Drumroll, please…

We’ve tallied up the votes, slipped into our tuxedos, polished up the trophies and are now ready to reveal the winners of the second annual PSN Gamers’ Choice Awards. Votes were cast this year across 10 categories in the PlayStation Store, including the community award for Best PSN Indie, which was voted online by the community.

First off, we’d like to thank all of the nominees for being a part of this year’s PSN Gamers’ Choice Awards. All of the games that we showcased were some of the highest and most user-ranked games released in 2011, which is an honor in and of itself. Second and most importantly, we want to thank all of you for casting your votes both online and in the PlayStation Store to determine our winners.

We had an incredible turnout during the voting period this year, which made for an intense competition. Things got so heated, in fact, that the battle for Best PS Move Game literally came down to the last day between Dungeon Defenders and Dungeon Hunter: Alliance. But only one could come out with top honors.

Without further ado, here are your winners for the 2012 PSN Gamers’ Choice Awards:

• Best PSN Exclusive: inFAMOUS Festival of Blood (PS3)
• Best PSN Game: Resident Evil 4 (PS3)
• Best PSN Game Playable Online: Street Fighter III: Third Strike Online Edition (PS3)
• Best PS3 Full Game: Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (PS3)
• Best PlayStation Move Game: Dungeon Hunter: Alliance (PS3)
• Best 3D Game: God of War: Origins Collection (PS3)
• Best PlayStation Classic: Chrono Trigger (PS3/PSP)
• Best Mini Game: Angry Birds (PS3/PSP)
• Best PSP Game: DISSIDIA 012 [duodecim] FINAL FANTASY (PSP)
• PlayStation Community Award – Best Indie: LIMBO (PS3)

The celebration continues as the award-winning titles will be discounted 30% in the PlayStation Store for one week, starting later today, with a 50% discount available to all PlayStation Plus subscribers. Don’t miss out on the chance to score these great games! And don’t forget to start rating the games that you’re playing throughout 2012 so your favorite games can get nominated next year.

Starting tomorrow, head into the PlayStation Store to cast your vote for your favorite games in nine of the 10 categories and receive a free Gamers’ Choice Awards XMB theme for each vote cast. New this year, you can also cast your vote online in one special community category, Best PSN Indie, and you’ll receive a voucher code to be redeemed in the PlayStation Store for a free exclusive XMB theme. Your votes exclusively pick the winners in every category, and your award winners go on sale.

Don’t go too far because the winning games in each category will be announced right here on the PlayStation Blog in just one week–on March 6, 2012–and that same day, the winning game in each category will be discounted 30% in the PlayStation Store for one week, with a special 50% discount for PlayStation Plus subscribers.

Drum roll, please! The 2012 nominees for PSN Gamers’ Choice Awards are:

Best PSN Exclusive:

• inFAMOUS Festival of Blood (PS3)
• PixelJunk Shooter 2 (PS3)
• TETRIS (PS3)

Best PSN Game:

• inFAMOUS Festival of Blood (PS3)
• Plants vs. Zombies (PS3)
• Resident Evil 4 (PS3)

Best PSN Game Playable Online:

• Hard Corps: Uprising (PS3)
• Street Fighter III: Third Strike Online Edition (PS3)
• TETRIS (PS3)

Best PS3 Full Game:

• Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (PS3)
• Assassin’s Creed II: Deluxe Edition (PS3)
• Midnight Club LA Complete Edition (PS3)

Best PlayStation Move Game:

• 4Elements HD (PS3)
• Dungeon Defenders (PS3)
• Dungeon Hunter: Alliance (PS3)

Best 3D Game:

• Dungeon Defenders (PS3)
• God of War: Origins Collection (PS3)
• The Sly Collection (PS3)

Best PSone Classic:

• Chrono Trigger (PS3/PSP)
• Parasite Eve (PS3/PSP)
• Xenogears (PS3/PSP)

Best Mini Game:

• Angry Birds (PS3/PSP)
• The Impossible Game (PS3/PSP)
• PAC-MAN Championship Edition (PS3/PSP)

