For this edition, I selected monsters that have left a strong impact on me personally, whether it was Dead Nation’s panic-inducing Cutter or Sackboy’s new arch-nemesis the Negativitron. Expect to see future editions of the PlayStation Monsterpedia detailing more memorable monsters from PlayStation lore, both old and new. What beasts would you like to see in the next installment? Be sure to leave your suggestions in the comments.

Codename: “WIDOWMAKER”

Height: Varies; size difference assumed to be based on varying maturity
Weight: Varies
Natural habitat: Unknown; Chimeran in origin
Defensive mechanisms: Toxic, caustic saliva; barbed fore talons; thick, chitinous armor
Weaknesses: Heavy artillery
Appears in: Resistance: Fall of Man, Resistance 3

BEHAVIOR:
The Widowmaker is the largest known feral Chimera, a wild spider-like predator that spits caustic saliva at any foes it cannot stab with its razor-sharp tarsi. Its appearance on the battlefield requires immediately engagement by all nearby units, with high casualty rates reported for both human and Chimeran forces. Widowmakers are generally solitary creatures, though scattered reports have indicated the possible existence of clans of Widowmakers stampeding through the wilderness.

Unlike the young Widowmakers Nathan Hale fought in England, fully grown Widowmakers are nearly impossible to defeat with conventional weaponry, though high explosives can prove effective. Initial data suggests that combatants that focus on the creature’s face first, then its weak points as it reacts, suffer lower casualty rates.

Codename: “DEVOURER”

Height: Approximately 25 feet tall
Weight: 7.5 tons (estimated)
Natural habitat: Marshlands surrounding New Marais
Defensive mechanisms: Powerful musculature; long, barbed tongue; thick armor plating
Weakness: Electricity; gaps between armor plates near the mouth and ribs
Appears in: inFAMOUS 2

BEHAVIOR:
The Devourer is part of The Corrupted, a race of mutant beings that have burrowed from the swamplands surrounding the city of New Marais. More precisely, The Corrupted comprise a hierarchy of organisms, including humanoid creatures equipped with long bladed arm talons as well as armored drones called Ravagers. The Devourer represents the pinnacle of The Corrupted’s unnatural evolution. The Devourer’s long, barbed tongue is prehensile, and the creature uses it to immobilize and ingest organic matter.

Eyewitness accounts from New Marais are scarce, but the Devourer is reportedly aggressive and territorial, making it exceedingly dangerous. With its vast size, enormous strength and armored exoskeleton, the Devourer presents a persistent threat to the citizens of New Marais — particularly as The Corrupted make increasingly bold incursions into inhabited urban centers. Attempts to subdue The Corrupted by local law enforcement have proven unsuccessful, sparking a small-scale arms race as mutant and human alike position for control of New Marais. A local anti-mutant vigilante group called the Militia has reported some success in keeping The Corrupted at bay, and have peddled these achievements into a local protection racket.

Speculation that The Corrupted and the Devourer were mutated as a result of local Ray Sphere experimentation warrants further investigation.

Codename: “CUTTER”

Height: 11 feet tall
Weight: Over 700 pounds
Natural habitat: Bioengineered, designed for urban environments
Defensive mechanisms: Thick, hardened carapace; machete-like talons
Weaknesses: Tactically inept
Appears in: Dead Nation

BEHAVIOR:
This lab-grown bioweapon patrols large areas and can survive for months, even years, on very little physical sustenance. The Cutter’s behavioral patterns are simple and primal, a testament to its artificial origin. Alarmingly nimble despite its towering physique, the Cutter tends to surprise its unlucky targets. Upon seeing its target the Cutter immediately charges and attempts to cleave the victim in two using its massive bladed talons.

The Cutter shows little discrimination in choosing targets, and won’t hesitate to carve through nearby reanimated corpses if they stand between it and living prey. Resourceful survivors have been known to exploit this fact as a way of negotiating the countless walking dead that now prowl the streets of major urban centers worldwide.

