‘retro/grade’ Posts
Hopefully you’ve been digging into some of the free PlayStation Plus content this month including Vanquish, Mega Man Maverick Hunter X, and indie-hit Closure. This week, we’re excited to bring the crowd-pleasing Plants Vs. Zombies on PS Vita to the Instant Game Collection.
In addition, there are some fantastic sales to jump on as well including the Gamers’ Choice Awards discounts (winners announced tomorrow) and the PS Vita Anniversary Sale celebrating PS Vita’s first year. Read on to learn more about these exceptional sales.
Don’t have PlayStation Plus? Go to the PlayStation Store on your PS3 or PS Vita or click here to get access via the Sony Entertainment Network online store.
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I can say with considerable confidence that today’s episode is our biggest and best yet, weighing in at a groan-inducing (but quality-packed!) two hours and 10 minutes. Our time at PAX Prime last week yielded sweet fruit in the form of five new game developer interviews, and each one is a treat. First, indie developer Matt Gilgenbach discusses how his new PSN-exclusive “reverse shooter” Retro/Grade changed his life; from there, we shift to Snapshot, the charming PS3 and PS Vita platform puzzler that enables players to manipulate their environment through photographs.
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Hello PlayStation.Blog readers! Firstly, if you aren’t familiar with Retro/Grade, check out our previous post for an explanation about how fighting battles backwards works. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Now that you’re all caught up, we can get started. It’s been a long journey since our first post about Retro/Grade on the PS.Blog over three years ago. We’ve worked very hard creating the best game we possibly can since then — if you saw the three year old screenshots, you’ll notice that it’s barely recognizable as the polished product you see today. Besides all the visual polish we added — like jaw-dropping effects and full HD 1080p rendering at 60 frames-per-second with anti-aliasing — we’ve added a ton of content.
Although we have a campaign mode, challenge mode is really the star of Retro/Grade. It’s where the real meat of the game lies. In challenge mode, you are presented with a galaxy map, and you go through playing various challenges that are based on the campaign levels, but with various twists and rule changes.
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Greetings, PlayStation.Blog readers! We recently announced that Retro/Grade, the first game played entirely in reverse, would be releasing exclusively on PSN on August 21st. Understanding and developing a game that is played in reverse is tough, so I want talk about how it all works.
Firstly, how did we design a game played in reverse? We worked backwards of course! We started with the idea that it’d be cool to play a game where time is flowing backwards, but we didn’t have any ideas on how to pull that off. We did a lot of brainstorming — time reversing is a hard concept to wrap your head around. We figured for gameplay purposes, undoing your actions would be the best fit for that theme. When undoing, you have to match both the timing and the position of previous actions. When matching timing, music is the best way to achieve that, so we thought rhythm gameplay would be the best mechanic to build the game around. We figured a 2D game where your motion is constrained to a few discrete lanes would make it easier to match the positions.
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Good news: We’ve finished our award-winning rhythm/shoot’em up, Retro/Grade! The game will be released on August 21st exclusively on PS3, and will provide hours of mind-bending rhythm-based gameplay as you fight through reverse-timed space battles.
We’ve gotten many requests to make Retro/Grade’s soundtrack available, so I’ll go ahead and confirm that we’ll be selling it on PSN. If you want the game and the soundtrack, there will be a discounted bundle — we’ll have more details on pricing soon.
For those who aren’t familiar with Retro/Grade, it’s similar to a classic Shoot ‘Em Up… in reverse! At the beginning of the game you stop a massive alien invasion, but all the destruction damages the space/time continuum, causing the flow of time itself to reverse.
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We’ve featured Retro/Grade several times on the PlayStation.Blog over the past couple of years. And so, we know a lot about it: it’s a shooter, controlled with a guitar controller, in reverse. But before Fantastic Fest 2011, I had never seen someone actually play the thing. As a pretty experienced Rock Band-er, I thought I’d be able to jump in and kick some ass, but the reality is, my gaming brain had never been taxed in quite this way.
So we set up a camera for 24 Caret Games’ Matt Gilgenbach, clad in a hard hat, to show you how the game actually plays. He actually beats the game in the first 30 seconds, but that’s not an accident…
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Hello Playstation.Blog readers! We’ve been hard at work making a must-have PS3 downloadable game for PSN, so it’s been a while since our last PlayStation.Blog update. If you’re like me and you can barely remember your own name, let me refresh your memory about Retro/Grade.
Retro/Grade is an innovative fusion between a rhythm game and a sidescrolling shooter that has received the IndieCade audience award as well as two Independent Game Festival nominations. The game begins when you have just singlehandedly fended off an alien invasion, but all the destruction damaged the space/time continuum, which caused the flow of time itself to reverse. What would have been the final boss is actually the beginning of your backwards journey.
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Matt Gilgenbach here. We’ve been pretty silent for the past year since I last visited the PlayStation.Blog about Retro/Grade, but that’s because 24 Caret Games has been hard at work transforming our prototype shown at the 2009 Independent Games Festival into an awesome PSN title. As you can see in the screenshots, all the graphics [...]
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