Don’t have PlayStation Plus? Go to the PlayStation Store on your PS3 or click here for access.

November 27th PlayStation Plus Update

Bejeweled 2 (PS3 PSP)

50% off for Plus members (Regular price: $4.99, PS Plus Price: $2.50)

Match sparkling gems three at a time to make them burst in showers of color and points. Match four or more to create flashy power gems that boost your score and your mood with brilliant cascades and combos. For even more dazzling fun, bump up your brainwaves with multi-faceted Puzzles, or enter the Zen state of Endless play.

Cash Guns Chaos (PS3)

50% off for Plus members (Regular price: $2.49, PS Plus Price: $1.25)

A fast-paced top-down shooter featuring intense run and gun arcade-action across more than 15 levels as you battle a never-ending onslaught of relentless enemies.

Peggle (PS3 and PSP versions)

50% off for Plus members (Regular price: $4.99, PS Plus Price: $2.50)

Peggle features everything you’ll need for the ultimate pinballesque adventure! Take aim and shoot metal balls from the cannon to clear mazes of brightly colored pegs. Indulge your love for bouncing balls and amazing firework effects by becoming a Peggle Master through 55 levels and 75 challenges.

Sideway NY (PS3)

50% off for Plus members (Regular price: $4.99, PS Plus Price: $2.50)

Battle your way through a twisted graffiti world where your prowess in puzzle solving makes the difference between life and death! Jump into one of the most unique and visually compelling 3D game worlds ever created. Follow the twisted journey of Nox, through a fast-paced 2D adventure set in a 3D world.

Slam Bolt Scrappers (PS3)

50% off for Plus members (Regular price: $4.99, PS Plus Price: $2.50)

Build and brawl in this fast and frantic mash-up! Race your opponents to build the most powerful towers in Slam Bolt City while defending against deceptively adorable baddies and hugely epic bosses. Create weapons that shoot lasers, drills, missiles, and more to annihilate your adversary. Battle in four-player co-op campaign mode, or go head-to-head for more brawling and block-building awesomeness.

Swords & Soldiers (PS3)

50% off for Plus members (Regular price: $4.99, PS Plus Price: $2.50)

Blend ninja monkeys, attacking Aztecs and brutal Vikings with everything you love about real time strategy games and you’ve got Swords and Soldiers! Acquire resources, assemble your army, thwart enemies and dominate your opponents in single and multiplayer local and online modes. Choose from the Aztec, Viking and Chinese factions, each with their own missions, campaigns and abilities.

TerRover (PS3)

50% off for Plus members (Regular price: $4.99, PS Plus Price: $2.50)

Launch yourself into the surreal mash-up of unique cartoon graphics and 2-D physics universe that is TerRover. Navigate through over forty stages of puzzling arcade levels in five different vivid art styles including the icy vistas of Congelata, all-tech surfaces of Mechanica, strange vegetation and terrains of Acor and Aura, and the treacherous volcanoes and lava of Volcanus!

Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade (PS3PSP)

50% off for Plus members (Regular price: $7.49, PS Plus Price: $3.75)

Choose from among four unique character classes and journey to the fantasy world of Aven. Experience on-the-go hack ‘n slash combat or join cooperative multi-player battles via wireless gameplay. Venture through dynamic 3D environments, discover rich treasures and unravel the mystery of an ancient planet.

Untold Legends: The Warriors Code (PSP)

50% off for Plus members (Regular price: $7.49, PS Plus Price: $3.75)

Untold Legends: The Warrior’s Code features an epic storyline brought to life through dramatic in-game cinematics, along with a completely new combat experience and enhanced 3D graphics. Players can now experience this action-RPG genre through an upgraded combat engine designed for strategic combat, a wider variety of combat moves and special abilities, and interactive boss battles with unique AI.

Pinball Arcade (PS3 and PS Vita)

50% off for Plus members (Regular price: $9.99, PS Plus Price: $5.00)

Pick up the core game at a great price, and watch for the monthly updates to get even more tables to play online tournaments and additional modes on.

