What can a small team achieve in 10 months? How about porting a classic Oddworld console game to the PS Vita! The heroes at JAW beavered away since the launch of the handheld in February 2012 to bring you the most the console has to offer.

PS Vita users might still be waiting for the chance to play Munch, but just in time for the holidays, here’s Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath HD. We’re bringing an enhanced version of the much-loved classic to PlayStation Store later today.

Like the PS3 version before it, Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath HD features high-quality graphical assets, better textures and high poly models. But this isn’t a lazy port… The game makes use of PS Vita’s touchscreen and rear touchpad for added controls and runs at the native screen resolution to give you a genuine Vita experience.

The game sees you take the role of the mysterious bounty hunter Stranger on a mission to clean up the Oddworld’s Wild West. So what if you happen to profit from it, right? After all, the money is needed for important surgery! Gameplay features a unique ammo system that’s live… literally! From the wisecracking Chippunks to the ferocious Fuzzles, your ordinance is there to help you out of sticky situations however you choose to play the game.

Stranger’s Wrath for PS Vita will be out later today in North America. Stick this in your digital Christmas stocking! How does the PS Vita version stack up? Let us know in the comments.

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With Jeff and Rey in L.A. for pre-E3 activities, and Nick still wandering his ancestral homelands in Africa, I preside over today’s somewhat more intimate show. Luckily, I roped in PSN Sr. Community Manager Matthew Harper to share his eye-opening Origin Story, which provides some helpful tips for those of you who have wondered how to break into game development.

We kick off with a late-breaking interview featuring Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley from Naughty Dog, the creative director and game director of upcoming PS3 survival epic The Last of Us. If you’ve wondered how the game will play compared to UNCHARTED, or how Naughty Dog is handling the game’s decidedly mature themes, today’s shows will provide the answers you need.

Then we shift gears for a detailed discussion with Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning and Just Add Water CEO Stewart Gilray. The pair provide insight into the upcoming PS Vita version of Oddworld Stranger’s Wrath HD, discuss how PSN’s indie-minded model has reinvigorated the seminal series, and lay out their plans for world domination.

And as always, we reveal next week’s PSN game lineup, share a selection of new user questions and tips, and provide a head-scratching new Mystery Theme.

Stuff We Talked About

• The Last of Us – new in-game cutscene
• Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath HD

The Cast

[Editor’s note: PSN game release dates are subject to change without notice. Game
details are gathered from press releases from their individual publishers and/or ESRB rating
descriptions.]

• Thanks to Cory Schmitz for our beautiful logo and Dormilón for our rad theme song and show music. Special thanks to Astro Gaming headsets for providing audio gear.

If you haven’t played Stranger’s Wrath yet, the launch trailer does a good job showing off the game’s key features: 60 frames-per-second action in both first-person and third-person perspectives, all set within the unique universe of Oddworld. For those that don’t know what Stranger’s Wrath HD is all about, let me tell you a story…

Tall, dark, and passive-aggressive, a Stranger is lured out of routine bounty hunting by the prospect of a one time, bounty-to-end-all bounties moolah maker. He’s got a short but pricey personal shopping list and he’s finally found a way to check it off.

With moolah on his mind, our Stranger travels from town to town facing off with mentally challenged Outlaws, violently ignorant Clakkerz, and paranoid, relic-hiding native Grubbs.

Welcome to the Mongo River Valley, the iron mining capital of the continent. Upstream is Sekto Springs, the bottled water company suckling the life out of the valley. Mr Sekto has damned the river and the habitat it sustains. A collector of rare Steef heads, Sekto has put word out that he’s in the market for a Steef. These majestic beasts once roamed the Mongo River Valley in great herds, but now their scarcity makes each one an extravagant prize. High atop the springs at Sekto Springs Dam, the slimy prima donna waits impatiently for the Steef bounty to be delivered.

Armed with his trusty double-barrel crossbow and a pack full of Live Ammo, Stranger is ready to deliver said bounty when a humbling incident with the local outlaws serves as a severe reminder of what it means not only to hunt, but also to be hunted. The prospect of being filleted brings many changes to an inhabitant.

Changes that even modern Vykker science cannot duplicate! Not one to pose as garnish, he makes it up to Sekto Springs all right, but Sekto and his Wolvarks get their Steef served up with a frothy can of whoop ass, prepared by our beloved hombre-sin-nombre. Yes folks, Oddworld just got Stranger.

As we announced previously, we will be releasing an update to the game in February that will add stereoscopic 3D support and a bunch of other features. Additionally, we thought we’d take this chance to ask if there’s anything you’d like to see addressed in the update, or if you had any comments you wanted to share.

In the meantime, I hope you all have a great 2012! We hope to see you down the road.

As most of you may know we originally planned to release the game around Easter, to be able to do that we were to have started full development in September last year, but as it transpired, we didn’t actually start until April 2011, which gave us our hoped late Summer release; but we ended up spending another couple of months on it, so here we are DONE AND DUSTED for release.

