I am thoroughly impressed and excited by this game each and every time I see it, so definitely watch this vid from beginning to end.

In true PixelJunk fashion we have made the game co-op, so get a friend around, grab an extra controller and anyone can just dive right on in. We’ve tried to make co-op as de-stressed as possible, so even if your player’s ship gets hit by something or overheats and starts crashing towards the ground, you can pop out your extendible hook thing (no official name for this yet – “Grabber” perhaps?) and grab your friend (he’s a bit heavy tho, so watch out), then you can carry him to the nearest pool of water and dunk him in to restore his health. If you don’t manage to grab him in time, he’ll just re-spawn near you and you’ll be docked a life.

The game is an old-school shooter at heart (hence the name), it is the PixelJunk take on those old retro shooting games such as Defender, with a little bit of Choplifter and Thrust! thrown in for good measure. We have giant bosses for you to fight against, multiple weapons to pick up and try out, shields you can grab, all kinds of stuff to give people with an itchy trigger finger a lot of fun. However, at the same time we have added a puzzle element (that we tend to do with most of our games) so even those without an itchy trigger finger will be able to play the game and have a lot of fun. This puzzle element obviously revolves around the sandbox fluid simulation we have implemented, and it is incredible to watch in action.

As with PJ Monsters Deluxe I’m not sure what the release date will be, but we are working very hard on it so hopefully it won’t be too far off!

A couple of weeks ago we unveiled PixelJunk 1-4 in trailer form to the masses and had a HUGE response! I suppose we deserved it because we simultaneously launched our naming contest for the game as well. For those who missed it we decided to let you, the fans, have a go at naming our game for us. It all began to snowball as news sites picked up on the competition and our servers crashed a couple of times from the load!

In just one week we got over 100,000 visitors to http://pixeljunk.jp and 10,000 people offered up ideas for a name based on the trailer. Even though the trailer’s resolution left a lot to be desired, we got a ridiculous amount of praise… and the team’s ego has been inflated a bit, which is a good thing, because now we’ll have to work extra specially hard to live up to everyone’s expectations! :-)

Anyway, we are now proud to announce that the name of the game has been picked! It will be called PixelJunk Shooter. Andy, the artist behind the style of the game, has knocked up a stunning logo that emphasizes the liquid element really well, as you can see below!

The lucky winner, picked from a hat of about 8 other people who voted for the same name, is Mario Paquet from Canada! We chose the name because: 1) it’s simple, 2) it describes the main thing you do in the game, and 3) it makes a great logo!

The other runner-up names were:

• PixelJunk Depths – Thomas Ella
• PixelJunk Atlantis – Takuhiro Hara
• PixelJunk Caves – Chi Lo
• PixelJunk Blaster – Edward Stumpfel
• PixelJunk S.O.S! – Derrick Kross

Other people voted for these names of course, but the above runners-up were picked out of a hat for each name in turn, so congratulations! T-shirts will be winging their way to you.

The most popular name suggested by a long shot was PixelJunk Elements, but we decided that it didn’t capture the shooting side of the game well enough and at the worst people might think it was a game about the weather. “Depths” almost became the chosen name but our producer at Sony Santa Monica, Deborah Mars, sounded like she had a lisp when she said it, so we dropped that one early on. We needed to choose a name everyone can enunciate. ;-)

Thanks for the incredible response and vibe we got from everyone. We are going to make this game a smash hit! If you manage to get into E3 next week you’ll be able to play a newer demo than the one shown in the video which has a number of cool new things in it… including co-op play!