Codename: “VERANIDATOR”

Height: Approximately 50 feet
Weight: 6.6 tons (estimated)
Natural habitat: Any large scale urban environment
Defensive mechanisms: Multi-shot rocket launcher; hydraulic claw; immobilizing acoustic eruption
Weaknesses: Easily distracted
Appears in: Eat Them!

BEHAVIOR:
Constructed in the laboratory of noted monster scientist Dr. Wilder, the Veranidator is equipped for maximum destruction in urban environments. Its rocket launcher can be used to take out ground-based and aerial attackers, and the patented ROAR acoustic weapon will immobilize unprotected human foes. Its hydraulic claw is just as useful for smashing through structures as it is grabbing improvised weaponry from the ground.

Like all of Dr. Wilder’s creations, the Veranidator is powered by disposable fuel units commonly used in vehicles, cafes, street corners, and anywhere else civilians congregate. Dr. Wilder has bragged that the Veradinator is just one of over five million variations he can create in his state-of-the-art genetic lab.

Codename: “NEGATIVITRON”

Height: 2.6 miles, or approximately 42,000 Sackboys
Weight: The Sun
Natural habitat: The cold, empty reaches of the Cosmos; the cupboard under the stairs
Defensive mechanisms: Sucking; creating Meanies and infecting the Cosmos; telling jokes at funerals
Weaknesses: Metal toy soldiers, bits of string, Sackboy
Appears in: LittleBigPlanet 2

BEHAVIOR:
Deep in the exquisite cold of the interstellar Cosmos, the skilled Negativitron hunter must know when to hunt and when to flee. Wherever there is silence, wherever there is serenity, calm or peace, that is when the tracker must be his most wary.

With infinite patience, the Negativitron waits in the darkest corners of the Cosmos with one terrible eye always open. The hunter will receive but one warning that his quarry has turned: THE UNMISTAKABLE DEATH WOOSH OF AN 1800W BAGLESS INTERSTELLAR VACUUM CLEANER! Snarling, thrashing, sucking, The Negativitron attacks with nothing but vengeance and fury on its mind. In the vast blackness of space, a Vacuum within a vacuum. Feeding on fear, on doubt, on all those times you were told you were worthless and grew to believe it. The Negativitron will read you, search you. The more you fear it, the stronger it becomes.

And what of the hunter? For most, eternal silence and blackness. Perhaps one in a hundred will escape with his life intact, and one in a thousand with his sanity. The Negativitron is a ruthless foe, filled with cunning and empty of remorse. It will lure you, trick you, seduce you and destroy you. Yours will be but another forgotten story, a speck of dust in the nebula of forgotten heroes.

The Negativitron shall live on! Brooding, resting, waiting.

The Monster Lab. We wanted you to be able to piece together the apocalyptic creature of your worst nightmares, and the Monster Lab gives you access to a huge selection of monster parts including a full arsenal of excessively powerful weapons. This gives you the power to play mad scientist to your heart’s content, designing creatures tailor made. If you were so inclined, the Monster Lab would allow you to create over five million unique monsters – you certainly shouldn’t run out of ideas any time soon.

Challenging Missions. Whether you get your kicks from maximum destruction, or prefer to face endless waves of opposition in a bid to survive as long as possible we’ve got the game style for you. Survival, assassination, racing and pure unadulterated destruction missions are readily available in Eat Them! Ever wondered what it’s like to rob a bank using a 100 foot tall, laser firing mechanical tyrannosaur? We can answer that question – it’s freakin’ awesome.

Co-op Multiplayer. The only thing better than single-handedly destroying an entire city is teaming up with other monsters to take down an entire city. Eat Them! allows four friends to join forces and play every mission in the game in multi-player. Anything you can do in single player, you can do in multiplayer, only with far more devastating effect!

