During our PlayStation.Blog takeover, we wanted to bring you a behind-the-scenes look at Resistance 3, what we’ve been doing the last two years and what the last year of development will bring us. We also discuss our Resistance 3 “war room” at our office, as well as the making of the GamesCom and VGA trailers. You can download the episode here or stream it right here via this embedded flash player:

If you want to make sure you never miss an episode of the Full Moon Show – subscribe to us via iTunes or subscribe to our RSS feed here. You can always reach the podcast team with your questions or comments at podcast@insomniacgames.com.

That’s it for our takeover of the PlayStation Blog. We hope you enjoyed our favorite games of the year, the retrospective of our Insomniac Holiday Cards and this very special episode of the Full Moon Show. Make sure you Like us on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter for all of the latest and greatest about Insomniac and our games!

From all of us at Insomniac Games, have a Happy New Year!

2006 – Resistance: Fall of Man
The 2006 Holiday Card celebrated the release of Resistance: Fall of Man and the PlayStation 3, with the Chimera building a Hybrid snowman, right before noticing the Dragon Flamethrower (albeit a red one, instead of the game’s green flames) pointed at them. This card probably would have been banned in Germany.

2007 – Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
The 2007 card celebrated the Drophyd enemy in Tools of Destruction, small goldfish like creatures that controlled death robots. One of my favorite features in that game to this day was the ability to squish the drophyds by stepping on them. Notice the Insomniac moon at the base, and the Lombax doll in its arm.

2008 – Resistance 2
The Splicer was one of our favorite and goriest weapons in Resistance 2, and doing a 1950s style holiday ad for one of the best weapons in the game seemed like a no brainer.

2009 – Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time
This card came out at the end of 2009 to celebrate the release of A Crack in Time. It was drawn by Insomniac North Carolina’s Dave Guertinand was the very first tease image we ever released of some of the updated art style being used for Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One, as well as showing the four characters together in a way we hadn’t yet. Now you know!

2010 – Resistance 3 / Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One reveals
While we didn’t release a game in 2010, we did show the fully-grown Widowmaker on the cover of Game Informer. Keeping with the 1950s setting of the Resistance franchise, the Widowmaker sits on the Insomniac moon while 1950s-style spaceships attack it.

ModNation Racers
My choice would have to be ModNation Racers. I played that game all night long, collected all the outfits, stickers, and whatnot, and made a ton of characters. I also posted a few tracks online – “A Night On Bald Mountain” and “Alice In Wonderland.”
-Giac Veltri, Engine Programmer

Rock Band 3
I really enjoy the challenge of playing songs in pro mode. The new keyboard, cymbals, and pro guitar are great additions to a game that was already amazingly fun.
-Herman Miller, Senior Programmer

MineCraft
The experience it gives you, you can’t get anywhere else.
-Joe Valenzuela, Engine Programmer

Super Meat Boy
It is unforgiving, unrelenting and unapologetic. It’ll grind your nose to the ground and make you feel insignificant. It does all this while staying fair to the player, no cheap deaths, and the feedback system showing the player where they jumped, landed and were mutilated by massive-death-blades(TM) creates a comforting and addicting “no, I can do this” feeling in the player.

It not only revels in a past era of super hard games, it refines it to near perfection. Super Meat Boy is everything anyone could ask for from a pure run-and-jump platformer.
-Chaz Wilke, Scripter

Starcraft II
I’m kind of embarrassed that it’s so mainstream, but Starcraft II. This was a surprise for me, since I’d always considered myself no good at RTS games, but apparently that’s all changed as I continue to charge through the Platinum 2v2 league 6 months after its release. It’s definitely an intense yet enjoyable challenge for me, and I love playing Zerg! (I chose to play Zerg for a highly strategic reason: they are adorable.)
-Lisa Brown, Designer

Bejeweled Blitz
My favorite game of 2010 was Bejewelled Blitz on Facebook. Despite a weekly @$$ kicking by my wife I keep coming back for more. (Lead Designer Jake) Biegel bows before me.
-John Fiorito, Chief Operating Officer

Bayonetta
Bayonetta, easily. The game really surprised me with its amazingly fast combat and unique (and kickass) soundtrack. It also had some of the best boss battles I’ve seen this entire generation.
-Scott Michalek, Engine Support Technician

