Official PixelJunk Thread - 4/20: PixelJunk 4AM out May 15, Beta for PS+ Begins May 1

I'm definitely looking forward to anything new by the PJ team, but would have liked to see a new game. Guess I can always get PJ Racers and give that one a go.
 
ah thanks Frisky...

Yeah, the last three levels in PJE is quite evil... Getting the Spectras are ok, but all seeds? Man, tough nut!
PJE Encore? i don't know man, i'm loving Eden so much now that i start to hate it (it's just too demanding and i kinda refuse to accept the notion that i can't get those trophies). If PJE Encore got more trophies (or at least make existing trophies easier to get, you know, a new way to obtain them), i'm all in.

I never liked PJR, not only no trophy, but i don't get the mechanic of it either.
 
[quote name='Serpentor']
I never liked PJR, not only no trophy, but i don't get the mechanic of it either.[/quote]
It's the same thing as slot car racing. It's a LOT of fun with four players but I am bummed at the lack of trophy support. I wish PJR would get a trophy patch.
 
PJR's a party game with a slot car racing shell. Cool game, but hard.

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2009/03/20/all-busy-on-the-pixeljunk-front/

Some more concrete details on what's in Eden Encore:

Sorry about the lack of information as of late, but busy doesn’t even begin to describe my work for the past few months…what with the exciting new project coming along (hint: yes, we’ve heard your requests!), and at the same time implementing some of our most crazy ideas for the new gardens in Eden Encore.



Eden Encore will be coming out very soon in April. Get ready for zero gravity, mirror worlds, all new music from Baiyon, and we’ve added something extra special at the end which is a Big Secret(tm) and is a present to all the fans. On top of all this, we’re flying along with the next new PixelJunk title (we’re calling it #4 for now) and even experimenting with future PixelJunk ideas too.

But things just keep getting more exciting because PixelJunk Eden has been nominated in not just one, but three (!!!) categories at the upcoming Independent Game Festival’s award show in San Francisco, CA. We are also nominated for the GDC Choice awards too, which are held during the same week. So GDC is going to be pretty crazy and even busier than normal, and I am looking forward to it a lot! Oh, and before I forget, on Friday, March 27 at GDC, Baiyon will be doing a talk about Eden and the use of CMYK in his graphic design work. I’ll be there in the audience listening in of course, so if you’re attending GDC, be sure to come check out this talk.

Anyway, back to work. I’ll pop back soon to detail more specifics about Eden Encore, so watch this space!


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Also, Dylan posted a bit about how the PSP version of PJM is coming along on his twitter account, mostly about music and sound tweaks:

http://twitter.com/dylancuthbert/status/1358798585
http://twitter.com/dylancuthbert/status/1359450657
 
http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2009/03/24/pixeljunk-eden-encore-adds-crazy-move/

pje2a.jpg

I played the new “Pixel Junk Eden” expansion “Pixel Junk Eden Encore” today and learned what’s new about this: five new levels. They are accessed through a portal in the standard “Eden” garden menu, which leads to an “Encore”-specific garden. The levels share the aesthetic of the original game’s, but I was told by a Sony rep that they are larger and full of new ideas. The biggest idea may be the new move which will also be retroactively added to “Eden” itself when “Encore” comes out next month: Activating three seeds in one move causes all of the pollen-filled floating entities on the screen to detonate at once, releasing a massive amount of pollen.

The first level of “Encore” that I played was set up for the big new move. It presented three seeds in a vertical stack. I set them all up for activation, then triggered them in one go. The screen filled with pollen. It was clear that “Encore” is working on a larger scale than “Eden,” presenting a bigger spectacle of its elements than the original. I joked that instead of being called “Encore,” it should be called “Extreme.”

pje1a.jpg


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pje3a.jpg
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Sounds like an interesting new addition for Eden Encore.
 
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2009/03/27/pixeljunk-eden-encore-details/

This is Dylan from Q-Games, the company behind PixelJunk, and following on from my blog entry last week where I listed what we’ve been doing for the past few months. This entry is all about Eden Encore.



First things first, what have we added? Well, basically we have added five whole new stages, each one choc-a-bloc full of ideas and gimmicks. We also designed five brand new backgrounds for them (each background for a garden is programmed uniquely just for that garden’s style - just in case you hadn’t noticed that in the original), and Baiyon went away and created five brilliant new tracks of music to match it all up.

To make things a little easier we are going to retro-patch the original Eden to have a new feature we created for Encore. This is the three-seed smart-bomb power your Grimp now has. Simply put, if you jump into three full seeds in a row, all the “Prowlers” on the screen explode into a big cloud of pollen. Everyone who boots up their original Eden in a few weeks will be patched and get this feature, so look out for that!

