July 17th PlayStation Plus Update

Dyad – 20% Off: Dyad is an abstract game that is influenced by many genres, including racing games, fighting games, puzzle games and classic arcade shooters. Each of the game’s 27 different levels utilizes a variety of mechanics and present unique challenges: forming long combos, racing, surviving as long as possible, hitting certain top speeds, and more. Releasing as part of the 7/17 PlayStation Store Update, we’re proud to present this highly-anticipated game to all Plus members at a 20% discount on day one! Want more info? Check out all the coverage from the PlayStation Blog on this title, or hop into the PlayStation Forums thread to discuss it with the community.

The Games (PlayStation Store Promotion): Start Your Training. Once again four years have gone by in a flash, and the world is getting together to compete in The Games. To celebrate, snag two bonus sporty PS one Classics free: International Track & Field and Hot Shots Golf 2. International Track and Field is a 3D update to the classic Track & Field series and offers fun competition in over 11 different Olympic Events. Hot Shots Golf 2’s gameplay still shines as well, with easy to pick up and play golf action. If you own a PSP and have a Plus subscription through your PS3, you’ll be able to activate these free Plus downloads on your PSP, as well as your PS3. In addition, the sale will feature 50% discounts on select titles for Plus members too.

July 24th & 31st PlayStation Plus Update

PSN PLAY – 20% off: This legendary PlayStation Store event returns with a killer lineup of new releases and special incentives. PlayStation Plus members get the edge though as each of these highly anticipated new releases will have a 20% discount for all members during the first week! By participating in this event, you’ll not only get discounts on each week of a game’s release (including the pre-order week), but the more you buy, the more actual dollars will end up back in your wallet! So watch out for the pre-order of Expendables 2, starting 7/24 and game release on 7/31.

Sound Shapes, Papo & Yo, and Counter Strike: Global Offensive are also in the wings to rock your PSN world in PSN PLAY, which continues into August. Want more info? Read more about the PSN PLAY event right here or discuss it in the PlayStation Community forums.

Malicious – 20% off: In Malicious, you’ll take control of a “Spirit Vessel” awakened by prophets to defeat Holders, evil giants bent on destroying The Kingdom. You’re armed with the Mantle of Cinders, a magical artifact that takes the form of weapons or a shield. This awesome new PSN title sports a 20% discount in its debut week on the PlayStation Store on 7/24!

That’s it for now, but keep your feedback coming in by posting your thoughts on this update in the comments section. We got some great feedback from the questions posed in the update earlier this month, so thank you for making your voice heard. What games will you be picking up this month? Thanks, and see you in the comments!

Starting with 12 blockbuster titles worth over $260 – including inFAMOUS 2, LittleBigPlanet 2, Saints Row 2, Just Cause 2, and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine – PlayStation Plus members will now have a library of games to play in addition to exclusive features like online game saves, automatic updates, priority access to betas, and the best discounts on games, DLC, and other content on the PlayStation Store – all for less than $5 a month. New games will be introduced all the time, so you’ll never run out of awesome titles to play!

Purchase PlayStation Plus in the PlayStation Store on your PS3, or purchase online and get a redeemable voucher code instantly. Click HERE to join PlayStation Plus today!

Below is the full list of games that will be available free to all PlayStation Plus members beginning today. Let us know your thoughts on the PlayStation Plus powered instant game collection in the comments below as we’ll be continuing to listen to your thoughts on the best value in gaming! As always, it’s only going to get better.

Don’t have PlayStation Plus? Click here to purchase your membership today!

We also know a lot of you have been asking about music in the trailers and what you can use. Due to the fact that these trailers will be posted publicly, and we don’t want to infringe on any artists’ rights by using their music without permission, you’ll need to use only the audio from the files provided on the contest page. We know that this limits your audio options when creating the trailers, and we’re taking that into account when judging the top 10, so don’t worry if the music in your trailer doesn’t line up perfectly with the video.

Happy holidays Ratchet & Clank fans! Hopefully you’re all enjoying some quality gaming time with your friends and family cozied up by the fire playing Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One this winter. Personally, I’ve been spending a lot of time down in the lobby of PlayStation’s HQ playing on the massive Ratchet & Clank arcade cabinet we first revealed at Comic-Con and PAX. I wish I had room for one in my place!

