Mercury Hg Slides onto PSN This Tuesday

41 8
Mercury Hg Slides onto PSN This Tuesday

If you enjoy casual, pick-up-and-play puzzle games, then get ready for an experience, because Mercury Hg is going to rock – and roll! From the developers of Polar Panic and Arctic Adventures comes an update to this PSP classic.

First, a bit of history about the periodic table of the elements. Mercury is metal that has a peculiar trait: it’s a liquid at room temperature! It’s also a highly toxic substance to play with — unless it’s done digitally, of course. In Mercury Hg, the core premise is to guide a blob of mercury around a tilting puzzle maze while collecting bonuses, reaching the finish as quickly as possible with as much of the blob left as you can.

Mercury was first released on the PSP in 2005, and updated again in 2006 as Mercury Meltdown. This Tuesday, we’ll be releasing it in HD for the first time as Mercury Hg – pun intended! When UTV Ignition approached us to develop a PS3 version of their popular IP, we wanted to update the franchise to appeal to today’s gamer. We designed an entirely new look for the game, drawing inspiration from the visual style of Apple and games such as wipEout and Mirror’s Edge.

Mercury Hg for PS3 (PSN)

We wanted to go far beyond a simple “re-skinning” of the old game, so we explored ways to make the levels more visually engaging. From the start we knew we wanted the soundtrack to be an integral part of the experience, so we tied that into the design with parts of the levels and backgrounds glowing and pulsing in time with the music.

What else is new? We’ve kept the basic premise of the game: getting the blob of mercury from the start to the finish, keeping as much of the blob intact as possible, mixing in colours, plus the splitting and merging mechanics. We’ve streamlined a majority of the elements within the levels, making the game more accessible and balancing the game for both the casual gamer and veterans alike. Unlocking new content is now a lot easier, as the levels themselves are easier to complete. The majority of them fit into the 30-60 second time frame if played well, though some are shorter and some are longer. We followed a “two-minutes, max” philosophy for all the levels, so it will never take more than two minutes to achieve 100% completion. This reduces the frustration that players had at losing their last drop of mercury after playing a level for five minutes and gives the game more pick-up-and-play feel. And because replayability is an important aspect for us, each level has a leaderboard based on score and time, as well as a ghost replay system.

Mercury Hg for PS3 (PSN)Mercury Hg for PS3 (PSN)

Music plays a major role in the look and feel of Mercury Hg. The blob pulses to the beat of the music as do the backgrounds and tiles, and the game supports custom soundtracks so you can stream in your own music from various sources to create a kind of personalized interactive jukebox. It also made sense to support the Sixaxis functionality of the DualShock 3 wireless controllers, something that was discussed at length on the original title but never came to fruition. Sixaxis adds a different element of skill to the game: some will prefer it, others will prefer the original analog stick control scheme. Try them both!

There are 120 levels across the main game and two DLC packs, with each level being named after one of the periodic table elements. Science geeks may note that there are only 118 recognised elements — we took the liberty of adding a couple more, maybe the IUPAC will consider those names when element 119 & 120 have been proven to exist! Additionally, there are 40 bonus level variants across the main game and DLC packs, in which the player starts off with a small blob of Mercury and must navigate the level collecting the other blobs in order to finish. There are also 20 challenges spread across the main game and DLC, and these require the player to meet a set of tricky criteria across a set of levels.

Mercury Hg hits PSN on Tuesday, September 27th for $4.99, along with the first DLC pack Heavy Elements; a second DLC pack will follow in the coming months. Mercury Hg is one of the slickest puzzle games to have been released on PS3 – download the demo this Tuesday and give it a try for yourself!

Comments are closed.

41 Comments

8 Author Replies

  • looks fun, give it a try i think

  • These kinds of games are fun layback time wasters :D yay

  • DUDE! MERCURY! HUZZAH!! SO PSYCHED!!! WOOO!!!! and good God is $5 a good price!

  • Clearly this caters to the dedicated nerd — count me in!!

  • Cool, a new game (kind of) for $5.00.

    Still, I won’t be getting it. However, you put it on sale for $2.50, and many thousands will purchase this.

  • Bought! I liked the last Mercury game I tried (on the Wii) and I’m glad this has SIXAXIS support!
    And LOVE the price!

  • in a small way, kinda reminds me of the old Marble Madness games….

  • @7 lyfestory

    loll that is what i was about to say

  • Does this support Move?

    • Hi. I’m the Brand Manager and I’ll try to answer the questions that I can.

      Unfortunately, It does not support Move.

  • Is Chemistry Cat anywhere in the game? :p

  • I had it foe the PSP and thought it was pretty good. But it also pissed me off allot.

    • First off, apologies from all of us at Eiconic – we’ve been real busy trying to get the next project in place.

      Hi Jeff, yeah, we had quite a few comments regarding the difficulty of the previous titles. As mentioned we’ve aimed at making Mercury Hg vastly more accessible; The levels can be completed quicker with each level having a number of different targets for completion.