Best PSP Game:

• DISSIDIA 012 [duodecim] FINAL FANTASY (PSP)
• DISSIDIA 012 Prologus FINAL FANTASY (PSP)
• TACTICS OGRE: Let Us Cling Together (PSP)

PlayStation Community Award – Best Indie:

• Dungeon Defenders (PS3)
• LIMBO (PS3)
• PixelJunk Shooter 2 (PS3)

Don’t forget to head into PlayStation Store tomorrow to cast your vote. You decide the best of PSN, so make your voice heard!

inFAMOUS 2 and inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood received widespread acclaim from the gaming community in 2011 not only for their amazing open-world super hero gameplay, but also for one very important, very unique feature: the ability to make your own missions. To bring out the best aspiring developers, we launched a contest late last year to see who could build the best mission within inFAMOUS 2. This mission needed to focus on telling a story about the main character Cole McGrath that could fit within the fiction of the universe. It also needed to play great, meaning good gameplay balance, strong action set-pieces, and a compelling narrative to pull you through.

From the missions that we’re submitted on infamousthegame.com, PlayStation and Sucker Punch reviewed only the most-played and highest-ranked missions as voted on by the community that plays. This tool not only makes it easy to find great missions in-game, but you can also browse and queue up missions to play in-game on the web by logging in with your PSN ID.

After much debate with the team from Sucker Punch, we’re ready to share the grand prize winner of the Cole’s Missing Mission contest. Introducing PSN member Seth9977 with his mission: Spying on the Spies. His mission brought a great story that matched the tone of Cole’s character while providing sweeping travel segments, awesome combat, and just the right amount of humor. He also goes a bit in-depth with Cole’s character to imply some deeper issues he’s struggling with and has some great call-backs to Cole’s time in Empire City. It’s now playable in inFAMOUS 2 under the Featured Missions category.

Hi everyone; Seth9977 here.

The thing that inspired me to make that mission was the story mission: “Alden Strikes” from inFAMOUS. I put my own little twist of Zeke being captured to bring back some good old memories of rescuing Zeke from inFAMOUS 1.

My advice to other mission builders:

It’s always best to get an idea of what you’re about to make, rather than sit there with nothing. Find something to spark your creativity, and don’t be afraid to try something new. It’s also best to learn how to use the tools. If you don’t know how something works, look at a template, play around with it, or come ask the friendly users at suckerpunch.com for help. Another thing that is a must for creating a fail-proof mission would be play testing and polishing. It’s always best to constantly test and play your mission whenever you make a change, look for ways that a player can break your mission. It will help you in the long run!

Whenever play testing a narrative, make sure to check your grammar, and read it out loud to make sure it sounds right. There are three questions that you should always ask yourself: 1) “Will this be enjoyable for the player?” 2) “Can less experienced players beat this?” and 3) “Will they be able to break my mission?” If you design around these questions, I’m sure you will have a great and fun mission for users to play!

My thoughts on the design tools:

The design tools overall are well made and allowed me to do a number of things. From creating a simple sentence to making an intense fight. I enjoy working a lot with narrative type stuff, so when I first picked up inFAMOUS 2, and fired up the UGC creator I was glad to see there was a way to implement a story into my mission. The variety of tools in the UGC creator has expanded upon the months, and I’m eager to see what else the people at Sucker Punch have to offer to us!
I would also like to thank everyone who has made this possible for me. I’ve learned a lot on my own, but when I got involved with the community at Suckerpunch.com and infamousthegame.com, I’ve learned a lot more on how the UGC creator of inFAMOUS 2 works. It wouldn’t have been possible without the players too! A lot of thanks have to go to the PlayStation.blog and PSN Community Management team too! Thanks for playing all my missions and inspiring me to keep on creating!

We also want to include mentions for the runner ups in this very heated competition. PSN members jedicam10 (Karma Police), The_Golden_Hero (Children of Empire City), and codybean1 (Cole in Time) also made some stellar missions. These missions are also now easily accessible in-game under the Feature Missions category.