The good news is that in celebration of this holiday season, we’re going to be giving you two chances to win one of these cabinets for yourself! The pair we’re giving away include a PS3 and the custom Ratchet & Clank controllers, so just plug them in and you’re ready to enjoy the ultimate Ratchet & Clank experience.

Seriously… How good would that thing look in your living room?

About now, you’re probably wondering how you get your hands on one of these. Starting today, those of you with a creative streak can head over to www.ratchetandclank.com and enter our Trailer Contest, which will be running until December 15th. We’ve provided all the cinematics from the game along with some gameplay footage for you to edit into your own Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One trailer. We’ll select our top 10 favorite submissions and post them to the contest page. Then, you, the fans, get to vote on your favorite and whoever creates the most popular video will be ringing in the New Year with a brand new All 4 One arcade cabinet!

We know not all of you are into video editing, though, and that’s why we’re also holding a “5 Days Of Ratchet” giveaway during December. Follow @PlayStation and keep your eyes peeled from December 12th to December 16th. We’ll be providing trivia questions each day; answer correctly and you’ll have a chance to win the second cabinet. Even if you don’t win the grand prize, we’ll be giving away sets of our sleek custom DualShock 3 controllers every day, so it pays to try and try again.

Enjoy your holiday time this year and be sure to follow @PlayStation and @insomniacgames for all things Ratchet & Clank. Oh, and don’t forget — Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One makes a great stocking stuffer!

To get you even more excited – we wanted to bring you the first cinematic from the game that sets the stage for our heroes’ intergalactic adventure:

We’ve got even more great content for you to check out today as well. Want to see the Behind the Scenes and learn how All 4 One was made? Check out the first Dev Diary from the folks in North Carolina!

That’s all for now, we hope to see and play with you online tonight on planet Magnus! Dibs on Qwark!

Can’t wait until next week to get a taste of Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One? You can check out an offline four-player co-op demo of the game right now, included on specially marked Blu-Ray and Combo Pack Blu-rays of the Sony Pictures film Zookeeper, starring Kevin James. That should definitely tide you over until the full game launches on October 18th!

Also, in case you haven’t heard, Target will be releasing an exclusive version of Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One that includes a voucher code for a FREE digital copy of Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty (a $15 value). If you haven’t tried it yet, now’s your chance to get it for free with purchase!

We hope you’re excited to play it, the team in North Carolina had a blast making it and is looking forward to playing with you online!

Finally: Captain Qwark gets his moment of glory! Flip over the cover art of Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One on October 18th and you’ll find this sweet surprise.

Now back to the making of the box art. Believe it or not, there’s a lot that goes into that rectangular piece of art that sits on store shelves (although I’m sure many colorful commentators would beg to differ). Before we kicked off packfront exploration, we collaborated with Insomniac Games to set our goals. The goals? Make something that not only popped on shelves, but spoke to the core principles of the game:

• Cooperative gameplay
• Unique characters
• Things that goes boom

We also wanted to make sure that something was designed with new audience members in mind: If you’ve never played a Ratchet & Clank game, what would you need to see to understand the characters? With our goals set, we began work on the various pieces of art that would start representing the game.

The tale begins in May of 2010, well before we revealed Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One at gamescom. As we worked on the reveal art, we pondered a direction for the game’s cover art (which is called the “packfront, “front of box” or FOB in biz-speak). At the time, we were noticing that a lot of recent game covers were looking very minimalist with clean, high-contrast colors — all-white or stark black backgrounds showing the hero in a dramatic pose. Ratchet & Clank is a colorful series, so we wanted to try this contemporary style while highlighting the bright color palette that makes All 4 One so visually appealing and unique.

From the start, we decided that it would be important for us to continue our tradition of working directly with Insomniac for the art; we didn’t want to go through some vendor and have them try to awkwardly emulate Insomniac’s style. This was especially important because Insomniac was making some minor tweaks to the character designs with All 4 One. So, after our initial discussions with Insomniac, we agreed to explore three basic directions for the cover artwork, which you can see below.

“Static Heroes.” This is the traditional, iconic movie-poster-style where you focus strongly on the characters’ faces. When it works, it’s because you know who they are. Note the game’s working title of “Ratchet & Clank: 4 Play,” which didn’t pass final approval for obvious reasons.