We’ll be back next week with an all new free game to play. Until then, we hope you’ve enjoyed the content this month. To give us a good look back on November, let us know what you felt was the best update this month. As always, thanks for your feedback and we’ll see you next week!

“They call me the creative director, but most of the time I just surf the internet and watch Kevin Butler videos.” Eitan Glinert is a lively character with a quick tongue and a big smile, and the self-proclaimed “Fire Chief” of Cambridge-based developer Fire Hose Games. As we speak, Glinert’s team is days from releasing its first game, the PlayStation Network exclusive building-and-brawling party game Slam Bolt Scrappers, available now on the PlayStation Store as part of the annual Spring Fever celebration. The excitement level is high – three celebratory stuffed pizzas are on the way.

In speaking with Glinert, we quickly learn that Slam Bolt Scrappers’ chaotic building-and-brawling gameplay didn’t develop in a vacuum. And, for that matter, neither did Glinert. He was the first graduate student of MIT’s GAMBIT Game Lab, where he researched video game user interfaces and ways to make games as accessible to as many people as possible. “When I first started, it was kind of ghetto,” he recalls. “We were in the back of this lab called the Education Arcade, we didn’t even have our own space. We occupied this back lab table and we wouldn’t leave! We were working on a game back there, at all hours, but the staff was nice about it. Eventually we got our own lab.”

A lab wasn’t all he got — MIT supported and encouraged Glinert’s passion for game design. “MIT has this awesome attitude where they say, ‘What’s your stupid idea? Let’s help you do that!’” Glinert’s stupid idea, it turned out, wasn’t so stupid after all. “I started talking to MIT about starting a game studio. Instead of laughing me out of the room, they said, ‘okay, let’s see how we can make that happen.’”

Founding Fire Hose Games became a quest that would take Glinert, his dream, and a small but growing team from a cramped HQ festooned with acid-waste-pipes — a room that, in an astonishing coincidence, sheltered the original creators of Ms. Pac Man some 25 years earlier — to a cozy but charming office in downtown Cambridge. By this point, Glinert’s team had begun work on what would eventually become Slam Bolt Scrappers. It was a development cycle that would include a full year of gameplay prototyping and six radically different game prototypes — almost unheard of for a tiny startup game studio with next to no funding.

“Most of our early worries came from the endless prototyping, money issues, and a real concern about ballooning scope,” Glinert remembers. In one early prototype of Slam Bolt Scrappers, the plan was to create a different building mechanic for every single level in the game — a monumental task. “We had a level where you patched up a dam; in another level you built a spiderweb bridge from chains so that this crazy centipede train could cross it.” One level configuration, however, stuck; it proved to be a hit at the office even during off-hours. Fire Hose Games had found their core mechanic, and hastily finished it in the weeks leading up to PAX East 2010, where they revealed it to a crowded video game community. Their persistence had paid off: The press paid attention, with several sites naming Slam Bolt Scrappers as one of the best games of the show.

Meanwhile, Glinert’s MIT graduate research into video game UI design actually proved useful for the rapidly gelling Slam Bolt Scrappers, which Glinert says was designed with accessibility as a core goal. Case in point: the Beverage Mode. “You can play the game with just one hand, and use the other hand for multi-tasking — say, drinking a beverage or eating a sandwich,” Glinert says with a wide grin. “It also lets you dual-wield characters if you’re really hardcore.”

Sid Shuman, PSB: Your first game design experience was with a free educational game called Immune Attack for the Federation of American Scientists. How did you land that job?

Eitan Glinert: At the time, I was in the bio-tech industry but I was looking for a new job. I was contacted for an interview, and I didn’t even know what the interview was for, I was going in blind. In the interview, the interviewer asks me, “listen, do you play any video games?” I think this is a trick question — obviously, she’s trying to figure out if I’m going to waste time on the job. So I say, “No, I hate video games.” Her face goes from a smile to a frown and she says, “oh, because we want somebody who plays video games a lot. You need to know them to make them.”

I could not backpedal fast enough! At the time, I was playing Final Fantasy X again. I ended up getting the job in the end, but probably because I backpedaled like a maniac.