Heavy Rain
Although other games like Mass Effect 2 and Red Dead Redemption captured me for longer periods of time this year, Heavy Rain is the game that most stands out in my mind. I really loved its depiction of fatherhood, a rarity in games. Heavy Rain gave me a new type of experience I hadn’t had before in any other game, and it made me really excited about the possibilities for interactive fiction in future games.
-Joel Bartley, Gameplay Programmer

If you guessed that our writer’s favorite game from 2010 would be the game where you played a writer… well, you’d be right:

Alan Wake
My favorite game of 2010 was Alan Wake. It was dark, atmospheric, with a compelling narrative and a really unique combat mechanic. It also satisfied my insatiable hunger for lumber mill-centric gameplay. As an added bonus, Alan Wake brought to light the gritty truth about writers: that we are all badass action heroes you want to align yourself with should possessed beings ever invade your tranquil summer burg. Unless you’re married to one of us – then you should probably run.
-TJ Fixman, Senior Writer

Sometimes we don’t get to play new games during the holidays, and they slip to the next year. That’s the case with the next couple of selections:

Uncharted 2
I liked the platform/parkour aspects of the level design. If Uncharted 3 has more of the platforming and jumping around I’ll be calling in sick until I complete it.
-Frank Lafuente, Lead Programmer

Dragon Age: Origins
Primary reason is that on my list of favorite game titles it was one of the only new titles, the others being sequels/new installments of a previous franchise.

I think that Dragon Age is an excellent example of bringing old school DnD style RPGs into the current generation. It was refreshing to see them revamp many of the traditional RPG standards while maintaining many of the same themes. It’s also one of few games that really delivers on content and epic story telling.
-Josue Benavidez, Associate Designer

Despite the wide variety of selections, as the response continued to flow in, it was clear that a vast number of Insomniac’s favored one game above all others during 2010: Red Dead Redemption. As our own (in?)famous cos-playing Senior Animator Ben Van Dyken writes:

• It was an emotional experience. You had real empathy for the character over the course of the game…. And not just in the main storyline, but I also got very attached to my horse, and when he died, I felt real loss…had to go through almost a mourning period before getting another. And these were never ‘canned’ experiences either…they usually happened so dynamically, that it never felt like an event ‘forced’ upon me by the designer….which gave it that much more impact.
• I also remember back when the game came out, each morning people would gather in the kitchen and tell their “RDR stories” from the night before. “…and right after that, I was wrestling this bear with only my bare hands…when all of a sudden, a cougar jumped out and mauled my horse…” It was great.

-Ben Van Dyken, Senior Animator

Other praise for Red Dead Redemption:
As repetitive as many of the quests could be, they created a world I enjoyed being in. They nailed the visuals and sound design of the west, from the time crickets swap with grasshoppers as the primary insect noisemakers to the way dawn casts nearly white light over deserts. The Morricone-esque soundtrack made me feel like I was in a western movie; It just felt good to ride around and experience that world.

Add to that the sheer number of things to do (skill rankings, outfits, primary story missions, mini games, bounty quests, etc) and amazingly entertaining ambient behavior (watching people get mauled from their horses by mountain lions, hearing the prostitutes around town say things like, “I hate to see a dry pecker” and trying to line-up the perfect sniper shot when suddenly being attacked by a Grizzly…) and you had a game that truly defines an era. Would anyone even want to try to make another western game?

Oh, and their “Undead Nightmare” DLC kind of ruined DLC for the rest of us. Best $9.99 I’ve ever spent!
-Marcus Smith, Creative Director on Resistance 3

My love of Spaghetti Westerns was beautifully recreated in this game. I loved the story lines and the fire fights felt like a cross between the Magnificent Seven and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. John Marston, the main character is well defined and carries all the emotion needed to connect with him. Rockstar did an amazing job and they continue to set the bar for sandbox games.
-Carlos De La Torre Jr, Tester

From cattle rustling to coyote wrestling to bandit killing, this game really drew me into its world. Playing co-op with some fellow Insomniacs is also a blast.
-Chris Edwards, Engine Programmer

The level of difficulty in making a Western game of the year is epic – yet they managed to nail it. The level of immersion and gorgeous environments leaves me awestruck – it’s a world that I love just being in.
-Joel Goodsell, Senior Designer

