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!

When Nihilistic first sat down and thought about creating a downloadable title, we immediately wanted to do it in the horror genre. We’ve got a lot of zombie and horror fans here. Not to mention some hardcore fans of old-school shooters. Combining the two felt logical and Zombie Apocalypse was born.

Thematic inspiration was drawn primarily from classic zombie films of the 70s and 80s. Two films in particular are ZOMBIE (aka Zombi 2) by Lucio Fulci, and Nightmare City by Umberto Lenzi. The first level in Zombie Apocalypse is set in an airport which is a homage to Nightmare City. If you haven’t heard of either of these films and don’t mind some bad acting they are both incredible zombie gore fests. They are definitely not for the squeamish!

The game design was inspired primarily by two old-school shooters. The first was Robotron, a classic and innovator in the dual-stick shooter genre. In fact, the internal codename for Zombie Apocalypse during development was “Zombitron”. At the beginning of Zombie Apocalypse’s development, we held an internal Robotron tournament to get prepared. The second was gamer favorite Smash TV. We built upon the gore and arena combat of Smash TV by adding environmental hazards into our arenas that will tear zombies to shreds, blow them up, or light them on fire when you blast zombies into them.

Zombie Apocalypse is all about survival and scoring big. When playing with friends either on the same console or online, the team is working toward a shared score. So to do well and hit the top of the leaderboards you’ve got to work together. Here are three PlayStation Blog-exclusive tips for hitting as high of a score as possible, applicable to either single or multiplayer:

• The survivor characters all have chainsaws that you can pull out at any time. Use the chainsaw to grapple by pressing and holding the L1 button to score an instant kill on a zombie and to increase your score multiplier by three. Just be careful to not use the attack in the middle of a group of zombies, as it leaves you vulnerable for a moment as it ends. Try to lead a lone zombie away from the group then chainsaw them in half.
• Make use of the environmental hazards. For example, blast zombies with your shotgun into the wood chipper in the Logging Camp level. Each hazard kill gives you an additional 5,000 points on top of the points you would have scored otherwise.
• Use the zombie bait grenade not just to kill a bunch of zombies but to lead them to environmental hazards to score more points. In the Graveyard level you can throw the bait into the open grave and then shoot zombies directly into it to put them back to rest and get your hazard bonus.

If you reach the point where you think you can easily handle a Zombie Apocalypse and want an even bigger challenge be sure to unlock Hardcore Mode, one of our six unlockable game modes. Hardcore Mode restricts each survivor to starting with just one life and no extra lives are granted. That means you’ve only got one chance to try to score big on the special Hardcore Mode leaderboard. To unlock Hardcore Mode, complete seven consecutive days (missions) in the normal game mode without dying. Additional unlockable modes include Blackout Mode, where all the lights turn off except for one small light per player, and 7 Days of Hell Mode, where the survivors are tasked to survive through a week of sepia toned zombie mayhem.

So hit the store later today and get Zombie Apocalypse for PS3! But we are not just developers — we’re givers too! So to celebrate the launch of Zombie Apocalypse we will be giving away 25 codes for the game on the PlayStation Twitter feed. But make sure you’ve read this post, as there might be little pop quiz via Twitter! So keep your eyes peeled to Twitter later today after our PlayStation Store Update goes live!

Hope to see you online fighting back the zombie invasion with me!

Greetings from Konami and Nihilistic. My name is Jon Slavin, one of Nihilistic’s game designers on Zombie Apocalypse, the downloadable title from Konami coming to the PlayStation Network next month. I wanted to drop in and show some Zombie love to the PlayStation community and give you some previews to what you can expect to see!

So what is Zombie Apocalypse about?

Zombie Apocalypse is pure and gory wish fulfillment. We wanted to strip off the woes of increasingly complex modern mega-games, and retreat back into the world of dank arcades and late-night movie rentals that was our childhood in the 80’s and 90’s. This was not a game in search of a hook, beyond perhaps one to skewer a zombie on. Our goal was to produce a pure arcade shooter, rooted in dual-stick classics such as Robotron: 2084 and Smash TV. We knew it had to be pick-up-and-play, gory party-game fun, but still deep enough and tense enough to stand among its forbearers. We knew multiplayer was a key feature in a game of this type, so we pushed hard to get four-player online co-op integrated from the start. With core values in place, we set out to fill that savage coffer with all the classic zombie lore we loved.

