so supportive over the last THREE YEARS (our longest project yet!). Your support really does make all the difference, and I can’t say “thank you” enough on behalf of everyone at thatgamecompany.

Because 2011 was such a long and intense year for us, we had a bit of a mellow party to just relax, hang out, and eat some good food.

TGCers gathering around Robin’s dining room table

We gathered with friends at TGC member Robin Hunicke’s house in Venice. A few family members happened to be in town and joined the festivities…..

Jenova Chen and… his mother! Who is visiting from Shanghai.

Although the event was meant to be low-key, I really wanted to give the team something great this year as a gift, in honor of the incredible work they do everyday, which completely humbles me. However, I am terrible at gifts, and have useless hobbies, like playing board games. Thankfully, Robin came to the rescue with an awesome idea, and the mad skills to make it happen. (Side note – when the apocalypse happens I’m making a bee-line for Robin. She’s the kind of person who knows how to PH soil properly to grow crops, how to build her own house, make a battery… I don’t know what I will provide but somehow this all works out great in my mind.)

Robin and our lead artist, Matt Nava, snuck out after work one day to begin the project. They chose the fabrics and paints that would be required to set things in motion. Then, over the course of a few weekends and Robin’s stint with the flu a couple of weeks ago, it all came together…..

You can probably guess where we’re headed now?

Robin sewed together the fabrics and Matt made the stencils for the symbols… which is unique for each person, and all directly from Journey.

They even made matching boxes!

And here are the final results…. of the real-life Journey scarves!

Happy Holidays from thatgamecompany! See you in 2012!

PSP news

Hey all, we have a special holiday message from David Jaffe, Co-Director of the new Twisted Metal and co-founder of Eat Sleep Play.

While Dave and the team are hard at work finishing up Twisted Metal, he wanted to take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy holiday and make a special holiday announcement!

PSP news

We want to let you know that we have detected attempts on Sony Entertainment Network, PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment (“Networks”) services to test a massive set of sign-in IDs and passwords against our network database. These attempts appear to include a large amount of data obtained from one or more compromised lists from other companies, sites or other sources. In this case, given that the data tested against our network consisted of sign-in ID-password pairs, and that the overwhelming majority of the pairs resulted in failed matching attempts, it is likely the data came from another source and not from our Networks. We have taken steps to mitigate the activity.

Less than one tenth of one percent (0.1%) of our PSN, SEN and SOE audience may have been affected. There were approximately 93,000 accounts globally (PSN/SEN: approximately 60,000 accounts; SOE: approximately 33,000) where the attempts succeeded in verifying those accounts’ valid sign-in IDs and passwords, and we have temporarily locked these accounts. Only a small fraction of these 93,000 accounts showed additional activity prior to being locked. We are currently reviewing those accounts for unauthorized access, and will provide more updates as we have them. Please note, if you have a credit card associated with your account, your credit card number is not at risk. We will work with any users whom we confirm have had unauthorized purchases made to restore amounts in the PSN/SEN or SOE wallet.

As a preventative measure, we are requiring secure password resets for those PSN/SEN accounts that had both a sign-in ID and password match through this attempt. If you are in the small group of PSN/SEN users who may have been affected, you will receive an email from us at the address associated with your account that will prompt you to reset your password.

Similarly, the SOE accounts that were matched have been temporarily turned off. If you are among the small group of affected SOE customers, you will receive an email from us at the address associated with your account that will advise you on next steps in order to validate your account credentials and have your account turned back on.

We want to take this opportunity to remind our consumers about the increasingly common threat of fraudulent activity online, as well as the importance of having a strong password and having a username/password combination that is not associated with other online services or sites. We encourage you to choose unique, hard-to-guess passwords and always look for unusual activity in your account.

PSP news

Hello everyone! This is Rich Bantegui, aka @FilithieRich, Community Manager for Namco Bandai Games America. Many of you have been following me over the last year looking for the latest details on all of our games. This week, you may have also been listening into what we have happening on our Facebook and Twitter for news coming out of the Tokyo Game Show for big fan-favorite series like Tekken, Soulcalibur, Ace Combat and even the upcoming action-epic, Dark Souls.

While there’s plenty of news flying about for all of our biggest titles, we wanted the PlayStation community to be among the first to get the scoop on the latest entry in a series that’s dear to all of our hearts, and one that features the tiniest of heroes.

Fresh from Tokyo Game Show, Namco Bandai has just announced that Katamari Damacy (working title) will be arriving soon for the PS Vita! Check out the fresh trailer above that we wanted to roll out to the fans here in North America.

You’re going to have to listen your old pop the King of All Cosmos once again as he commands you to roll up anything and everything in sight! One of the coolest new features is the ability to use the rear touch pad of the PS Vita to S-T-R-E-T-C-H and SQUEEZE that katamari both horizontally and vertically to pick the world around you in ways never before done in a Katamari game. You’ll be rolling up everything from the tiniest of ants to the enormous masses of Earth like Mount Fuji and BEYOND!

Now, if you’re a Katamari fan, we know what you’re thinking. New Katamari. WANT! PlayStation Vita. WANT! Trust me. I want it too, but they won’t let me have it, YET!

Namco Bandai Games will be launching more titles for the PS Vita as well, so for now, stay tuned to our Facebook and Twitter account, as well as the PlayStation.Blog in the coming weeks and months for more details. Until then, I’m going to roll my way through the aisles over here at the Tokyo Game Show. I am in gamer heaven! *faints*

PSP news

Please see below for a letter from Howard Stringer:

Dear Friends,

I know this has been a frustrating time for all of you.

Let me assure you that the resources of this company have been focused on investigating the entire nature and impact of the cyber-attack we’ve all experienced and on fixing it. We are absolutely dedicated to restoring full and safe service as soon as possible and rewarding you for your patience. We will settle for nothing less.

