We are proud to announce that Zombie Tycoon 2: Brainhov’s Revenge is launching on PlayStation Store today. Since it’s Cross-Play and Cross-Buy, you’ll get both PS Vita and PlayStation 3 versions for just $9.99. PlayStation Plus members in the US can pick it up for free!

Here’s a quick recap, in case you didn’t read our earlier posts. Zombie Tycoon 2: Brainhov’s Revenge is a real-time strategy game. However, it’s not your classic RTS with resource gathering, base building and tech-tree climbing. No, it’s pure, unadulterated tactical zombie assault! You’ve got two zombie packs, a mobile base and a monster at your beck and call, each controlled using a different symbol button on the controller.

In multiplayer mode, both teams start out at the opposite ends of the map. As they move across town toward an inevitable confrontation, they capture buildings that grant diverse benefits. The more buildings you take, the more zombies you have and the more special zombies you unlock.

Trophy hunters out there will be happy to hear that Zombie Tycoon 2 is brimming with trophies. The most hardcore players will even have the opportunity to unlock a Platinum!

If you guys have any questions, post them in the comments section or on our Facebook page, and I’ll answer them all as soon as possible. I can’t wait for my zombie army to meet yours in Finkleville. Get ready for some zombie vs. zombie action!

When we announced the release of Zombie Tycoon 2 right here on PlayStation.Blog, we were purposely a bit vague about the gameplay. But, now that the game’s release is only weeks away, we’ve got nothing to hide!

Zombie Tycoon 2 is a tactical real-time strategy game in which you will lay waste to your enemies by controlling two squads of zombies, one hero-like monster, and one zombie-spawning vehicle. We use the term ‘tactical’ because the game is all about managing your units and deciding how to tackle the warzone. There are no resources to gather, no structures to build, and no tech-tree to climb. As you capture buildings, your zombie army grows, you unlock the ability to transform your zombies, your monster gains levels, and you expand your control over the battlefield.

Our biggest challenge as a developer was coming up with controls that not only work well, but feel intuitive on both PS3 and PS Vita. And guess what? Impressions so far are unanimous: we pulled it off! Your squads of zombies are linked to two of your face buttons, while the other two buttons control your monster and your spawner. All four of your monster’s active abilities are mapped on the directional pad.

Throughout the single-player campaign, you’ll learn everything there is to know about the two factions, the different zombie types, and the monster units. On one side, you’ve got Orville Tycoon and his old-school, hulking zombies, who are just about done invading Finkleville. On the other, you’ve got his former boss, Archibald Brainhov and his army of fast and frantic zombies. To say that he’s got a score to settle with his former apprentice is a monumental understatement!

There are six different types of zombies (seven, if you count the starter zombies), and four epic monsters to mess with. Each zombie type is unlocked by capturing a special building, while the monster is selected before starting a game. I’ll briefly go over each unit, to give you an idea of how your tactical skills will be put to the test.

Brawler zombies are pumped-up starter zombies. They hit harder and are much, much tougher. Every time they strike, they have a chance of stunning their target, making them perfect front line units.

Scavengers are the only zombies with the ability to attack from a distance. They can throw garbage, TV sets or sign posts at their enemies. Team them up with brawlers for a killer combo!

Engineer zombies are not battlefield material. But they are highly tactical units with the unique ability to capture buildings twice as fast as any other. These are better used when you feel that your army is at no risk of engaging the enemy in close combat.

Samurai zombies are swift and deadly. They hit a lot harder than brawler zombies but are more fragile. With the ability to charge at their victims, they are perfect for assaulting unsuspecting squads of engineers or scavengers.

Cleaner zombies can move through and neutralize chemical waste, but more importantly, they explode upon death, dealing damage to all nearby enemy units and leaving puddles of toxic goo on the ground.

The silly-looking Scout zombies are perfect for spying on your enemies. These fast-moving units skulk around unnoticed by neutral humans and structures, and when they take root they become completely invisible and regenerate health.

You can find detailed information on all four monsters on our official blog. We’re closing in on the game’s release date — April 30th. Stay tuned to our Facebook page — we might have a few codes to give away!

If you have any questions about the gameplay, storyline, development, or anything else, I’ll be shambling around the comments section to answer them.

We at Frima Studio are excited to announce that the sequel to the best selling PlayStation Mini Zombie Tycoon is coming on April 30th! Zombie Tycoon 2: Brainhov’s Revenge will be a full-fledged, Cross Play and Cross Buy enabled digital title available for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita on PlayStation Network!

