‘Tis the PixelJunk Season…

We know you’ve been patiently waiting for your chance to finally go hands-on with the fourth game in the PixelJunk series. So let me lead off by formally announcing: PixelJunk Shooter will become available on the PlayStation Store next Thursday, December 10th.

We’ve been holding on to this video interview with SCEE‘s Jem Alexander and I until we were ready to announce PixelJunk Shooter‘s release date. With that out of the way, hit “play” below:

I was a bit tired during that interview, which is my excuse for the over-use of the adjective “cool” (the game *is* cool though! *Very* cool cool indeed)! Here’s the story behind that:

The time was 12am midnight and it was a warm early Autumn night and my heavily loaded car was waiting for me to drive it from Kyoto to Tokyo (estimated 8 hour drive).  This was the start of our journey to the Tokyo Game Show to set up our very own booth for the first time ever.  To cut costs wherever we could, I decided I would drive overnight, lugging the heavier stuff (big TVs, free give-aways, PS3s etc) and saving on train tickets too (by including a couple of Q-Gamers in the drive too).  The car was ram-packed full and weighed heavily down!  Luckily it is a Murano so fairly large and sturdy in the first place, but it’s a wonder the police didn’t pull us over during our trip.
 

 
In Japan the freeways aren’t “free” but recently there is this “ETC” deal which lets you drive on most of them for a single charge of ten bucks or so. Oh and some stretches of road are only 2 lanes (because of the mountainous nature of the country), so as you can imagine there were a few bottlenecks on the way, and one accident that had occurred only a few minutes before we passed it near Mt. Fuji just as it was getting light, that wasn’t the greatest thing to see in the wee hours!  We arrived in Tokyo safe and sound though!
 
Driving through Tokyo on the express way is an interesting experience. You are in Shibuya and below is the ubiquitous maze of tiny streets but you are oblivious to all that as the express way is up above it all in a world of its own, lined by tall buildings.  One minute you are in Shibuya, and the next Roppongi, then you are passing Tokyo Tower and driving over the rainbow bridge, the speed at which it all flies by makes Tokyo seem so small! (It isn’t of course, not by a long shot).
 

 
We arrived 10 minutes later in Makuhari Messe where TGS is always held, grabbed a quick Denny’s breakfast as it was the only place open at 7am and then drove to the conference center.  They allowed us to drive right into the hall and park the car next to our half-finished booth (we employed a company to set up the walls and large prints).  It took us the rest of the day to set everything up, including DIY anti-theft locks for the PS3 controllers! (The problem with Bluetooth controllers is that people can easily walk away with them, and we didn’t want that to happen!)  Once everything was finished it really looked great for such a small booth!  We then went and got some much needed sleep because by that point we were totally knackered!!
 

I might as well use this blog entry as an excuse to talk a little bit about the response last month’s release of PixelJunk Monsters Deluxe has been getting – it has been awesome!  Metacritic currently has us at 88 and we’re in the top 10 of all-time best PSP games, which is absolutely incredible for us!  It seems most people are playing the game in offline 1p mode (which of course is engrossing to the extreme), but everyone should definitely try out the online play. It’s a lot of fun and there are lots of like-minded Monsters fans out there to “parlay” and boogie on down with.  It’s also surprisingly fun to simply hang out in a one of the lobbies and watch the blow-by-blow tickertape commentaries of other people’s games. Remember you don’t need a PSPgo to play Monsters Deluxe, it works fine on any PSP!  That’s something we’ve had a lot of mails about.
 
Anyway, I’ll sign off here and write up another blog once Shooter is out!  Remember to post comments!