Here it is, a video of the full demonstration that we showed to the press at E3, all 15 minutes of it. We’d love to know what you think at our forums at www.irrationalgames.com.

-Ken (@iglevine)

This year we showcased one of the strongest software lineups in our history, including many creative and show stopping titles for the upcoming PlayStation Vita, family friendly options for PlayStation Move and an amazing lineup of AAA titles and franchise favorites for PS3. The positive response we received from our community was overwhelming, and the confirmation from E3 judges was very gratifying. In fact, PlayStation hardware and software was nominated for more than 140 awards at E3 this year. Here’s a look at just a few of the accolades we received:

PlayStation Vita

G4TV.com, “Best New Hardware”
GameCritics: “Best Hardware”
Game Informer: “Best Tech”

Journey

Examiner.com: “Best Living Artwork”
GamesBeat/VentureBeat: “Best Games of E3 2011”
G4TV.com: “Best Downloadable”

Sound Shapes

IGN: “Best Music/Rhythm Game”
GameTrailers: “Best Music Game”
GameCritics: “Best Handheld/Mobile Game”

Twisted Metal

Attack of the Fanboy: “Best of E3 PlayStation 3”
PlayStation: The Official Magazine: “Most Valuable Game”
VGChartz: “Best Multiplayer”

UNCHARTED 3: Drake’s Deception

G4TV.com: “Best Action/Adventure Game”
GameTrailers: “Best Multiplayer,” “Best 3D Graphics,” “Best Graphics”
Yahoo! Games: “Best of E3 2011”

UNCHARTED: Golden Abyss

Game Informer: “Best Handheld Game”
E! Online: “Top 10 Games of E3”
Game Trailers: “Best PlayStation Vita Game”

The year ahead will be a memorable one for PlayStation fans everywhere. The introduction of innovative hardware such as PS Vita and the PlayStation 3D Display will set the bar high when it comes to both quality and creativity. PlayStation Vita will provide gamers with the highest definition handheld gaming experiences, delivering new ways to play at home and on-the-go. In addition, the PlayStation 3D Display will offer PS3 users and their friends the ability to face-off with the exclusive two-player mode and provide easy access to all of their favorite 3D entertainment. Developers meanwhile will have more ways than ever to challenge and change the way people play and experience PlayStation games.

We are continuing to work closely with the global community of Worldwide Studios game developers and partners to deliver innovative games and content for the entire family of PlayStation hardware. I’m personally looking forward to all of the great software titles launching in the upcoming months, including Resistance 3, Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One and Twisted Metal. We’ve got some great new PlayStation Move titles coming as well, including Medieval Moves: Deadmund’s Quest, and Carnival Island. And of course…we’ve got all kinds of great PlayStation Vita titles in the works, including Uncharted: Golden Abyss, ModNation Racers, LittleBigPlanet and Sound Shapes. Too much goodness to talk about in one little blog post…

Thanks to all of the great PlayStation fans out there who helped make E3 2011 one to remember!

Thanks,
Scott
Twitter: @RohdeScott

Coming out of E3 a few weeks ago, we at thatgamecompany couldn’t be more excited about the reception our latest game, Journey, received from both the press and general showgoers. Journey is our third exclusive game with SCEA’s Santa Monica Studio for PS3 and PSN, and we’re trying something new, something that we hope changes the way people think about online gaming.

As you may have heard, in Journey, players take on the role of travelers headed to a mysterious mountain in the distance. But unlike our previous two games, flow and Flower, Journey presents our vision of what an online adventure can be. As you explore Journey, you may cross paths with other travelers. You can join and play with up to one other player at a time.

But what makes Journey different is that there are no online lobbies, no matchmaking, no PSN IDs, and no chat. You are the character, limited to the ways of communication of the character itself. Will you choose to travel together – or go your own way? What secrets lie in the mysterious, sand-covered ruins of this world?

We had a great time at E3 talking to all of the press that stopped by the Sony booth. And we couldn’t be more proud after Journey took home some great awards like PlayStation: The Official Magazine’s Most Valuable Game award, Machinima’s Best Downloadable Game award and Examiner’s Living Art award, as well as Best PS3 game nominations from IGN, G4TV and GameSpy, as well as a Best Original Game nomination from the E3 Game Critics.

To test Journey’s innovative and unusual multiplayer functionality, we are conducting a small, invite-only beta that will run tomorrow, June 28 and will run through July 12. If you were one of the very earliest adopters of Flower, and you are a PS Plus subscriber as well, watch your XMB inbox for your invitation and entry into the beta. Additionally, we’ve been able to free up a limited number of additional spots for the beta. Please check thatgamecompany’s Facebook page, here on the PlayStation Blog, or our media partners and their sites for code give-aways.

We will be inviting players to join our weekly play sessions in order to help test our network code and all of the technical stuff running in the background of the game. You will also be able to provide feedback to the team on your experience. These sessions will take place on Tuesdays from 6 PM to 10 PM PST.

Thanks, and keep watching the blog, and our Facebook page, for the latest on Journey.