My favorite game of 2010 would have to be Red Dead Redemption. I expected it to be GTA4 with horses, but it turned out to be a sprawling, profound, emotionally moving experience centered around one of the absolute best characters in video games (John Marston). Easily the greatest Western video game ever made, and possibly the greatest Western ever made, period.
-Josh Leman, Tester

Sounds trite, but I loved, loved, loved Red Dead Redemption. I love the desert. I love hiking in the desert, camping, and driving through it. I think the Red Dead team nailed the feeling of the lighting, the topography, and the natural plants and cacti. I’m also a huge fan of westerns, and to me, this was nothing less than the definitive western video game–besides Boot Hill, of course. :)

I’m not sure I’ve seen better looking horses in a game either. It’s the kind of game I like playing just so I can ride around watch the sunset… before I smoke some outlaw gang from their shack. It’s truly a world I feel like I can escape into.
-Steve Ratter, Environment Artist

I loved the openness and the fact that you could finally be a bad-ass gunslinger. First western game to really capture that and it was awesome. And let’s face it, who didn’t always want to skin a bunch of bears.
-Tim Salvitti, Web Developer

So Red Dead Redemption is definitely the favorite pick of Insomniac Games for 2010. Congrats to everyone at Rockstar: San Diego for making such a fantastic game, that sucked up so much of everyone’s time here at Insomniac Games. If you haven’t played it yet, we can’t highly recommend it enough.

A good part this wave comes from the event we held for the media just after the Spike VGA 2010 – you read about that here on the PlayStation.Blog a couple of weeks ago when the first batch of info on UNCHARTED 3 gameplay was released.

PlayStation.Blog was there not only to check out UNCHARTED 3 with their very own eyes, but they got managed to snag Creative Director Amy Hennig and Game Director Justin Richmond to answer some questions in the video above.

We knew the writing was on the wall when our power needs became so demanding that our neighbors started to experience brownouts. Adding an electrical transformer allowed us to at least finish Killzone 3 without bringing down the whole block, but the rising number of employees and the start of a new IP meant it was only going to be a temporary reprieve. (And we’re still hiring, by the way. You can check out guerrilla-games.com/jobs for a full overview of available positions.)

Anyway, we’ll miss the old Canal House – not just for its quaint atmosphere, but for its unique construction as well. Between the parallel-but-uneven stairwell columns and the mixed-height floors, it took new employees months to get a grasp of the layout. Many were the times an intern would get hopelessly lost, ending up in the wrong room or even on the wrong floor after returning from a meeting. The Canal House would’ve made a pretty good multiplayer level, but somehow we never got around to including it in a game.

As for the studio itself, Guerrilla isn’t going far: 700 meters to the east to be precise, to a lovely location overlooking Rembrandt Square. By sheer coincidence, the new building also used to be a bank – but unlike the Canal House, this one was constructed in the twentieth century. That means there will be plenty of space for high-tech gadgetry, network cables, dev kits, monitors, action figures and anything else we might choose to bring along.

See you in the New Year, everyone!

At the same time, Amsterdammers place a lot of value on traditions. They have their own version of Santa Claus called “Sinterklaas,” whose holiday in early December rivals Christmas in terms of importance. And they insist on using bicycles as their primary form of transportation, regardless of temperature or precipitation. At this time of year, it’s not uncommon to see someone chugging through 2 inches of snow on a bike, with one hand on the handlebars and the other clutching a bag Christmas shopping.

Above all else, the people of Amsterdam appreciate atmosphere – or, as they call it, “gezelligheid” – and nothing brings this out more than the holiday season. When the days grow short and the weather grows cold, the city takes on the nostalgic charms of a Dickens-inspired Christmas village display. The sight of so many cozily lit canal houses and decorated high streets is enough to warm the heart of even the coldest Helghast polar trooper.

If you’d like to experience Christmas in Amsterdam someday, you may be in luck – Guerrilla is hiring! Check out our website at http://www.guerrilla-games.com/jobs for the full list of job vacancies. Who knows, by this time next year you could be walking – or, if you’re brave enough, biking – around Amsterdam yourself.

Merry Christmas everyone!

The holidays are here! After a busy but productive crunch period on Killzone 3, we’re finally able to catch up on our Z’s and spend some quality time with the family. For quite a few of us, there’s an additional family member waiting at home this year. In fact, since we began working on Killzone 3 over a dozen of our developers have become parents!