Congrats again to Seth9977! Your $1,000 in PSN Voucher Codes, limited-edition Cole statue, and signed copy of inFAMOUS 2 from the Sucker Punch team is on its way!

First up we have concept art from inFamous: Festival of Blood. Emilio Gandin, our Lead Environment Artist, wanted to point out some of these pieces of concept art. We wanted to add a new area to the title and explored the idea of doing catacombs below the Cathedral. The dark gothic, claustrophobic catacombs fit perfectly with the vampire lore. Once levels featuring catacombs were playable, we started to explore how Cole would navigate through them. We wanted a way for Cole to quickly move through the space and we came up with the backstory of the catacombs being used to smuggle arms thus giving us a reason to include the rails that Cole can grind on.

In the spirit of the season we also wanted to share our Holiday Cards. This year Senior Artist Edward Pun, Artist Mike Haney, and Lighting Artist Jason Connell teamed together to create this Santa inspired Cole, delivering gifts to the kids of New Marais.

From all of us here at Sucker Punch Productions, we hope you had a Happy Holidays and are looking forward to the New Year. We look forward to talking with you in 2012.

Later today look for our next blog post with some unreleased concept art from inFamous: Festival of Blood and our Sucker Punch Holiday Cards. Be sure to Follow us on Twitter or Like us on Facebook. From all of us here at Sucker Punch have a Happy Holiday.

A couple of weeks ago we released an update for inFAMOUS 2 that included the 2D Cut Scene tool that was in packaged inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood. This update allows you to create your own comic book-inspired cut scenes for your missions, giving you tons of control over the types of stories you tell. To guide you through the creation process, we created a new video tutorial explaining the basics of the 2D Cut Scene tool — you can watch it below.

If you are new to UGC, be sure to watch all of our tutorials which will explain all the basics on creating a great UGC mission.

Stay tuned to infamousthegame.com and join our forums on SuckerPunch.com for future updates on inFAMOUS 2 and inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood. Also follow us on Twitter, @SuckerPunchProd, and check out our Facebook Page.

The response so far to inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood has been amazing, and we’re thrilled people are enjoying Cole’s new horror-themed adventure. Just to add some digital chocolate to your Halloween haul we’re putting up an insider movie to show off the coolest powers and enemies you’ll go up against in inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood.

On top of that PlayStation Move is now part of the inFAMOUS world. You can play inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood with PS Move…and coming soon you will be able to play inFAMOUS 2 with Move as well via a free update. So check out the video and have a freaktastic Happy Halloween.

Stay tuned to infamousthegame.com and join our forums on SuckerPunch.com for future updates on inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood. Also follow us on Twitter, @SuckerPunchProd, and check out our Facebook Page.

It’s been a long time since my last PlayStation.Blog post, and today’s entry is a little….different. I’ll start with the marketing facts (inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood available now!!!! $9.99!! Only $7.99 if you are a PlayStation Plus member!!!) but really, I thought I’d give you a little insight into why and how we ended up making a vampire based spin-off of inFAMOUS.

For us, we’d been working for two projects and five-plus years on the main storyline of inFAMOUS. We wanted the DLC to be a chance to take all that art and technology and do something fun and different for players. We knew we couldn’t just release some more missions or a skin pack, so we took a bunch of pitches from all the departments here at the studio for what we might do. We wanted something that fit the world of inFAMOUS, would be fun to work on, and ideally would be unexpected, too.

One of the strong pitches we got was originally called “Vampire City” (a play on “Empire City” from inFAMOUS). The pitch was that Zeke was trying to impress a girl with a tall tale about Cole, Vampires, and the origins of Pyre Night. There was a lot to like about this pitch, some important ones were: finally getting to add flying to inFAMOUS, the strong “Pyre Night” set dressing we could add to New Marais, a solid supernatural basis for new powers, and of course having a launch date in the days before Halloween didn’t hurt, either. So it was decided, and work began!