The goal of the game, Immune Attack, was to educate students about the functions of the human immune system. The job was a ton of fun, but what’s really interesting about it is who was on the team. I was working in Washington, D.C. with the Federation of American Scientists, and we were working remotely with the University of Southern California — including a couple of students who were brand new, one of whom was Jenova Chen. He went on to help create flOw and Flower for PSN. And we had Vincent Diamante as our sound guy, and he went on to be the sound guy on Flower! We were all really young and we didn’t know what we were doing, though I bet Jenova and Vincent had a much better idea than I did.

PSB: Hearing you talk about accessibility and user interfaces reminds me a lot of Jenova Chen and thatgamecompany…

E.G.: They go to the extreme, right? They try to make games with only Sixaxis controls and maybe a button. I don’t want to speak for Jenova too much, but I’m fairly certain that his design philosophy is coming more from an experiential standpoint. You know, “how can we make people feel like they are the wind?” For us with Slam Bolt Scrappers it was, “we want to make a party game that includes everyone; how can we make a control scheme that will support that?” Our game was much more mechanics-driven.

PSB: A lot of gamers think they can make games. Do you have any words of wisdom about what it’s like in the real world of game studio startups?

Eitan Glinert: There are so many of them. Prototyping is one of the biggest things. Take the time to make it good — I think the Valve model of “it’ll be done when it’s done” is pretty smart. Rushing a game out that’s half-finished is not a good way to do it.

PSB: What was it liked when you founded Fire Hose Games? Did you live on instant ramen?

E.G.: It was scary. This isn’t even just video games, it’s startups in general. If you do a startup, be prepared to live on nothing. I didn’t get paid forever making this game. There’s no money associated with this — we’re hoping that people who see this will go and buy the game, and then maybe we’ll get some. You’re doing this out of passion, not for money. Anyone who creates this kind of startup does so because they have this creative itch that needs to be scratched. They want to make games that nobody else is willing to make, and that’s why they’re willing to put themselves out on a limb.

PSB: Slam Bolt Scrappers puts a big focus on multiplayer. What are Fire Hose Games’ favorite multiplayer games?

E.G.: Anything four-player with couch play, where you sit around and scream at each other — that’s what we love. One game we’ve been playing a ton is the PSN game TerRover. You have this little tank rover, and it has these ridiculous controls — you can jump in bizarre ways. The most awesome part of TerRover is the four-player race mode because these races are unbelievable silly. If you die, you respawn in funny places. And if you’re really good at the game, which we are, you can fly. LittleBigPlanet 2 (LINK) is also our kind of game, though we’re kind of jerks about it: we grab each other and drag each other around.

PSB: Are you thinking about concepts for what you’d like to do after Slam Bolt Scrappers? Having you considered extending into a different genre?

E.G.: Oh, you’d better believe it. Slam Bolt Scrappers is a weird name, right? We want to explore the Slam Bolt universe and do new things with it. There are a couple of prototypes we’re working on already for new games that could fit into this world. We’re not quite ready to talk about it yet, but you’d better believe we’re working on it and you’d better believe we’re looking at PSN as a home for them.

In Slam Bolt Scrappers (SBS to the cool kids) you race to combine colored blocks into squares of the same color. Build big colored squares and they form weapons that automatically attack your enemy’s tower. The player with the last tower standing wins! It sounds simple enough, but once you throw in jetpack fueled flight, punching baddies, stealing blocks, awesome power-ups of awesomeness, and fun button-mashing brawling you’ll quickly realize how gloriously chaotic our game can be. Both the epic battle mode and crazy campaign can be played with one to four players, making this the perfect game for some rocking party time action.

So, PS3 owners, if you have any interest at all in beat-em-up games, puzzlers, or fun, you owe it to yourself to play some SBS – the ultimate combination of brawling and building. It also makes you a cooler person, but I know you don’t need that.

For more information on Slam Bolt Scrappers and Fire Hose Games, stop by our website, reach out to us on the Twitters, or come join our Fan Club.