“Ready for Action.” This is your classic hero shot where the team is armed, ready for battle, and up against stiff odds. In these early comps, marvel at Qwark’s huge body and (understandably) tiny head — it was a constant design challenge to fit him into frame.

“Team Smackdown.” This is an approach often seen gracing comic book covers – say, part three of a five-part series. The heroes are in the throes of combat, in the middle of the destruction. For this to work, we have to show them working together: jumping into battle, rushing towards the screen, or firing their weapons.

Based on our early compositions, we quickly determined that the Team Smackdown approach looked too busy to be effective: it showed lot of weapon effects, enemies getting shredded, tons of motion, with some characters looking too small or disappearing in the chaos. Qwark alone took up to a third of the entire image in some of comps! The Static Heroes approach was tempting, and we’d used it for Tools of Destruction, but we walked away from it because you had to know who these characters are for the effect to work. And with All 4 One, we wanted to introduce the characters to a new generation of gamers in addition to longtime series fans.

We took a step back and thought it might be smart to use the art more consistently, to try to communicate who the characters were through the art and then show it again and again. After kicking ideas back and forth, we settled into the next phase of the art design. We ultimately opted to focus on the Ready For Action theme, with a dash of Static Heroes by pulling the camera in close so you could identify the characters. From there it was a back-and-forth process of tweaking the thumbnail sketches until we got the effect we wanted.

As we made progress towards the final version, we gradually learned that it was best to show the characters from the waist up. Throughout this process, you have to consider so much: weapons can add a lot of clutter, but at the same time if we had left the characters empty-handed, people who saw the art might think it was a game where four guys punched everyone in the face — not what we wanted!

Throughout the entire process, our collaboration with Insomniac was an excellent experience. Insomniac Principle Artist Dave Guertin, took our suggestions and reworked the image until we hit the design goals of both teams. Our creative collaboration with Insomniac wasn’t just nodding and smiling – we were on the same page and we gave each other what we wanted.

This version is getting close, but we wanted Ratchet to sport a mischievous grin and instead he looks kind of… evil. We asked Dave to raise his head a bit and subtly brighten his eyes. We wanted him to look like he’s ready to kick butt, not like he’s going to kill you in your sleep!

Meanwhile, as we worked towards the final version, there were so many factors to keep in mind. You need to make room for the game’s logo to stand out (and it’s a big one!), so you have to be very economical and make smart design decisions. We also wanted to showcase the game’s weaponry — a key gameplay feature for the series since day one — so we slapped a Combuster into Ratchet’s hot little hands.

Once we were homing in on our final designs, we conducted an experiment to see how the art options would hold up in the real world. We headed down to our retail staging area, which has shelf mockups that mimic the ones you see various retailers. We smacked the artwork onto the shelf, and we immediately saw that a bar covered up both Ratchet and Clank’s faces. D’oh! So we had to creep the logo and artwork higher to keep them above that bar. It’s the little things…

Between concept, direction, approvals, renders, tests and internal reviews, the packfront design process lasted between seven and eight months of constant iteration and refinement. Dave painted the final image in February of 2011, just in time to debut it on the PlayStation.Blog a few weeks later.

And there you have it, our journey towards a final packfront. As you can see above, it can take a lot of time, effort, trial, error and discussion to get to the final piece that we reveal our gaming audience. It may seem easy when you take a glance, but it’s anything but.

We hope you enjoyed the read and found it educational. Let us know what some of your alternate favorites are below and be sure to pick up a copy of Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One when it releases this October 18th!

This latest video we want to share takes place on the Aldaros Plains, one of the first areas you’ll explore on Planet Magnus. This is an area of the planet where the rules of gravity seem to be bent, and floating islands of rock make up the shifting landscape. The boss here is a gigantic creature called an Octomoth. If the name doesn’t give you an immediate idea of what this fearsome creature would be like, watch the video above!

We hope you enjoyed today’s video, and have your pre-order for All 4 One all ready to go for the 18th. To keep up with the latest happenings, be sure to follow Insomniac Games on Twitter or Like us on Facebook!