Thinking up new stages for Eden was hard work. We put a lot of stuff into the original game, especially the gardens onwards from garden 04, and we racked our brains for new and interesting ideas to put into this expansion pack, and we think we found some pretty cool ones! One of the first stages has you in a Garden where all the plants are huge and thick, and at the same time there are loads of them, all intertwined. This is a type of stage we didn’t have in the original game - falling isn’t much of an issue in this garden because the vines are practically everywhere.



Also, in another garden we have implemented a zero-G item that once you collect, lets you float and control your Grimp with no fear of falling (well, until the effect wears off of course) which is crazily fun with three players! At the same time that garden is full of some pretty cool puzzles to solve, and we really go to town with the no gravity mechanism. In one of the final gardens we have implemented an entire “mirror” garden that you go in and out of freely via portals scattered throughout. It’s a lot of fun making your way back and forth between the two subtly different “mirror” gardens - what might be a cannon in one is a teleporter in the other; what is open space in one, might be closed off in the other. It’s a lot of fun solving the puzzles.

Right at the end of the game, if you collect all the 25 new Spectra we’ve added, we have put in a big present for our fans - one that will enable you to play the entire game again in a completely different way, so that’s really something for everyone to look forward to.



What else can I say really? This expansion pack isn’t just “some extra levels”; it is full of rich design and will give you weeks of fun, so it’s definitely worth $5.99!
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Sounds like a cool expansion that's more than just more levels to play.
 
Dylan said Eden became profitable 24 hours after release, everything they sold afterwards has been pure profit. Amazing.

What an Encore too, looks really good.
 
So, does Encore add more trophies? If not, it's a bit blank to play the new gardens right? The only thing that keeps me going back to Garden 8, 9 and 10 are ALL SEEDS trophies.
 
Eden has always frustrated the hell out of me. It seems like no matter what I do, everything is a near-miss, which of course makes it all the worse.
 
http://kotaku.com/5220735/playstation-gamers-day-why-i-was-absent-from-kotaku-today

Get ready for E3, as the new PixelJunk game was shown off at the pre-E3 gamer's day event that was held yesterday, so there should be a formal announcement with impressions from various sites within the next month and a half.

Also, if you haven't beat Eden Encore yet and you want to see the special mode that's unlocked at the end, you head
here
and see what it is.
 
So it looks like Eden with some different mechanics. More of a puzzler than a platformer which is good. Interesting to see how it turns out
 
The big turn off on Eden for me was the time limit. If they took that away, Eden is probably one of my favorite games of this generation.
 
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3173987

1up has details on PixelJunk Monsters Deluxe for the PSP:


Coming out of its recent Gamers Day event in LA, SCEA has finally given up precious details on the third iteration of Q-Games' addictive tower defense game, PixelJunk Monsters. Traditionally a series for PlayStation Network, this version will be for PSP and is titled PixelJunk Monsters Deluxe. The "deluxe" moniker isn't just a fancy way to say "port" either, as it will not only include the two islands from the original and Encore expansion of the PSN game (including everything the expansion brought to the table), but a third new 11-stage island, complete with new music by Otograph.

With the new island, Deluxe will also bring two new towers (one of which is a gem tower that will slowly upgrade any offensive towers in its radius), a new boss monster, and a new enemy type. Previously ground-only creatures, like the speedy spiders, will now start off as air types thanks to balloons strapped to their backs. After you pop the balloons, the monsters drop to the floor, becoming ground creatures. Medal challenges replace the PSN games' trophies, and you can use the ones won to purchase unlockables in the Tiki Hut, like videos, themes, and artwork.

Gameplay remains unchanged, but to accommodate the PSP's screensize, the camera will zoom in to follow your character's movement and zoom out whenever something happens outside your point of view that the game deems important (new wave of monsters approaching, monsters get to the babies, etc.). This is helpful when playing co-op, which Deluxe will have available in local and online flavors.

The publisher provided factsheet for the game lists Deluxe's platforms as PSP and PlayStation Network, though. Could this mean the game will be sold via download as well as on UMD? Whichever way they're selling it, I'm buying. PixelJunk Monsters Deluxe is due out this fall.
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deluxe sounds neat - would love to have the new world/etc as an add-on to the psn title though. My psp has an inch thick layer of dust that I've been working on for a while now!
 
I'm liking Eden Encore a lot. Garden 12 is my favorite with 14 probably close behind at the moment.

The Encore garden appears as a portal in your main garden that starts out just like the beginning of Eden, where you have to play a bit of Garden 11 to open up the path to 12 and so on and so far to open up the rest of the gardens. There are plenty of portals around the Encore garden to take you back to Eden and you'll find the same types of bonus items around, like cannon flowers and those steering wheel things that changes the color scheme of the Encore garden until you get them all to reach the special bonus at the end of the journey like you could at the end of Eden.