      All I can say is download the demo and give it a go. Hopefully you’ll remember just how good Mercury is and go on to purchase the full game – it’s worth every cent!

  • Reminds me of Marble Madness back in the day on NES. I’m buying this.

  • I think I’ll be getting this. $5 sounds tempting.

  • Marble Madness is the first thing that comes to my mind…

  • $5 USD + a demo….I’ll have to check this out.

  • Cool! Wish the demo was out today but I’ll add it to my to-do list for next week! and for $5 sounds like fun and interesting. Any chance this will have trophies? How about a PS Vita version? Obviously it was for PSP back then but want to see more updates!

  • YESSSSSSSS

    I´ve LOVED Mercury Meltdown remix on the PS2.

  • Awesome, I loved these games before.

  • 5 bucks isn’t a bad deal. I had this series on the PSP.

  • finally, someone remembered why the dualshock it’s also called SIXAXIS

    • So SIXAXIS was something that we wanted in from the beginning and trying to balance this to please all of our tastes was a challenge, will be interested in hearing your feedback. There is the Dualshock twin stick support as well for those looking for that type of control.

  • I love how you guys took the cell shading away. It makes the game SO slick.

    • Part of the original design brief. We wanted to make Mercury Hg really stand out, not only from its predecessors but also from a vast majority of other games out there at the moment. Download and enjoy!

  • $4.99?!!!!
    SOLD!
    I’ve been craving a game like this.
    Thanks!

    Will Move support be coming?

  • Oh jeez, this game gave me quite the headache on the PSP….

    $5 though, I’ll give it another shot, it should be a lot easier to make precision movement using the DualShock’s analog stick than the PSP’s small analog nub.

    Does this include all the stages from the original two Mercurys? If not, how about a possible DLC pack for them?

    • Not so many headaches this time around, hopefully :)

      Mercury Hg control is vastly improves with the twin sticks and camera control.

      The original stages from both games are not in this version as we’ve redesign most of the elements. That said, there is no reason for them not to be in there and could be done as additional DLC packs. Hassle Yoh, I’m sure he’ll push something through :)

  • Looks interesting. I will give it a try.

  • S O L D ! ! ! ! ! ! !

    SIXAXIS CONTROLS = BRILLIANT!!!!

  • The price is certainly right for this! I love these kinds of casual puzzle games, and Mercury Meltdown was a fav on my friend’s Wii :)

    from the screenshots, it looks like it’s not 1080p, any technical reason why?

    but 720p + AA + the cool depth-of-field effect make up for it :)

    any co-op DLC?

    who’s doing the music? is it losslessly compressed? (worst part of the Wii Mercury Meltdown was the awful audio quality)

    Cubixx HD, now this.. great time to be a PSN gamer! :)

  • Thanks for the news! I’ve been looking forward to this game. I was planning on the PSN version, especially if you included sixaxis support, and you did, thanks!

  • Avatar photo

    Everyone: Hi. Thank you for your support. We appreciate it! I’m going to try and see if Graeme can answer your questions directly. If not, I’ll try and get the answers.

  • Shamone Graeme, answer the questions, shamone! ;)

  • Is this going to be a PSN exclusive?

  • does anybody notice that Hg is mercury’s elemental symbol?

  • $5! WOW! can i get an amen…..

    • We wanted the game to look as slick as possible and react quickly. The fill rate for 1080p meant that the screen refresh would have been much lower than the 60fps that we wanted.

      The depth of field effect is something that we’re really pleased with and glad that you like it too. Antialiasing is done as part of the post processing after rendering, and is often called “edge based” antialiasing. We do it this way as we use deferred rendering techniques on the SPUs to push the per-pixel lighting effects as much as we could on the PS3.

      Co-op DLC is something that is being considered for the future, there are some really interesting ideas that we’re developing and we’ll let you know as and when we can release more details.

      Music has been done by two artists, Jilk and Sugar Jesus. The music is MP3 format (128kb/s) as standard and so is not in a lossless format. That said if the PS3 will let us play it, you can play it in the game and have the levels dancing to your own tracks.

  • Ooooh! $4.99, great price! Def will buy! ;)

  • Finally my favorite PSP game comes to PS3 yaaaay =D

  • A new Mercury game? Yes please!
    Loved the original games on the PSP and was always a little bummed that I couldn’t play it by tilting my PSP the way I’ve seen the game shown off before, so I’m really glad to see the Sixaxis support!

    Love the whole music upgrade the game got, and all for just $5? Sold!
    Looking forward to the release next week!

  • I love Mercury and Meltdown on my PSP. Worth it on the PS3 for $5.00.

  • Once again apologies for the delay. We will endeavour to keep on top your questions and comments. If there is anything we’ve missed, let me know and we’ll address it.

    Happy Mercury Hg Launch Day!!!

Please enter your date of birth.

Date of birth fields