About the same time, we had some promising PlayStation Move prototypes running. We’d initially thought we would use Move to support UGC authors–but as we progressed, we became convinced we could make the game fully playable with Move. So Move shifted to become a core gameplay feature, and our UGC team decided to tackle our next big wishlist item – “speech bubble” cutscenes. Like making narrative missions? Now you get set-up camera shots and add speech bubbles to characters!

So that’s the story behind “Festival of Blood”… We all hope you enjoy this little “what if” detour in the inFAMOUS universe… From all of us at Sucker Punch, Happy Halloween!!

P.S. I can also confirm the new cutscene tool and PlayStation Move support will appear in the main inFAMOUS 2 game any day now!

inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood will be available on the PlayStation Store in just a couple days: Tuesday, October 25th in North America for $9.99, and $7.99 for PlayStation Plus members (you can even pre-order now on the PlayStation Store). Play it with the classic DualShock or try it out with PlayStation Move support!

Before you get your hands on the game, we had Animation Director Billy Harper and Marketing Director Ken Schramm pack their bags for a whirlwind three-day tour spanning 5,668 miles, two coasts, three cities, and over 20 interviews with press from North America and beyond. It was an amazing couple of days of sharing the latest adventure in the inFAMOUS universe.

We have been pretty quiet about Festival of Blood since we teased you with a clip revealing Bloody Mary at PAX. Since then we have been hard at work crafting this next adventure, adding in all the final details and finishing touches on this standalone game to make the perfect purchase right in time for Halloween. This press tour allowed us to pull the curtain back and give one big preview before the game comes out next week. Billy and Ken covered tons of the new features in Festival of Blood, some of which we will cover here.

With a totally new story in Festival of Blood, of course we had to give Cole a totally new set of powers. One power that fans have always wanted in an inFAMOUS game has been the ability to fly, and with Festival of Blood we thought it was time to give Cole the chance to spread his wings. Bat wings, that is, with a new power called Shadow Swarm. While Shadow Swarm allows you to experience New Marais in a whole new way, it does come at the expense of the innocent people walking around in the night as you must feed upon them to fuel your flight.

Speaking of Pyre Night, all of New Marais celebrates this hallowed night by shrouding the entire city with banners, fireworks, and pedestrians dressing up in the streets. The look of the Pyre Night comes from Sucker Punch’s City Team spending the summer dreaming up the spooky street party that features surprises around every corner. The abandoned subway lines of New Marais have been converted to macabre underground catacombs. Stepping into these dark corridors would leave anyone unsettled, even more so when you find out that Bloody Mary’s minions have been crawling around inside them for years.

User-generated content (UGC) is a key part of the inFAMOUS universe, as you can see from our Cole’s Missing Mission Contest (the grand prize winner receives a $1,000 PlayStation Store gift card!), and we haven’t forgotten this feature with Festival of Blood. Over the last couple of months we have been listening to your feedback and playing all the missions we can from the community and the one thing we have been seeing is the desire to create strong narrative missions. To help users tell their stories, we are happy to add the new 2D cutscene tool with Festival of Blood that allows you to create comic book-inspired cutscenes in your missions. You now can create intro sequences, provide key story details mid-mission, or end your mission with a bang. Along with the 2D cutscene Tool, Festival of Blood brings a whole new set of gory assets to the UGC universe and you can now design missions with as many fiends and harpies as you want.

If you haven’t had a chance, read some of the previews we have listed below:

• GameSpot
• Shacknews
• Kotaku
• Examiner
• Examiner
• Destructoid
• IGN
• GamesRadar
• G4TV
• San Jose Mercury News

Stay tuned to infamousthegame.com and join our forums on SuckerPunch.com for future updates on inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood. Also follow us on Twitter, @SuckerPunchProd, and check out our Facebook Page.

We’re excited to announce a new program called “Only On PSN,” which features brand new games that are exclusively available on PlayStation Network throughout October. Every week starting tomorrow, October 4, you will find new titles, unique to PSN that are part of this program – games that you’ve likely read about here on the PlayStation Blog, or seen during our showing at E3 2011. You may recall our announcement a few months ago about our Pub Fund – a $20 million investment in exclusive PSN titles, and the Only On PlayStation Network program showcases two titles spawning from this investment: Eufloria and Okabu.