Pick your side in the epic war between two evil masterminds: apprentice-gone-rogue Orville Tycoon and his army of heavy-duty zombies, or his vengeance-thirsty mentor Professor Brainhov and his frantic masses of agile undead! Post Z-day, Tycoon’s mad machination to extinguish all life in Finkleville has almost reached its apogee. During the final siege on the human fortress, his former mentor makes a sudden comeback, seeking retribution for his apprentice’s betrayal and eager to reclaim his rightful place as alpha mad scientist. Only one question remains: who shall win? Slow zombies, or fast zombies? Find out as undead armies clash in both the immersive single player campaign and the competitive multiplayer mode!

The multiplayer mode pits Brainhov and his fast, ravenous zombies against Tycoon and his army of shambling, slow zombies in a one versus one deathmatch. Pick a side and unleash your zombie hordes to destroy the mobile base commanded by your rival scientist. To achieve that, you will be given control of two packs of zombies and a powerful monster unit to gain control over various buildings, level up and ultimately face off in an epic battle!

Zombie Tycoon 2: Brainhov’s Revenge is a Cross Play, Cross Buy title – Vita players can face off against PlayStation 3 players in online multiplayer and vice-versa – and for a single purchase, you will be able to play on either console!

Stay tuned! As we get closer to the launch date, we’ll be releasing more details about the story, the different units and monsters and other goodies. In the meantime, follow @ZombieTycoon on Twitter and join us on Facebook.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to share them with us in the comment section — we’re really eager to chat with you guys!

Last year, my team at Frima Studio set out to create the ultimate PlayStation Move party game and in just a few weeks the whole world can enjoy the fruit of our labor on PSN. Lights, Camera, Party! embodies everything we think a party game should be; fast-paced, funny, quick to set up, social and full of a variety of mini-games, challenges and Trophies for a fresh experience each time you play. With only one Move controller required to play, it keeps the whole family on their feet and frantically passing the controller between fits of laughter.

You and your friends will step into the shoes of the Funzinis, a family forced to compete in an array of wild game shows to win a new home after the TV station’s satellite crash lands in their living room. In the primary Story mode, up to four players guide the Funzini family through five rounds, each modeled after a type of TV show (Cooking, News, Sci-Fi, and so on) that contain up to 24 fast-paced mini games. Other modes support up to eight players and feature selections of Lights, Camera, Party!’s 50 mini-games in a variety of challenging formats.

In Lights, Camera, Party! you and the controller are always moving, keeping everybody engaged and tensely waiting for their chance to blast alien ships, whack piñatas, escape rabid dogs, and save the family!

Hello again PlayStation.Blog universe! Since we last stopped by to exclusively reveal the new trailer for Young Thor here back in August, we’ve been hard at work on the next game for all you Sony fans out there. We’re happy to report that it’s nearly complete and most certainly continues our tradition of delivering some of the highest quality and rewarding experiences available on the platform. So, what’s next in 2010 from Frima, the studio that brought you Zombie Tycoon, Widgets Odyssey I and II and Young Thor? The answer lies in the cosmos with A Space Shooter for Two Bucks!

With what we feel may be the most appropriate and what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) titles in gaming history, A Space Shooter for Two Bucks! is what the Frima Studio team has been working on for the last portion of 2010 and is one of the most exciting minis we’ve ever seen. For the ridiculously low price point of – yep, you guess it, $1.99 – it’s also one of the most value-rich shooters ever. And as a bonus, A Space Shooter for Two Bucks! is quite historic – when it launches on Tuesday, December 21, it will also be available absolutely FREE to all PlayStation Plus subscribers, marking the first time a game has launched to the general PSN public and also made free for Plus users on the same date!

About the game itself…well, hopefully you can guess what kind of game it is from the title. :P

We’re a big fan of the classic space shooting genre here at Frima Studio, and it’s been a real thrill to create one ourselves and being able to add everything we love about space shooters and omit everything we don’t. A Space Shooter for Two Bucks! features everything you’d expect: swarms of enemies filling the screens with hazardous bullets and missiles, heaps of upgrades for your ship and its arsenal, high-paced and constant action requiring deft reflexes, and hordes of alien baddies just waiting to be blown up by your superior space-faring skills.

A Space Shooter for Two Bucks! also contains some truly colorful characters that you’ll get to meet during gameplay and cutscenes. You’ll wipe the galaxy clean of nefarious extra-terrestrials by taking control of Commander P. Jefferson, a truly patriotic earthling who has vowed from an early age to keep the human race number one in the universe, where it belongs! His xenophobic quest is assisted by Edgar, his ship’s somewhat persnickety artificial intelligence (AI) that guides Jefferson to various galaxies and provides helpful information, but always with plenty of snobby sarcasm piled on his replies.

We’re also proud to report that A Space Shooter for Two Bucks! features a complete soundtrack of full voiceovers for Jefferson, Edgar and all the rest of the characters you’ll encounter throughout your journey, both good and evil. We’re excited to have a team with the technical expertise and experience with this platform to be able to squeeze full voiceover into a game that looks and plays fantastically and will give you hours of intergalactic enjoyment in a package under 100MB.

