Posts tagged with “Slam Bolt Scrappers”

It’s been a long wait, but the PSN store is finally back online! SWEET! That means that you can get your two free games, check out a bunch of new content that updated during the outage, and most importantly, you can buy Slam Bolt Scrappers. Yes, life is good.

We know that a lot of people were bummed that they couldn’t get our game this past month, and of course we’re concerned that some former PSN store users my be apprehensive about coming back. To help sweeten the deal a bit beyond what Sony is already doing we’ve decided to drop the price of Slam Bolt Scrappers from $14.99 to $9.99. That’s means you can get a face full of four way multiplayer mayhem for 1/3 less than before. Pretty awesome, amiright?

So go grab Slam Bolt Scrappers in the PSN store now for the new low price of $9.99. If you like it tell your friends and get them to play it too! If you don’t like it tell your enemies and inflict it upon them.  Happy Scrapping!

Hey SBS fans!

We’re excited today to be releasing the original soundtrack for Slam Bolt Scrappers! We’re offering it as a free download over on this page.

The 13 tracks making up the soundtrack were composed and produced just for SBS by me and Jeff Nickel, who’s also responsible for the soundtrack to our thugged out team video. This is the first released game music for both of us — we learned a ton and had a blast getting the tracks ready for the game. We hope you’ve enjoyed listening to them too.

So go download the tracks now, or listen on YouTube to get a taste!

Starting at 4PM today, one of our superstar programmers and GAMBIT alum, Sharat, will lead the folks at GAMBIT through the journey that was the development of Slam Bolt Scrappers. As you may know, SBS has gone through a number of iterations, and Sharat will be showing off those early prototypes while discussing the different elements we changed between each and why we decided to change them. The original post can be found here: http://gambit.mit.edu/updates/2011/04/friday_games_gambit_040811_-_a.php.

GAMBIT holds a special place in the hearts of everyone here at Fire Hose Games, so we’re very excited that they’ve invited us to come talk about Slam Bolt Scrappers today for this week’s session of Friday Games at GAMBIT! Friday Games is a particularly interesting series at GAMBIT where each Friday they take an analytical approach to looking at games and games issues from the past, present… and FUTURE. Recent sessions covered the history of Tetris, the censoring of sex in games, and, of course, the history of Michael Jordan in video games, starting with 1993′s NBA Showdown. A list of events at GAMBIT (including past Friday Games) can be found here: http://gambit.mit.edu/updates/events/.

Hope you can make it!

Hello True Believers,

As Alec noted last week, Issue #1 of the new FF series (the successor to Fantastic Four, now that Johnny Storm has been killed, penciled by Steve Epting) shows Franklin Richards (son of Reed and Sue) playing a video game he has just lost, and that game is Slam Bolt Scrappers!

The shot is from SBS circa Fall 2010 (after PAX Prime, when the health bars were vertical instead of horizontal, many months before release).

Here is the actual image they found on the web and used!:

And here is a side-by-side of the comic art and the original:

As far as we can tell, they set the Hue (in Hue/Saturation) to 180 and then the Cutout filter was applied (before the non-SBS text was overlayed).

In the process of unraveling this, I started playing with the Cutout filter and the Hue/Saturation of other shots from the game. Here were some of my favorites. What do you think? Any of these worth a spot in the Modern Museum of Art?

And the ultimate question: Are the results as cool when this is tried in other games, or is it only in the splendid chaos of Slam Bolt Scrappers?

–Jason

P.S. Hey Steve Epting: next time you are in Boston, come visit us!

Ahh, friends, there you are. Come join me as we unravel a mystery of cosmic proportions. Our head comic book aficionado, Jason, has pointed me towards a strange sighting in the new (first) issue of FF - which is a relaunch of the Fantastic Four where they call themselves the Future Foundation and replace the Human Torch (who is apparently dead) with a black and white Spider-Man. See below to get an idea of what I’m talking about:

Back to the controversy! Jason flips the book open to a page where the FF crew and some alien children are gathered around a TV playing a game. They are losing. OBSERVE:

ZOOM.

ENHANCE!

This does, in fact, appear to be a screenshot of an early prototype of Slam Bolt Scrappers – probably the build we showed off at PAX Prime 2010. I’ve highlighted a few items for my case in the picture below.

The first thing to jump out at me was the HUD on the left side. That is almost exactly the same as the HUD we had in the prototype we showed off at PAX Prime 2010. On top of that, there appear to be many different colored squares. Furthermore, in the bottom right, there is a T shaped piece of colored blocks, which is quite common in SBS. And if you really look closely, on the lower right side, there is a green circle in the middle of a square shooting a line at the other blocks. Looks a lot like our purple laser guns… but green! IT’S SBS I TELL YOU!

So, there you have it. It looks like a trendy artist put an image of SBS on a TV in a Marvel comic. Heck yeah! #WINNING.

EDIT: I found this old screen shot from PAX East 2010 (courtesy of SpawnKill) that shows our old HUD. Looks pretty similar to me!