If modern war doesn’t have enough shooting to satisfy your trigger finger, how about a good ol’-fashioned American crime spree? We’ve got Saints Row: The Third’s Super Genius Man-Cat Professor Genki with an exclusive tour of the violence-ridden city of Steelport. It’s the wackiest spin on the open-world crime game that we’ve seen since….well, never. Honestly, in what other game can you fire a weapon that shoots a mind-controlling octopus that you can detonate for wide-scale destruction? Or call in an airstrike to take out rival gang members? There’s even a controller button dedicated to delivering nutshots! It’s outrageous—in that special, tasteless way we so adore.

Rounding out the issue, we’ve got big-time previews of THQ’s brawlers WWE ‘12 and UFC Undisputed 3, hang out with platform pals in Rayman Origins and Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One, and take spin in Ridge Racer: Unbounded. We’ve also got the final verdict on the latest PlayStation releases including Resistance 3, Dead Island, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, NHL and Madden 12, and the oh-so-special Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection.

We’ve also got first looks at Borderlands 2 and our new gamegal crush with Lollipop Chainsaw. PTOM is on newsstands September 27th and hitting subscribers mailboxes right now. Enjoy!

We hope you’ve been enjoying the Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One Limited Beta. We gave out tons of codes last week, and if for some reason you haven’t gotten a code to download it yet, check out the special pre-order deal we have going on with Amazon. If you pre-order from now until September 26th, you get into the beta! Also, if you get over to RatchetAndClank.com before supplies run out, we’re giving away a limited number of access codes on the homepage as well! The beta features one-to-four player online and offline co-op, as well as two segments from different locations in the game and a cross-section of the inventive arsenal you’ve come to expect from Ratchet & Clank games.

One of the frequent questions we get is how the evil Dr. Nefarious ended up with Ratchet, Clank, and President Qwark. We actually explain this at the beginning of the game: Ratchet, Clank and Qwark have arrived on the planet of Luminopolis so that now-Galactic President Qwark can pick up an Intergalactic Tool of Justice Award. Of course, there is no such award as it’s all an elaborate ruse by Dr. Nefarious to lure our heroes into a trap. Dr. Nefarious’s plan goes awry — and when your plan that involves a giant light-eating Z’Grute goes bad, it’s going to get ugly. Nefarious realizes he has no choice but to begrudgingly help our heroes in order save his own skin.

As part of our gameplay series of videos, we wanted to show you some of the spectacular bosses and co-op moments that you’ll find when you play Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One. The video above shows you the sequence starring the Z’Grute, as it terrorizes the city of Luminopolis.

We hope you are as excited as we are about Ratchet and Clank’s first four-player co-op adventure. It’s only a few weeks away, so to stay up to date on all the latest news, be sure to Follow Insomniac Games on Twitter and Like Us on Facebook.

The first scenario is the opening level of Luminopolis where Ratchet, Clank, Captain Qwark and the evil Dr. Nefarious are forced to band together when Nefarious’s light-eating Z’Grute is unleashed upon the city. The second area of the beta jumps you deeper into the action with The Vertigus Cliffs, set in the N.E.S.T. area of the treacherous Planet Magnus is a unique area full of vertical views that look stunning in 3D. The Vertigus Cliff level will also give you a chance to check out some mechanics from later in the game, including use of your weapon wheel and many of the crazy Ratchet & Clank weapons you’ve come to know and love. New weapons like the Frost Cannon, Plasma Bomb Launcher and Warmonger give you a great assortment of guns to play with, but old favorites like the Combuster are back as well. There are LOTS of weapons in the beta, as well as character’s special ability.

Right now, this limited beta is only available to folks who possess a special code – so if you attended our Community Day, or have won a contest, you should be checking your e-mail right about now! Haven’t won yet? Be sure to follow Insominac Games on Twitter and Like us on Facebook for some new contests and opportunities to get in on the limited beta. And starting next week, our promotional partner Amazon.com will be sending out access codes to their email list as well as offering them to everyone who pre-orders between now and September 27th, and RatchetAndClank.com will have limited codes available – to keep apprised of when those promotions happen, be sure to follow Insomniac Games and PlayStation on Twitter/Facebook!

Still didn’t win a spot in the beta? Don’t lose hope! This October will see the release of a official demo for all to download and enjoy. We hope you enjoy the online beta for Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One. We’re really excited to get the full game in your hands on October 18th.

How do you plan on playing Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One? Solo or with a team? Let us know in the comments and keep an eye out for codes! If you miss your chance, keep an eye out on the PlayStation Twitter today for more chances to snatch a code.