Bodycount is an adrenaline-inducing, explosive torrent of action, destruction and gun ecstasy. It’s an FPS that puts the fun back into firepower. But these words can barely do it justice, so here’s our brand new gameplay trailer from E3.

Right off the bat you can see the explosive boom-stick that is the shotgun, and it really sums up what Bodycount is. This isn’t just another shooter; this is a gun centerfold that gives you amazingly satisfying guns that you will never forget. The mantra in the team has been ‘gun, bullet, world’ – everything is focused on the experience of squeezing the trigger, hearing bullets tear through the air and watching them obliterate enemies and the environment. Every gun has been carefully crafted for your gaming pleasure. Bodycount has everything from a deadly pistol all the way up to super-charged futuristic weaponry used by your elusive enemies, ‘The Target’.

Bullets, naturally, are never in short supply and but it’s their effect in the world that completes this glorious firing feedback loop as you shred through enemies and the environment. Whether it’s wood, glass, body armor… it rips up and splinters as you unleash the pain on the world around you. It doesn’t just look cool and make you feel great, but it gives you the opportunity to rip through your enemies cover, and they in turn yours. It makes for an unstoppable river of pyrotechnics as you travel the globe you get to tear through warzones in Africa, city streets in Asia and mysterious bases as you hunt the ‘Target’ across the globe.

There’s only so much we can fit into one blog post, so this is where we hand the reins over to you. Have you got a question for the developers? Who are the ‘Target’? Perhaps you want to know what multiplayer modes are up for grabs? Whatever your question just put it into the comments and we’ll pick it up for a Community Q&A in the following weeks.

If you want to keep tabs on all things Bodycount don’t forget that you can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. You can even speak directly to the Games Director, Andy Wilson (@andygwilson) and Andrew Parsons our Experienced Level Designer (@AP_Codies) on twitter.

Puzzle-platformers are no rare breed on PSN, but one upcoming title, Papo & Yo, is looking to revitalize the genre in a number of intriguing ways. Introduced in early June on the PlayStation.Blog, Papo & Yo tells the story of Quico, a young boy who has an unlikely best friend: a giant hulking beast named, appropriately, Monster. Together, the duo must navigate an ethereal world that’s reminiscent of a South American town but is set entirely in Quico’s imagination. The world itself is made up of dream-like neighborhoods to roam and populated with puzzles to solve.

After getting my hands on the game at E3, it didn’t take long to notice the unique approach developer Minority is taking when it comes to navigation and puzzle solving. Controlling Quico from a third-person perspective, I wandered a bit around Papo & Yo’s surreal world. Players can easily run and jump around the expansive environments, and also use visual cues to direct Monster (as well as a cute little flying robot named Lula) to points of interest. Utilizing all three characters to solve puzzles is key to progressing in the game, and once you learn a few basics—Monster is good at moving heavy objects, for example, and Lula can reach high areas inaccessible to Quico—the gameplay becomes surprisingly intuitive.

What really impressed me while playing is how the world changes according to Quico’s actions. Picking up a series of unassuming boxes near a line of houses causes the actual individual houses to lift off the ground and move according to where Quico places the boxes. Placing the boxes inside a nearby chalk outline causes the houses to create a rooftop bridge for Quico to cross. The entire segment really helped highlight the dream-like nature of Papo & Yo’s world.

There is, however, a dark side to Papo & Yo. If Monster happens to come across a poisonous frog (his favorite snack) and eat it, he’ll be thrown into a frenzied rage that puts Quico’s life in danger. Papo & Yo creative director Vander Caballero explained that Monster’s addiction to poisonous frogs is meant as an analogy to his own father’s substance abuse, which greatly affected the developer when he was a young boy (like Quico). Preventing Monster from eating the frogs, or hightailing Quico away from him if he does, is key to survival throughout the game.

There’s still plenty more of Papo & Yo that I can’t wait to see, but the game is already looking and playing wonderfully. Keep your eyes on the PlayStation.Blog for more news down the line.

Executive Producer Jason Delong joined us on our E3 livestream and presented a radically different vision for Need for Speed — one in which you’re not always behind the wheel. I’ve always been a huge fan of all things fast, and Need for Speed has been a long time favorite racing franchise of mine, so when Jason walked us through The Run, I was skeptical at first — but by the end, I was sold on the newest Need for Speed.

Check out the video above for a full in-depth walk-through.

How does it feel to be bringing Hitman back after such a long time away?

TB: It feels super great. Part of time was spent building a brand new engine from scratch. We looked at all the previous Hitman titles and said, “Okay, there’s a lot of DNA here, what do we want to improve?” We looked at everything, from Agent 47 himself – how does he move? what can he do? – to the AI. We had quite a few binary reactions in the old games, where if you got discovered it turned into a bit of a clumsy combat situation. We wanted to widen that a lot. Obviously we still have a lot of stealth elements in the game.

Let’s say you get discovered by a police officer. He won’t immediately try to shoot you, he’ll attempt to arrest you. This means that in Hitman: Absolution we have a bit of rubber-banding, a bit of leeway to try things out. You can back away, find a dark corner or try to disarm him.

