Brandon Boyer

Retro Remakes: Square Enix reviving PC shooter Thexder for PSP

It's always nice when developers oblige your theme week: Square Enix has announced -- just ahead of the upcoming Tokyo Game Show -- Thexder Neo, a remake of Game Arts' original PC transforming-giant-robot shooter, brought to the U.S. by Sierra in the late 80s.

Above is the debut video of the remake, due for release via the PlayStation Network for the PSP (and rumors abound, via the ESRB, of a PS3-playable version as well) on October 1st, with an online mode, reports andriasang, that lets six players race to complete each level's goals.

Brandon Boyer

Get this: the superlative solo act of Rock Band: Unplugged

Harmonix -- and, by extension, developers Backbone -- had a difficult balancing act to achieve in creating Unplugged, their downsized PlayStation Portable exclusive version of Rock Band.

For the newcomers that have only found the studio's output only via its most recent games, they had to carefully re-dress the experience of their foundational Amplitude and Frequency games in Rock Band's rock/gothic/punk clothes, and had to ensure that that re-dress didn't also alienate the long-time supporters -- the ones, you could say, who were there for the early dive-bar gigs and bought the hand-screened, car-trunk T-shirts.

As a card carrying member of the latter category, then, I can say with some happy surprise that they've succeeded with at least that much: though its four-lane compression (corresponding to Rock Band's traditional bass/drums/vox/guitar breakdown) might be the next step down from Freq's eight to Amp's six, returning to that twitchy lane-switching familiarity was entirely welcome after the nearly six year interim since Amp first hit the shelves.

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Brandon Boyer

I go out rolling: Sony announce PSP downloadable LocoRoco Midnight Carnival

Somewhat obscured in yesterday's Slim/minis shuffle: the announcement of a new, exclusively downloadable PSP follow-up to Sony's internal cult action game LocoRoco, Midnight Carnival, which will add new nighttime levels, minigames, and bonus stages to the mix, along with an apparent new 'boing' move featured above, and newly socialized play with competitive leaderboards.

Brandon Boyer

GamesCom: the 3 things you need to know about Sony's PS3 Slim/PSP conference

1.) Sony officially announced its $299 PS3 Slim.

After months of strong rumors, Sony has officially announced its new model PlayStation 3: the 120GB Slim, to be released in just two weeks time on September 1st, at a pricepoint of $299. Starting tomorrow, current standard 80GB PlayStation 3s will see their price dropped from $399 to $299, and the 160GB models will fall to $399. The price move puts the Slim model on par with the standard 60GB Xbox 360, and $100 less than the 120GB 'Elite' model 360.

2.) Sony announced, 'Minis', a new PSP downloadable game series

As mentioned to UK outlet Develop in mid-July, Sony has officially announced a new line of exclusively digital-distributed game series to be known as 'minis', with a strict 100 meg size limit, and a 99 cent to $9.99 price structure, clearly targeting the iPhone's App Store market.

That goes for its game titles themselves, too, many of which have been directly lifted from the App Store, including Tetris, tower defense game Fieldrunners, Mountain Sheep's shooter Minigore, and Gameloft's Hero of Sparta, all as spotted by the official UK PlayStation blog.

The blog says Sony announced 15 games will be available at its October 1st launch, with a total of some 50 available by the end of the year.

3.) Sony announced a new PSP Digital Reader, starting with Marvel, IDW comic books

Also launching for the PSP this December, a new Digital Reader app, which will let users purchase, download and read -- "page by page or frame by frame" -- a series of comic books coming from partners like Marvel (Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four), IDW (Transformers, Star Trek), iVerse (Archie), and a wider range of "titles from indie and local publishers."

Cryptically, Sony also added that, according to the PlayStation Blog, "the Digital Reader isn't just comics, though -- more on that at a later date."

Brandon Boyer

Beaterator: Rockstar/Timbaland's musicmaker coming to PSP in September

We were as surprised as anyone in March to hear that Rockstar's Beaterator -- a music sequencer/tracker based on their original 2005 Flash/web experiment -- was back on track for a 2009 release, and curious about Take Two being coy with the platform on which it would eventually land.

And now we know, as Take Two announce that -- as it was always intended to be -- the project is due for a release in September on the PSP (alongside a digital only release on the PlayStation Network), and drop off the video above.