As such I’m extremely pleased to announce that Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath HD will release on December 27th in North America for $14.99. And we will be releasing worldwide! (all stores, except for the Far East/Russia/Ukraine and Portugal at this time).

We had planned on shipping with support for stereoscopic 3D and PlayStation Move and a few other little things, due to time limits we are not able to bring those features in this initial version. However we WILL be bringing them in an update in a couple months’ time, along with some other little extras we’ve got planned.

One of things we’ve been asked a lot over the past few months is if Stranger’s Wrath HD has a Platinum trophy, of course it does. This is a big game and can easily take at least 12+hrs to complete.

So what’s been updated in the HD version …

Characters

• All 84 character models have been updated with increased polygon counts and higher resolution textures.
• Wolvark Sloghandlers now release Slogs instead of Slegs.
• Professor Dimble now has glasses and an academic tome.
• New female voices have been recorded for two characters.
• Made Blisterz Booty unkillable.

Original Version (top) HD Version (bottom)

Original Version (top) HD Version (bottom)

Environments

• All environments have been given higher resolution textures.
• Most vegetation has been updated with increased polygon counts and/or higher resolution textures.
• A lot of environment now reflects in water where it didn’t before.
• Many, many pipes and barrels were rounded.
• New Easter Eggs added to the game.
• Added Blisterz Booty’s broken crud gun to the floor by his bola’d body.
• Sekto’s Office has been changed to more closely resemble than seen in the FMV.

Original Version (top) HD Version (bottom)

Audio

• All game audio (voice, sound effects and music) have been upgraded to 16-bit 44KHz from 8-bit 11KHz or less!
• Support for 5.1, Dolby Digitial and DTS.

Display

• Everything now runs at 720p, 60 FPS, and in widescreen.
• All menus have been updated with a new design based on original unused concepts.
• New posters now occupy the inventory menu when no bounty is accepted.

Difficulty

• All armour upgrades now actually increase Stranger’s health.
• Added difficulty levels to the game: Easy, Medium and Hard.
• In Easy mode:
• Stranger has twice the health
• Enemies have half the health and stamina
• Enemies’ stamina recovers half as fast
• In Normal Mode:
• Stranger’s health and armour for later in the game have been re-balanced.
• In Hard mode:
• Stranger has a third less health.
• Enemies stamina recovers a third quicker.

Unlockables

• 37 Trophies: 23 bronze, 8 silver, 5 gold, 1 platinum
• 37 pieces of unlockable concept art
• Five unlockable movies

Once again, thanks for waiting as long as you have, we certainly hope you’ll enjoy the game, and if the review scores we’re starting to get in are anything to go by, you will!

Happy holidays everyone!

It’s been a long road for us, and we’ve made a whole truck full of updates. We’ve updated EVERY one of 83 characters in the game, the vast majority of the environmental textures, and a lot of the environment geometry. We’ve also completely updated the user interface, added some easter eggs into the game, and a whole raft of unlockable extras — some never seen before, and some rarely seen.

To celebrate being at the end of the development cycle for Stranger’s Wrath, we wanted to share this trailer with you. The trailer looks great but the game looks better: you just can’t capture 60 frames-per-second action in a web trailer!

We hope you enjoy the trailer and we’ll be back very soon to share full release details with you.

You may have heard of this game before – it was originally released in March 2005, but we’re doing an HD remake for PSN. Recently there have been a whole raft of HD remakes coming to the PS3, and to be able to work on this project and take the definition of “HD Remake” to the next level has been a dream come true.

Not only are we revamping various aspects of the game such as texture resolution, user interface and game audio, but we’re also overhauling the character models. You’ll no doubt have seen the visual update we’ve done to the main character, Stranger. We’re updating every character in the game in similar style, and today I’d like to introduce you to a couple more.

First up we have the Clakkerz, the general population from the towns at the start of the game all the way to New Yolk City. The guy pictured above is the Store Keeper, he runs the General Store where you get to buy ammo and upgrades, and is always wise cracking, ahem, with you. A lot of my passion for this game is the story and the script, there is so much humour in there that you can’t help but laugh out loud at times!

Next we have the Grubb Natives. These guys are afraid of their own shadows and mistrust anyone, especially a tall Stranger that comes into their settlement, but is there a reason for that? Their story unfolds farther in the game.

In Stranger’s Wrath you play a bounty hunter, tracking down various villains and capturing them. To do this, you don’t use a gun but LIVE ammunition. And by “live” we really mean that – your ammo are little critters with special abilities, and at times the damned things even back chat you. So the critters sit on your crossbow and talk to you, then when the time’s right, you press the trigger and send them on their way.

This little guy is my favourite, the Chippunk, cause he’s a wise-cracking chipmunk-like guy!

Over the coming weeks and months, we will be back to talk to you more about the PS3 version of Stranger’s Wrath, including other updates and additions to the game we are making.

Thanks, and we hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!