Mayhem. As the missions play out, the city’s defense forces get wise to your destructive plans and send an increasingly lethal barrage of artillery – and even superheroes – to take you out. You certainly need your wits about you to fight them off, complete the mission at hand, and stay fed. I’ll give you one guess what your primary source of nourishment is.

Eat Them! launches exclusively on PSN today! Go download and start the sheer joy of charging up to a pristine building, and letting rip until only the foundations are left!

A game can have the greatest technology in the world, the most incredible art assets, and USPs that would have marketing people salivating into their espressos, but if the controls feel wrong – if the player isn’t properly connected with the game – then everything else will be wasted.

One of the first things you do when designing any game is download a picture of the DUALSHOCK 3, cribbed from Google images, fire up your favorite drawing package, and put little lines all over it connecting buttons to boxes that describe their functions. At this stage, as an experienced designer, you make an educated guess at what’s going to work for your game. The reality is, until you get the game on the Test Kit, the controller in your hands and you actually try the thing, you may as well have been drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa.

Because customisation is a big factor in Eat Them!, each monster’s capabilities are going to be slightly different – and with four possible weapon positions on each monster, as well as kicks, grabs, jumps, and stomps – mapping all the controls, and all the while keeping things simple and intuitive, is quite challenging. Those things, however, are easily tested and changed, tweaked to accommodate new functionality and swapped to satify people whose fingers are the wrong way round – that’s the 80%.

The more dificult thing to get right is the 20%, that ever nebulous factor of whether the controls “feel” right. And that’s more than just where you hands sit – it’s how fast the camera rotates, it’s the timing of the build up to a punch, it’s the relationship between the press of the button and the action happening on-screen.

No one wants to play a game where they feel they are out of control, and the very best games make you feel you are being more than just a player sitting on the sofa mashing buttons; they put you in the shoes of a pro skateboarder, or a cage fighter, or a superhero… or in our case an ultra-destructive five storey monster.

We’re getting there – we’re now at the stage where it’s almost impossible not to indulge in a spot of destruction when loading up a level, even if you were just there to check the latest exports. It feels good to simply tool around smashing things and eating people, even without the rest of the game content layer in. That’s a very good sign that things are going in the right direction. But we will continue to refine and polish and tweak to ensure that it feels even better before release. You don’t see Godzilla struggling to unleash his atomic breath, so why should the player?

Anyhow these are the current controls for the game – let us know any thoughts:

Hello readers! This is Ana (the producer) from FluffyLogic, in Bristol, UK. We’re the developer of the Savage Moon series of games for PlayStation 3 and PSP. We’re here to blog about our new title every two weeks, with a developer diary charting progress of the game from now until you’re sick of hearing from us :)

You may, or may not, know that we demo-ed our new exclusive PlayStation 3 game for the PlayStation Network, ‘Eat Them!’ at E3 in June. In Eat Them! the player gets to create their own giant monster which they then use to smash, crash and munch their way though the city. The monster is people-powered, so eating folk is a prerequisite of keeping your monster in full-on destruction mode. The game features eye-catching ‘comic-style’ graphics, fully customisable monster creation and lots and lots of smashing things. The player has the option of single-player and split-screen multiplayer, head-to-head and co-operative missions. Eat Them! promises action, mayhem, destruction, humour and, did i mention?…eating people! The game is scheduled for release this winter. Here’s what it looks like:

So where do the ideas behind Eat Them! come from? I am a big fan of monster movies – the old-school films where a guy in a giant rubber suit goes mad in a model city while the cameras roll…I wanted to be able to do just that… I also love comics; from the 50s horror and sci-fi classics to 70s Hammer Horror Fanzines. And finally, I love games that have a strong destructive vibe – the truth is – smashing stuff is fun! I also really, really wanted to be able to eat people….in a friendly, “I’m just a monster, I can’t help it” kind of a way. So we put all that into a digital blender and the result (so far) is Eat Them!

So I hope you’ll join us over the next few months as we share with you the process of game development from here to release.

Thanks & see you in two weeks…