To date, there is no confirmed evidence any credit card or personal information has been misused, and we continue to monitor the situation closely. We are also moving ahead with plans to help protect our customers from identity theft around the world. A program for U.S. PlayStation Network and Qriocity customers that includes a million identity theft insurance policy per user was launched earlier today and announcements for other regions will be coming soon.

As we have announced, we will be offering a “Welcome Back” package to our customers once our PlayStation Network and Qriocity services are up and running. This will include, among other benefits, a month of free PlayStation Plus membership for all PSN customers, as well as an extension of subscriptions for PlayStation Plus and Music Unlimited customers to make up for time lost.

As a company we — and I — apologize for the inconvenience and concern caused by this attack. Under the leadership of Kazuo Hirai, we have teams working around the clock and around the world to restore your access to those services as quickly, and as safely, as possible.

I know some believe we should have notified our customers earlier than we did. It’s a fair question. As soon as we discovered the potential scope of the intrusion, we shut down the PlayStation Network and Qriocity services and hired some of the best technical experts in the field to determine what happened. I wish we could have gotten the answers we needed sooner, but forensic analysis is a complex, time-consuming process. Hackers, after all, do their best to cover their tracks, and it took some time for our experts to find those tracks and begin to identify what personal information had — or had not — been taken.

As a result of what we discovered we notified you of the breach. Our investigation is ongoing, and we are upgrading our security so that if attacks like this happen again, our defenses will be even stronger.

In the last few months, Sony has faced a terrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan. But now we are facing a very man-made event – a criminal attack on us — and on you — and we are working with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies around the world to apprehend those responsible.

In the coming days, we will restore service to the networks and welcome you back to the fun. I wanted to personally reach out and let you know that we are committed to serving you to the very best of our ability, protecting your information better than ever, and getting you back to what you signed up for – all the games and great entertainment experiences that you expect from Sony.

With best regards,
Howard Stringer

PSP news

We’re super excited that Swarm is finally about to be released on PlayStation Network. The genesis of the original idea for the game stretches all the way back to 2006, shortly after we started Hothead. There was an indie video game developer contest we wanted to enter, so we brainstormed a ton of ideas on what to submit. Dr. Mike Hayward, Hothead’s resident Ph.D., brought forward a concept based on his doctoral research in artificial life. He called it Swarm and it had plenty of science cred. We thought this was our contest winner, so we came up with a cute adorable character to go with his tech, the swarmite, and got to work on a prototype.

In the end we did very well in that contest, placing in the final four, winning the people’s choice vote, and garnering 0,000 in winnings. Every time we wore a Swarm t-shirt in public, invariably someone would ask us about the character. People really seemed to like it. So we knew we were onto something. We just had one problem: what we created wasn’t really a game.

The prototype was cool. 50 pudgy, blue swarmites milled around and waited for you to act. You took control of a single swarmite and the rest watched attentively. You’d take some action, like picking up a rock, and the rest of them would frantically run around, trying to find rocks. There were never enough rocks to go around, and so the swarmites would absentmindedly pick up other items or even their fellow swarmites. Then you’d throw the rocks at a target and they would all follow. Every time you did something, they learned, and as you progressed through the level they used all their learning to move you forward. So the tech was very cool and the way the swarmites behaved was funny, but because you were teaching them, the further you progressed through the level, the more time you spent simply watching and the less time you spent playing.

Our response to this was to park the uber-smart Dr. Mike in a corner and let him play for three years or so. “Turn it into a game!” was our direction. He kept at it, finally hitting a big turning point when he started playing with the idea of directly controlling 50 swarmites at once. Suddenly Swarm started looking like an action game and a platformer. And there were cool examples of emergence that he kind of stumbled on. For example, if you huddle the swarm together and then jump repeatedly, they stack on each other’s heads and form a tall totem. That wasn’t planned in any design document, it just happened by accident in one of Mike’s prototypes.

Armed with some cool new control schemes, we put the game into production and set out to make the coolest PSN game ever. Then we hit our next obstacle. Turns out if you move 50 characters at once and put them in a ridiculously dangerous world with explosives, fans and other things that tend to blow them all over the place, it can get a tad confusing for the player just what is going on and where their swarm is when all hell is breaking loose. So to address this, we did what we always do: lots and lots of playtests. We’d bring in four or five fresh players that have never seen the game before, put a controller in their hand and let them give it a go. Certainly it can be a humbling experience when you watch players get frustrated with your game, but we persisted at iterating and improving it a little each week. It wasn’t long before we had something that users reported was intuitive and fun to play… no small feat for a brand new type of gameplay mechanic!

With our deadline quickly approaching, we turned our attention to replayability. What would give players a reason to want to go back and replay levels they’ve already completed? The epiphany here turned out to be our scoring system. Swarm has multipliers, multipliers on multipliers, checkpoint bonuses, time bonuses and lots and lots of shiny pickups. The upshot of all of it is that whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned player, you can always work to make your score better. There is no natural maximum score on any level. And the great benefit of that is it makes the leaderboards in the game naturally quite competitive. We put your results right in your face as frequently as we can so you always see how you’re measuring up against your friends on each level. We even have the game automatically facilitate a bit of smack talk.

We’re proud of what we’ve made in Swarm: it was wrought from our indie blood, sweat and tears. We’re confident you’ll like what you see when you play it.

PSP news

Apparently aLoader is the way to be loading your PSP ISOs on 6.20 TN. So, here it is: aLoader v1.21 BETA from ardi. The package you’re about to download contains aLoader 1.20 (non-beta) and the 1.21 BETA update. The two files in the update rar — see aLoader-1.21ß-update.rar — are to be copied to the [...]
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