Here at Guerrilla, we observe a peculiar Dutch tradition to celebrate the birth of a baby: we eat “beschuit met muisjes,” which literally translates as “biscuits with little mice.” It’s a Dutch delicacy consisting of biscuits coated in butter and sprinkled with sugared anise seeds. We also give the parents these adorable little one-pieces to put on their newborns:

As to why there have been so many Guerrilla babies lately – perhaps it’s the constant exposure to militaristic Helghast propaganda, which has increased the virility of our developers. Or perhaps it’s simply a sign that Guerrilla has matured. After all, the young turks who stood at the studio’s metaphorical cradle ten years ago are professionals in their thirties today. They’re old and wise enough to stand at real cradles.

Being able to provide for your family by doing what you love is a rare fortune, and it’s during these days of celebration and reflection that we truly realize how blessed we are. We want to take this opportunity to thank you, the fans, for supporting us all these years; for showering us with your infectious enthusiasm and honest criticism, and for playing our games with endless dedication. We hope you’ll share a wonderful holiday with your loved ones, and we’ll see you in 2011.

That’s a wrap! Together with James from the EU PlayStation.Blog, Jeff, Rey, and I will soon be winding down for the holiday break. But this is no Blog blackout: The PlayStation.Blog will be going strong with fresh new posts helmed by some of the greatest game developers in the world. It starts tomorrow with Guerrilla Games and a unique look Christmas in Amsterdam. Insomniac Games and Sucker Punch Productions will also be spreading a little holiday cheer of their own. And later…well, who knows who else will drop by?

Looking back, 2010 was one hell of a year for PlayStation fans. We got great games like Heavy Rain, God of War III, Gran Turismo 5, MAG, and ModNation Racers; we got sweet new PSN video services such as Hulu Plus, (a disc-free) Netflix, VUDU, MLB.TV, and NHL.TV; we got PlayStation Move in all of its precise glory; we got stereoscopic 3D and Facebook integration and Share and HD PS2 classics and PlayStation Plus and betas and a LittleBigPlanet 2 demo and an UNCHARTED 3 announcement and a Twisted Metal E3 announcement and a bunch of other things I’m probably forgetting (feel free to remind us in the comments!)

Be happy, be healthy, and be good! And be sure to join us in 2011 for one of the wildest PlayStation software lineups of all time. I’m tingling already!

P.S. What was your favorite overall PS3 and PSP game this year?

Starting this week, the video store gives you more reason to celebrate the holiday season! Now through 12/31, cash in on incredible offers in the Holiday 2010 collection. First, enjoy FREE holiday rentals of Nativity! and Black Christmas from 12/24 through 12/26. Then, starting 12/20, save up to 50% on Hollywood blockbusters like Kick-Ass, The Hulk, Zombieland, The International, and more in our Holiday Sale.

Next, cozy up for a festive movie marathon with a Holiday Movies collection featuring classics like Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Santa Clause, Adam Sandler’s Eight Crazy Nights, Home Alone, and more. And what is the holiday season without TV specials? Discover the best holiday episodes from all-time TV favorites like The Office, South Park, and Modern Family in our Holiday TV collection. Last but not least, enjoy Spotlight on 2010 featuring the most raved about movies of 2010 and the year’s box office winners!

Visit Featured Collections > Holiday 2010 on PlayStation Store and let the festivities begin!

By now you’ve hopefully had the opportunity to test out the exciting and new PlayStation Move platform. Adding Move to your gaming arsenal is not the only way to elevate your experience on PS3 system. Designed to maximize your overall entertainment experience, finding a new Bluetooth Headset, a Surround Sound System, or a “Candy Pink” DualShock 3 wireless controller under the tree is sure to make anyone’s holiday a little brighter this year – at prices starting as low as $49.99(MSRP). As many of you know, PS3 is already the most complete home entertainment solution available this holiday season and tops many gamers’ wish lists. When combined with any of our newest titles, such as Gran Turismo 5, The Sly Cooper Collection, or SingStar Dance, PS3 instantly becomes something everyone in your entire family can enjoy and play together.

These peripherals are available at local retailers around the U.S., so be sure to check them out. As always, let us know your thoughts and enjoy!