We can’t wait for you to get your hands on the Only On PSN games yourselves, so we’re giving you a few special offers throughout the course of the program. First, to sweeten the deal, we’ll be offering PlayStation Plus subscribers a 20% discount on each game during the first week of its availability.

Additionally, users who spend $60 or more out of their PlayStation Network/Sony Entertainment Network wallet through the month of October will get $10 back in November. This includes any of the Only On PSN games, purchases of games, add-ons, movies and TV shows in both the game and video sections of the PlayStation Store, your paid subscriptions for PlayStation Plus or Music Unlimited, movie rentals or purchases through Video Unlimited and any games or virtual items you buy in PlayStation Home.

Be sure to keep an eye on the PlayStation Twitter feed, as we’ll be giving away download codes for each game in the line-up every week. Don’t miss your chance to get this week’s Only On PSN games for free!

Now, let’s check out the games:

October 4:

• Eufloria – An addictive ambient game of space exploration and conquest, plant growth and bio-mechanical evolution. Explore a beautifully realized universe rendered in a style that is unique and compelling. Conquer asteroids in deep space and use their resources to literally grow and nurture semi-organic plants and creatures to do your bidding.
• Rochard – A fun and original space adventure game that features a resourceful hero, ominous villains, rugged machinery, big explosions, even bigger stunts and sharp one-liners. The game tests players’ coordination and wits as they use gravity to their advantage, changing it at will to solve environmental puzzles and advance through each level.

October 11:

• Sideway: New York – Help defeat Spray, a sinister tagger who wants to dominate both Sideway and the real world in this unique sidescroller that offers you the chance to leave your mark on the city.

October 13:

• Sodium Collection – A more than $35 value available for $9.99, this PlayStation Home value pack includes the SodiumOne Pilot’s Jacket, which unlocks the full 50-level tank combat Salt Shooter game, and weapon upgrades for your SodiumOne tank. Also included is a variety of upgrades for Sodium 2: Project Velocity, a high-speed, free-to-play, futuristic multiplayer racing game exclusive to PlayStation Home, and the wildly-popular Blaster’s Paradise personal space, which hosts a tabletop version of Salt Shooter. Buy from the PlayStation Store and play in PlayStation Home.

October 18:

• Okabu – An action-puzzler, where players will guide Kumulo, Nimbe and four cloud-flying heroes as they battle to save their people and their world from the industrialized threat of the Doza. Dive into a hyper-tactile toybox world filled with a huge number of puzzles, playthings, adorable creatures and devious machines spread across an epic co-op campaign.
• RocketBirds: Hardboiled Chicken – Annihilate an evil penguin regime in this cinematic platform adventure game offering full solo and co-op campaigns with stereoscopic 3D support. Destroy enemies with a slew of weapons and illuminate the secrets to his past while uncovering the real enemies of Albatropolis.

October 25:

• inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood – Vampires swarm New Marais, and revered superhero Cole MacGrath has been bitten. To save his soul and city, he has just one night to find and kill the head vampire. Featuring hours of new gameplay, themed environment settings and new characters/enemies, Festival of Blood explores the darker side of the inFAMOUS universe.
• PixelJunk Sidescroller – Q-Games goes old-school with a completely retro side-scrolling shooter that reinvents the genre from the ground up while maintaining that nostalgic feeling. Dodge flurries of alien bullets and strategically upgrade weapons while battling through sweeping stages full of hazardous fluid and endless shooting mayhem.

Also starting tomorrow as part of Only On PSN, we’ll also be offering a selection of rare classic games in the PlayStation Store: God Hand, GrimGrimoire, Maximo: Ghosts to Glory, Odin Sphere and Ring of Red.

So head into the PlayStation Store tomorrow afternoon to check out Eufloria and Okabu, and don’t forget: If you’re a PlayStation Plus subscriber, be sure to take advantage of the 20% discounts for the new games each week before we move onto the next week of Only On PSN titles. We hope you enjoy the month of October gaming with these exclusive titles on PSN!