There was never any argument over style when it came time to design the aesthetics. We are all huge fans of classic zombie films, from Romero, to Fulci, to Danny Boyle, we love it all. We wanted to pay homage to the classic “big box” horror films–the true exploitation flicks that proudly exclaimed how many countries they had been banned in on their garish posters (Zombie Apocalypse has already been denied by Cero in Japan!). There would be no cell-shading or cartoon ghouls. This was to be a real stomach-turner, steeped in zombie history with little nods to the masters of the genre sprinkled throughout.

Deadly Environments
In the best zombie films, the environment is as much a character as any of the victims, and we weren’t content to let our backdrops be only set-dressing. To begin, we wanted to find locales that would reflect the best moments in zombie film history. We have a graveyard with a crematorium that spews green gas, in a nod to Return of the Living Dead. Then there’s the woods surrounding the lonely cabin of a certain Dead turned Evil. After our seven locations were cemented, we began to work in a series of deadly hazards. There are spinning rotors and a jet turbine in the Airport, car crushers and grinders in the Junkyard, and an out-of-control garbage compactor in the Town Square. For Zombie Apocalypse, the environment is as much a weapon as your guns or chainsaw, and we really want to challenge the player to get creative with their kills. Sure, you can plug that zombie with your M-16, but can you lure him into the wood chipper along with a half-dozen of his shambling friends for big score bonuses?

Four Unlikely Heroes
For our heroes, we knew that bald-headed bad-asses just wouldn’t do. The Zombie Apocalypse is a plague that has stripped mankind of its place atop the food-chain, and the ones who were left were all unlikely survivors. We started with Harlan Woods, heavily inspired by the lead character in George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead film. We then added Natalie Flores, our tough but mentally-unstable female lead. A bartender with no customers left alive to serve double shots to, she’s content to serve up plenty of double-ought shots to zombies. To round out the roster we added Ed Fragsen, the lonely and broken security guard with nothing left to lose, and Jimmy86, the arcade-rat geek who’s really a reflection of the designers themselves set loose on the zombie hoards as though it were a game come to life.

Zombie-Killing Arsenal
With our theme, our environments, and our heroes in place it was time to refine the gameplay. We didn’t want the player to ever feel like they didn’t have the tools necessary to deal with the undead masses coming at them. This is why there is always a chainsaw strapped to your back, ready to go, as well as your default M-16 that never runs out of ammo. With their trusty chainsaw the player has the option to either just slice-and-dice or to put themselves at risk and go for a grisly “Chainsaw Execution” move (more on that later). Also at the player’s disposal is “zombie bait” which takes the form of a cute and talkative teddy bear strapped to the gills with C-4 and counting down to his “big surprise.” The zombies find his chatter irresistible, and will follow him to their death. There is also an entire arsenal of weapon drops the player will come across, ranging from a flamethrower, to a chaingun, to dual smg’s and a shotgun (10 in total).

Racking Up the Score
Wrapped around these instruments of death are a score multiplier system and an intricate series of bonuses the player can earn. Each stage of the game represents a Day in the life of the survivors, with the ultimate goal to survive all 55 Days of terror. Each day, the multiplier begins to climb the longer the player can stay alive and keep killing zombies, boosting the value of each kill as they go. The score system is designed to be layered, so that each positive action by the player feeds into the next. For example, by rescuing survivors the player earns a score bonus for the rescue as well as a fresh zombie bait to replenish their supply. The bait is great for luring zombies into environmental hazards, which yield score bonuses for each kill. Bonuses are affected by the score multiplier, which is given an extra boost when players put themselves at risk and use their “Chainsaw Execution” move. It’s all about giving the player as many zombie-killing options as possible, and then finding a way to give each action meaning within a larger context.

55 Days of Terror
Finally, our goal was to give the player a great value. There’s a lot of competition in the downloadable arena, and we wanted to make sure picking up Zombie Apocalypse was a no-brainer (pun intended I suppose). We have 55 increasingly intense levels across seven unique environments in the main game, unlockable modes including the punishing “7 Days of Hell” and “Hardcore” modes. We also have full 4-player local and online multiplayer support in all modes, as well as full trophy support for the PS3. Our hope is to have created something that arcade fans, zombie fans, and even the casual player looking for a quick fix or some bloody multiplayer fun will enjoy and keep coming back to. This is a game we had a lot of fun making, and we hope will be as much fun to play once it is unleashed upon the PlayStation Network.