The only question remaining is the actual mechanisms behind which we'll be able to share our resulting music: trading custom save files? MP3 exports? But there's hardly a month left until all will be officially revealed.

Brandon Boyer

Listen: flOw on a G-string

Above: a May 16th performance of Los Angeles' Golden State Pops Orchestra playing selections from thatgamecompany's flOw, as composed by Austin Wintory. An MP3 of the section is also streaming at the official PlayStation.Blog.

Brandon Boyer

Subatomic bringing iPhone tower defense game Fieldrunners to PSP

In an exclusive report on Sony's renewed and rejuvenated initiative to bring smaller (read: indie) offerings to the PSP and its on-device PlayStation Network Store (which I noted earlier as probably the most important aspect of their PSP Go! announcement, especially combined with its subsequent drastic devkit price drop), the company has told Develop that it's already signed some 50 studios for new content, both games and apps.

Chief among them, or at least, the most recognizable game/studio? Subatomic, who Develop have revealed will be bringing a new exclusive version of their iPhone tower-defense hit FieldRunners to the PSP.

Subatomic's Ash Monif told Develop that Sony's plans were "about bringing the lighter, lower barrier content to the PSP that has been so successful in other categories... You don't see this happening at Microsoft and you even don't see it happening at Nintendo yet."

Brandon Boyer

Little Wars: Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars jumping to PSP

The morning's most high profile story of exclusives and rebirths: Rockstar sends word that their DS exclusive Grand Theft Auto entry, Chinatown Wars, will be making the jump to the PSP "this fall", with "upscaled widescreen graphics, enhanced lighting and animation, and... all-new story missions."

The game will be available in both UMD form and pure digital download for the by-then-released PSP Go, making it currently one of the highest profile third party games (alongside the next Metal Gear Solid entry) to buoy the handheld back into gamers' consciousnesses.

Brandon Boyer

E309: Echochrome meets Braid for time-shifting PSP puzzler Echochrono

One of the most experimental concepts shown at E3 thus far, and yet another game quietly announced but not explicitly mentioned by Sony: a PSP followup to Jun Fujiki's Echochome, the Escher-esque PS3/PSN downloadable in which wireframe artist models traversed impossible constructions using tricks of perspective to bridge gaps and open paths.

This time, as the name implies, the trick isn't visual but temporal: like Braid and Yoshio Ishi's Cursor*10 web games, players will have to -- as seen above -- use versions of previous rewound playthroughs to advance characters in later playthroughs.

Brandon Boyer

E309: Sony goes augmented reality with PSP creature hunter Invizimals

Also only noted in brief passing during Sony's montage of upcoming PSP games: Invizimals, an augmented reality monster hunter/battler game from Barcelona studio Novarama that utilizes the PSP's camera attachment to "hunt" invisible creatures and capture them via included augmented-reality cards.

The PSP camera originally debuted in Japan in 2006 and was released across Europe a year later as Go!Cam (the Go! brand obviously now widening with the latest model PSP), but still has yet to make its stateside appearance: the teasing of Invizimals is the strongest sign yet that it might finally arrive.

Brandon Boyer

E309: 4-player simultaneous play in PSP's Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker?

Hideo Kojima's full sequel to Metal Gear Solid 3 will also follow the events of its PSP debut Portable Ops, again focused on Liquid Snake/Big Boss's storyline up to the establishment of Outer Heaven (if I'm understanding Kojima's labyrinthine storyline correctly): the location you infiltrated as Solid Snake in the NES original.

More interestingly, with Kojima promising to take full advantage of the PSP's capabilities during Tuesday's Sony press conference, four player simultaneous play seems all but assured, both with the lineup of four near-identical Snakes at the end, and the double-box gag at the end of the trailer.

You can see a double-set of boxed Love-Pack'd legs, too, in the screenshots included after the jump.

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Brandon Boyer

E309: first look at the PSP's littler LittleBigPlanet

Media Molecule's first look at the downsized PSP version of its LittleBigPlanet seems to confirm that, for now at least (Media Molecule have previously said they're investigating the possibility), there won't be cross-platform content sharing between it and its big PlayStation 3 sister, but there's still hope, at least, for it to be able to talk with the company's planned web-based portal and level browser.

Hit the jump for ten screenshots of the game (unfortunately delivered in fairly low resolution).

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