Best friends forever,
Fire Hose Games

Slam Bolt Scrappers is an epic game about blocks and baddies, friends and foes, building and destruction. The journey began long ago: We had discovered a powerful recipe by deciphering encrypted instructions found on ancient stone tablets. We followed this recipe for millennia, meticulously mixing strange ingredients from exotic locales. The result is a game with the perfect combination of multiplayer beat-em-up brawling and strategic puzzling. The result is Slam Bolt Scrappers. *cue epic music*

In SBS, players fly through the air above their team’s tower, punching cthuloid grubs to get colored blocks. Placing these blocks into squares of the same color turns them into powerful weapons that automatically attack their opponent’s tower. By punching baddies, building larger weapons, and saying mean things about their opponent’s face, one player will destroy their enemy’s tower and emerge victorious. 1-4 players can compete in the co-op campaign, fighting a variety of baddies and bosses, or duke it out in the multiplayer battle mode, unlocking new weapons and levels as they brawl.

We’ve put a variety of weapons in the game for your block breaking pleasure. Teal lightning blasters, purple laser guns, and automatic green drills are all at your disposal, but the ultimate weapon may be the dreaded black cannon.

The black cannon is unique in Slam Bolt Scrappers. Unlike all other weapons, the black cannon must be manually loaded and fired for each shot. Instead of using their blocks to build more weapons, players fly into the green arrow on each empty cannon and press the circle button to load their block into the cannon. The cannon then finds a target and fires a flaming block, causing massive damage to whatever it hits along with splash damage effecting other nearby blocks.

Using the black cannon in fights always has devastating results. There is nothing like wiping out a huge weapon in your enemy’s tower with a single shot. Well, nothing except wrecking a boss with these same flaming projectiles.

So, if you want to get some hands on experience with the black cannon, be sure to pick up the game on March 15th. If the trailer got your heart racing and you can’t wait to use the cannon, stop by booth 1133 at PAX East for a hands-on sneak peak. In the mean time, check out our website, join our Facebook Fan Page, and follow us on Twitter for more updates!

GOOD NEWS EVERYONE: Slam Bolt Scrappers is coming to the PlayStation Network on March 15th! That’s right, in mere days you will be able to experience the greatest experience of all experiences.

After centuries of laboring over our sweet, scrappilicious, love child of brawling and building, we are proud to present the perfect genre mash-up: Slam Bolt Scrappers. Behold its glory and embrace its chaos, but most of all, be ready for some serious multiplayer trash talking. On March 15th.

What is Slam Bolt Scrappers, you say? Thanks to what could only be psychic powers, you already know that it’s a game that combines a beat-em-up feel with building and tower defense. Players control flying heroes that beat up baddies to get colored building blocks. Stacking these blocks into squares of the same color builds weapons. Most battles give players a specific tower that they need to build on – the weapons built on this tower will automatically attack a tower controlled by their opponent. The goal is simple: use your weapons to destroy your opponent’s tower to win. Players can play with up to 4 towers, and the game is 4 player, so there are plenty of different battles to be had: multiple players can work together to build one tower, battling it out against friends or computer opponents, a single player can control multiple towers, or each player can man their own tower in free for all mode. And it’s really sweet!

I said most battles give you a single tower to build on, but with our Skyscraper level, we took that literally. Players get a giant skyscraper with different stories that they can build in – sort of like a vertical sidescroller. Starting at the bottom of the skyscraper, players stack blocks into weapons in each level with the goal of destroying an onslaught of baddies and working their way up to the next level.

Once all the stories have been completed, the boss soars down from the sky, flying to different areas of the Skyscraper and bringing the player along with him. The player then needs to rely on weapons that they’ve placed throughout the tower to help destroy the boss. And, we’ve given players a special new weapon to get the job done – THE LIGHTNING BLASTER. Observe:

The lightning blaster is an awesome weapon that not only attacks flying baddies and bosses, but also attacks opponents’ weapons, doing serious damage and sometimes stunning them, preventing them from firing. Once players master this weapon, they not only become a serious force in SBS, but also a better looking person.