Again, A Space Shooter for Two Bucks! launches on Tuesday, December 21 for $1.99, so keep an eye out and stay tuned to the PlayStation.Blog for more information and assets. Happy alien hunting cadets!

Last week’s launch of Young Thor has been a tremendous occasion for our studio, and finally launching one of the biggest mini titles to date has brought up a lot of warm praise and even some questions from the fans. In short, I’d love to take this opportunity to tell you how this project came about, and fill you in on our unique approach to minis.

Nearly three years ago, an idea came to us for a project surrounding a fresh take on Norse mythology. We wanted to make something that we’d enjoy as hardcore gamers, but also something for all ages that our families could dive into at the same time. While we weren’t exactly sure where we would decide to take the game, our imaginations ran wild before we got into the actual game design itself. We created our own animated short for Young Thor that helped us wrap our heads around what we wanted to do. Once finished, we all knew that we still wanted to tell this story in game form, but we wanted to do so in the same vein as an animated short.

At the time, there just wasn’t really a platform for that.

We DID know that we loved the PlayStation platform, but we didn’t want to stretch things into a full-on retail game, nor did we want to go as big as a downloadable PSN game. We needed a format that could help us encapsulate the essence of a short animated film, yet retain the feel of the all-out epic adventure we wanted to enjoy. By 2009, we knew that Sony had exactly what we were looking for when the PlayStation minis were first announced.

This is what lead us to the launch of our first mini, Zombie Tycoon, a ghoulish take on the RTS genre that was designed to be played in as short or as long of bursts as needed. Once we wrapped on that project, we finally had time to go back to the drawing board on Young Thor. Not only did this mean a total redesign of the characters and the logo, this also meant we were faced with the challenge of creating not necessarily a ‘full-length’ action epic, but a ‘mini-length’ action epic. A game that would fit the tone for what minis are all about, yet still retain all of the same production value as a full-blown retail game.

I’d say that overall, this was definitely the most challenging piece of new territory for us, rethinking a lot of how we knew games could be presented and trying something fresh. In our story, we wanted Young Thor to travel through rich and vibrant environments, but we also only wanted to focus in on four of the Norse realms where we would follow him on his journey. This meant that we would give the player an epic experience, bashing their way through all four worlds, upgrading experience and finding rare items – but this also meant keeping the experience brief, or ‘mini’, as you will. This was an idea we fell in love with, but also wanted to see if we could flesh things out for the hardcore players like us. With this notion, we gave players the option to re-explore those same levels with a completely different set of enemies and challenges, also giving 50 different achievements to complete. This was precisely our goal: a short, epic story for everyone with plenty extra packed in for the hardcore gamers like us.

This is why we love the minis so much. We have the ability to create something for everyone, tell our stories, hook players in just long enough to finish, and then give them even more gameplay on top of it. We encourage players to check out all of our minis, and not to miss Widgets Odyssey II which launched this week and which echoes many of our same approaches we had with Young Thor. I also want to thank everyone again for supporting Frima, and we look forward to continuing our delivery of quality games on minis that come from big ideas.

Today we’re showing off the final trailer for Young Thor, which will be launching next week for minis on PSP and PS3. Our team has had a ton of fun creating titles for minis like Zombie Tycoon and the recent Widgets Odyssey, but Young Thor represents a completely new milestone in our efforts. Built entirely for minis from the ground up to look great when played on either system, we wanted to deliver a truly epic action title that pushes the boundaries for what a minis title can become, and it’s anything but tiny. Check out the official launch trailer below!

A fresh take on iconic Norse Mythology, the game has been inspired by some of the best action-platformers and beat-em up brawlers around. You’ll need to pummel your way through Midgard, the world of men, and Asgard, the world of the gods, with over a dozen different attacks and special powers if you should ever hope to save the world tree Yggdrasil. While I don’t want to spoil anything, we also have a mountain of 50 different in-game achievables to unlock throughout Thor’s epic journey. On top of that, there is an addictive leveling and experience system that will let you strengthen your stats to level 99, and there are plenty of divine items that will help you bring the hammer down on Hel, daughter of Loki!

We’ve had all hands-on deck for Young Thor since the beginning, and we’re happy to also share a look at some of the artwork that went into the game’s visual style. You can even get a look at some of the comics we’ve made, which also showcase the more light-hearted humor from our take on the mythology.

The release of Young Thor has been a long time coming, and we’re happy that this PSP Mini title will also be playable on the PS3 when it hits the PlayStation Store on July 20th for just $4.99. In truth, we feel there is more to this minis title than anything else before this, and we could go on for ages if Odin would let us. Instead, I’ll be fielding some questions from you guys in the thread below, and I’m happy to answer as much as I can about the game!