Garden 11 and 12 are pretty much like the early levels of the main garden, with those easy prowlers that won't cut your silk rope for your pollen needs. Each one of those offers a few of the bigger prowlers that will stalk you around the level until you kill them or let them do their thing.

Garden 11 is extreme verticality in that the plants you grow tend to be really tall, so there is a lot of space for you to cover when getting spectras, which is why this garden is probably the longest in the entire game.

Garden 12 is more styled like the beginning levels in most aspects, with lots of rock formations to move around on. This one feels smaller and more intimate than Garden 11.

Garden 13 is where the weird mechanics start coming into play. This one features floating rock formations that drop when you land on them and float back to their original spot when you jump off, which is cool and a fairly safe way to see a bit more of what's around you. It also features quite a few portals, which may be more related to Garden 8 a bit than their first appearance in Garden 6.

Garden 14 is another insane level, which features these new crystals that look like the large time crystal but activates zero gravity. That means that you can continue your jump for as long as it lasts, which isn't all that long, across greater distances than you'd normally be able to do that. That is sort of your main means of getting across the garden, so there's not too much exploration early on. Expect to see the tougher pollen prowlers that will cause your silk rope to break more quickly here.

Garden 15 is pretty much like a spinoff of Garden 6, but the portals take you to an alternate version of the same garden where you fill up more seeds to reach the next portal to get to an area you couldn't reach before. The first world features the easy prowlers and the mirror world features the bladed prowlers, so there is some challenge to be had to just get to each portal depending on the world you're in.
 
[quote name='KingBroly']The big turn off on Eden for me was the time limit. If they took that away, Eden is probably one of my favorite games of this generation.[/quote]

Unfortunately that's a big factor in Eden, TIME... Otherwise, the crystals will have no value other than accumulate scores. Not to mention combos will be less sought too. Of course, that makes pollinating the seeds easier (no time limit, duh).

If you take away time limit in Eden, it's a different game... The "easy" patch did make the crystals last longer and there's a Continue option too. Of course, you will not get All Seeds trophies if you use Continue.
 
[quote name='FriskyTanuki']I'm liking Eden Encore a lot. Garden 12 is my favorite with 14 probably close behind at the moment.

The Encore garden appears as a portal in your main garden that starts out just like the beginning of Eden, where you have to play a bit of Garden 11 to open up the path to 12 and so on and so far to open up the rest of the gardens. There are plenty of portals around the Encore garden to take you back to Eden and you'll find the same types of bonus items around, like cannon flowers and those steering wheel things that changes the color scheme of the Encore garden until you get them all to reach the special bonus at the end of the journey like you could at the end of Eden.

Garden 11 and 12 are pretty much like the early levels of the main garden, with those easy prowlers that won't cut your silk rope for your pollen needs. Each one of those offers a few of the bigger prowlers that will stalk you around the level until you kill them or let them do their thing.

Garden 11 is extreme verticality in that the plants you grow tend to be really tall, so there is a lot of space for you to cover when getting spectras, which is why this garden is probably the longest in the entire game.

Garden 12 is more styled like the beginning levels in most aspects, with lots of rock formations to move around on. This one feels smaller and more intimate than Garden 11.

Garden 13 is where the weird mechanics start coming into play. This one features floating rock formations that drop when you land on them and float back to their original spot when you jump off, which is cool and a fairly safe way to see a bit more of what's around you. It also features quite a few portals, which may be more related to Garden 8 a bit than their first appearance in Garden 6.

Garden 14 is another insane level, which features these new crystals that look like the large time crystal but activates zero gravity. That means that you can continue your jump for as long as it lasts, which isn't all that long, across greater distances than you'd normally be able to do that. That is sort of your main means of getting across the garden, so there's not too much exploration early on. Expect to see the tougher pollen prowlers that will cause your silk rope to break more quickly here.

Garden 15 is pretty much like a spinoff of Garden 6, but the portals take you to an alternate version of the same garden where you fill up more seeds to reach the next portal to get to an area you couldn't reach before. The first world features the easy prowlers and the mirror world features the bladed prowlers, so there is some challenge to be had to just get to each portal depending on the world you're in.
[/quote]

thanks for the write up on Eden Encore. I have only tried Garden 11, my goal is to pollinate all seeds, the Spectras are just for more time :)
 
Oh man, I really hope Monsters Deluxe is PS3-compatible. Not sure I can justify buying a new PSP for my fiancée just to co-op... I've been tempted because of Patapon 2, etc. but it's not a small chunk of change for only a few potential games.

Maybe they'll sell Deluxe as a standalone package for the PSP and also an add-on like Encore for PS3.
 
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