That’s all for now PS fans! Stay tuned for more updates as we get closer to release – we’ll be showing off more sweet weapons and crazy levels. If you make it to PAX, stop by booth 1133 to check out the game. Be sure to follow us on twitter (@FireHoseGames) and swing by our Facebook fan page (facebook.com/FireHoseGames) for more behind the scenes goodness. And don’t forget to get the game when it comes out on March 15th! (EUROPEAN FRIENDS, DISPAIR! You’ll have to wait until March 16th!)

Ah, March. Home to Mardi Gras, the Equinox, and Pi Day. Now you can add one more celebration-worthy event to that list: It’s when Slam Bolt Scrappers, the new indie game, will be hitting the PlayStation Network!

If you are wondering “What is this awesome and likely epic game I’ve never heard of?” then boy do we have some good news for you! A unique blend of brawling and building mayhem, Slam Bolt Scrappers is a one-to-four player party game where you fight and simultaneously build crazy weapon-growing towers.

The game features a co-op campaign where up to four players can work together against super-smart enemy AIs, and giant bosses with anger management issues. We’re also bringing back couch play with a four-way battle mode where those same friends can duke it out for hours and hours while shouting at each other and the TV. The game even has a beverage mode where you can play with one hand while using the other to multitask and enjoy a tasty drink. Sweet!

We’ve been hammering away these past few months and we’re happy to say that oh man this game is getting wicked fun. We’re putting the finishing touches on it now so that it’ll be extra shiny for the March release. In the mean time enjoy these new screens! And be sure to check out the Slam Bolt Scrappers website for more updates as we get closer and closer to the drop date. We’ll be putting up more images, concept art, and videos, as well as descriptions of our new characters, levels, and weapons. This is one PlayStation Network game you don’t want to miss!

Slam Bolt Scrappers is a genuine, bona-fide genre-twisting mash-up of brawling and building where one to four players clash in an all-out brawl while simultaneously creating weapon packed towers that fight alongside them. Gameplay centers on assembling colored blocks into powerful weaponized turrets while defending against enemy attacks and mobbing creeps. The game presents a deep battle mode with tons of replayability and a fast and frantic co-op campaign filled with deviously charming baddies, epic bosses, and fun, cartoony levels.

Duke it out and crush your enemies in the competitive battle mode by building massive towers of weapons…Or work together as a team to protect Slam Bolt City against hordes of invading baddies!

Want to participate in this beta testing opportunity? Drop us a line at test [at] firehosegames [dot] com with your name and when you are going to be in Boston, and we’ll get you set up!

For those who can’t make it to Boston’s soon-to-be frozen tundra, never fear. Slam Bolt Scrappers is scheduled to hit the PlayStation Network in early 2011.

Hopefully you now have a better idea of why this genre-mashing game is racking up the accolades. Look for it in early 2011.

Now, it has come to my attention that there might be those of you out there who haven’t heard of Slam Bolt Scrappers before. THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE. I mean, we’re talking Game of the Decade-level stuff here. A title that you will cherish and pass down to your kids along with family heirlooms. This will change your life and the lives of your unborn children’s children. I also guess I’m saying that I frequently overuse hyperbole.

Slam Bolt Scrappers is a wild, mile-a-minute mashup of building and brawling where you and your friends race to build the greatest towers in Slam Bolt City, while defending against deviously charming baddies and epic bosses. The gameplay is different from anything you’ve played before (nominated for Best Game Mechanic of E3 2010 by Kotaku), and in conjunction with Sony Online Entertainment, we can’t WAIT for the game to come out as a PlayStation Network exclusive in early 2011.

But what’s this? You don’t want to wait a few months to play this game? You want to play it NOW? Well then we’ve got good news for you! We’ll be hanging out all weekend at PAX in booth #3834 showing off our goods to any fan, enemy, or dinosaur who happens to pass by and wants to give it a shot. Be sure to come visit, play the game, and talk to the actual game developers who will be manning the booth!

HAVEN’T HAD YOUR FILL? Why not check out our website or peer into the twisted minds of our development team? You can also comment here and we promise to pop in and respond :)

Hope to see you in Seattle at PAX!