We created a lot of different scenarios. So for example there’s a kind of hippies’ apartment which Agent 47 enters disguised as a police officer. These guys don’t like cops, so this disguise is not a good idea in there. But they won’t just attack you without warning. They’ll want to know why you’re there and warn you off. Of course, they might try to attack you, but that’s probably not going to end well for them.

Now, if you go in there dressed as Agent 47, they probably would allow you to be there, even though you’re trespassing and would arouse suspicion. There’s a lot for us to play around with.

So a lot of the experience will depend on you reacting to what’s going on around you?

CE: Yes, you need to play with your eyes open. Disguises play a big part here to alter how the game pans out in front of you. A lot of the disguises have their own attributes, and the Instinct system ties in there too. Instinct allows you to see potential challenges in real time. If you’re disguised and it’s cop versus cop then you can try to bluff them and sneak away to save ammo.

Is Instinct always available?

CE: No, Instinct is an economy. You have to earn it by doing the sorts of things a real hitman might do – by carrying out silent kills, successully concealing bodies and bluffing a large number of people, for example. You have to use it carefully on the most expert difficulty settings, while it’s more prevalent on the easier ones.

The demo we saw was set in a rain-lashed Chicago. Is the whole game set there?

TB: I can’t get into specifics there I’m afraid, but there are a lot of locations and Agent 47 will be collecting his air miles.

What’s the nature of Agent 47′s assignment this time?

TB: It’s a much more personal journey for Agent 47. He’s completely invested in the story, and we see an interesting turning point where he gets betrayed. This sets him off on a hunt for the truth, but, of course, it’s still very much about finding people and killing them.

There’s a real sense of non-playable characters’ micro-dramas happening all around you.

CE: Well an open world game needs to feel alive, so that’s what we’ve gone for here. The characters can do so many different things according to the situation. Along with the cinematic sequences, this has been the toughest thing for us to get right, hence us having to build our own brand new tool set and basically attack it from any angle.

If you take out the guy that was supposed to turn on the lights in a room, it changes the situation completely. Every action, however small, has its own consequence.

TB: We have a rookie cop character who has been called out with his colleagues to a library which Agent 47 is stalking round. This new guy is always getting told off by his sergeant, and you can actually distract him. He will go off and investigate before carrying on with his own little story. If you take a different path through the library, you can see his story unfold from a different perspective.

This allows you to play with your morals – you can kill the rookie without a second thought, or isolate his sergeant and kill him instead, giving the new guy a bit of a break. We really wanted to include a lot of this kind of stuff. Imagine playing through this big, dark library without this and it’s just a normal stealth game. It loses a defining Hitman characteristic. Nothing else has that. Whichever way you play it, it should always be entertaining.

Do you create the characters first, then build the game around them?

CE: It goes into a big jumble. Often we think of a cool disguise then devise a way to get it into the game, like the chicken suit in Hitman: Blood Money.

We sometimes think of the situation first then devise the characters to populate that – like the library full of cops. Pacing is always top priority, so anything that can add variety is a good thing because it makes the player think differently.

Who dreams up the various ways to assassinate people?

TB: We had a base of mechanics from Hitman: Blood Money that we started off with, and we added to that whatever people could come up with. Plus, many of the improvised weapons are location specific, so you wouldn’t find too many heavy books outside of the library.

So does that mean people from IO Interactive go home at night and sit there thinking up ingenious ways to kill people?

TB: Yeah! People come in the next day and go, “Hey! I had this great idea last night about pushing a cop off a ledge”, or whatever. Everyone’s a closet hitman.

I’m back in Kyoto after a rip-roaring time at E3 where we revealed not one but two games: PixelJunk lifelike, which you can see a bit of in this previous blog post, and PixelJunk sidescroller — a title no one was expecting and took a lot of people by surprise just as we intended!

When we were wrapping up PixelJunk Shooter 2 a number of us here at Q-Games felt an undeniable urge to create a homage to the old school side-scrolling shooters that we grew up with…so we did and here it is! We went totally overboard on the special effects though and even threw in an incredibly realistic simulation of an old CRT monitor for good measure. The effect is so realistic that at E3 people’s heads were turning and we were questioned as to why we were using such an old TV! It looks really retro-awesome! :-)

Give the video a look to see it in action! We’ll be back soon to share more before PixelJunk sidescroller lands on PSN later this summer.

Who’s responsible for ensuring an awesome PS Vita launch lineup? People like Scott Rohde, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Studios Product Development at SCEA.

In our E3 interview, Scott Rohde talks about the making of Vita and the flexibility of the platform. It’s safe to say that fans of traditional button-and-analog-stick controls will be satisfied, all while incorporating innovative new interfaces like the back touch panel.

I’ve got to say, I love working for a company where a senior vice president doesn’t wear a suit. Like, ever.

Here we have the interview in which Baiyon does a live performance of his new collaborative title: PixelJunk lifelike! This title garnered a lot of buzz during the show. It’s nearly impossible to explain what it is, so Baiyon and Dylan decided to show us what PixelJunk lifelike is all about. While it may not be a game, per se, it definitely is a game changer! Hope you enjoy the video and Baiyon’s performance.