Looking for a cool game on your band new Samsung Wave phone? Lucky you, Twin Blades is available right now from the Bada store almost everywhere in the world!

Not only does the game sport high-res graphics fit for the S8500 800×480 screen, but it also contains an exclusive new environment featured below:

Peeps in Russia, China, South Africa, Argentina, Australia, Canada and Mexico may have to wait a couple weeks before Samsung makes the paid-apps store available in your countries – which according to the intel retreived from a Korean ninja should come up late june/early july.

As for our fellow Brazilians and Koreans I’m afraid it’s a no-go, apparently your respective governments take the matter of video-games so seriously that there will be no games at all on the Bada store in your countries. It’s a little be more complicated than that but the lawyer-ninja bore us to sleep before we could understand why exactly games are banned there. Sorry pals.

Alas, this one contest is for Press Start Studio.

The folks over at computerandvideogames.com have nominated Twin Blades into several categories for the 28th Golden Joystick Awards!
Votes are user-based, and I was told people with bad karma problems could redeem of few good points by voting for Twin Blades in the Portable, Downloadable and Ultimate Game of the Year categories.

Voting is open until may 27th and no registration is needed.

Now whether or not they actually are giving winners a gold-plated joystick and, most importantly, whether said joystick would feature Japanese components remains unknown.

KidKobun even made us this nice looking mockup of where you can vote for Twin Blades, and because his mockup features much better-looking arrows than mine it is showcased below.

We have passed the point where Twin Blades has become profitable (which sounds like a delectable dessert to our ears).
So we’ve got this big bag of money right now and being a big bunch of nerds we had no idea what to do with it, so we made a quick vote and unanimously decided to spend it all on custom t-shirts.

And because we have too many of these classy t-shirts, we thought we should give them away to our most dedicated fans. But we’re not going to throw them away randomly, or else where would the feeling of achievement be in that? How could you unsuspiciously parade in the streets with your PSS t-shirt and swell with pride in society without emanating the subtle odor of own sweat?

We’ve noticed Twin Blades had its fans and we like that, a lot. But further than that we’ve also noticed how some of these fans take initiatives to actively participate in the promotion of the game. And we want to reward those active fans, and we want to equip them with the best gear the world has to offer so they can beat the crap out of the other games’ fans.

Thus, we collectively decided that Phil should sacrifice the unique custom Twin Blades joystick he crafted out of a Xbox 360 pad and equipped with full Sanwa/Seimitsu japanese parts, and give it to our best uberfan.

Well that’s interesting, now how exactly do I become an uberfan so I can beat the crap out of other games’ fans with a unique joystick in a cool t-shirt? you ask. And the good news is we haven’t set any boundaries for that. All you need to do is promote Twin Blades in any way of your choosing and send us a picture or whatever you did at uberfan@press-start-studio.com before the 30th of may to enter the contest!

Get involved, do it your way! You could either tell about the game and how much you’ve liked it on your favorite forum like Gamer_Kyio did on IGN, or send a message to your daily game news blog to incite them to update their review with the DLC, or draw some fan art like Aphex did with the nun (along with a completely NSFW version), or send a tip to any website you think would like the game like KidKobun did with Mtv, or use your own prose to post a review of on the app store, possibilities are endless, creativity is all yours!

Aye, after months of hard work the free DLC is now available for download on the Xbox Live Indie Games channel!

As previously stated the new content brings a storyline, boss challenges, a mini map navigation system, 11 new environments, more awards to unlock, additional slash moves and plenty of other improvements.

Go ahead and enjoy the treat – we look forward to hearing your impressions!

Edit: The DLC has also hit the app store, ready your iPhones!

Yes, the DLC is on its way. The peer review of the XBLIG version is roughly 85% complete and the iPhone version is still making its way to you.

In the meantime I’d like to introduce you with a neat little feature we haven’t mentionned before: you will now be given the opportunity to set the level of transparency of the HUD all by yourself!

In the story mode we have de-zoomed the action slightly in order for the nun not to overlay with the controls too much. But for those of you who can find the controls solely with the Force™ rather than relying on your good old eyesight will be pleased to know that you can make the bottom-screen icons completely disappear if you so wish!

Oh yes, you can also adjust the level of the in-game sounds and music separately as well. But who would ever want to lower the sound of an imploding zombie head I wonder.

And as a special treat I’ve also added a screen of one of the new environments at night time – featuring what seems to be the most popular weapon of all: the flame-thrower of course!

It seems it has been following my whole career on the production side of the games industry, everytime I am in the vicinity of a coder announcing (with a certain pride) something like “this is it, we’ve fixed everything ’tis the last build we’re compiling”, it is bound to fuck up.

This time the curse has been very creative and we have uncovered a nasty hidden bug at the last minute that corrupts the saved game if the player leaves the mini-map under certain conditions.

One wonders why we don’t use the famous ‘if(m_CorruptSavedGame = 1) return UncorruptSavedGame‘ line but Jeff & Fab insisted that coding didn’t work like that and we needed the late working hours to fix it thoroughly instead.

So we’re holding on the release until it is fixed, because even if only 2% of the players encounter this bug it is potentially so frustrating that it would completely destroy the user experience.

Please bear with us while we process the sacrificial chickens to counter the curse, we’re getting there I swear. ‘Tis the last build we’re compiling.

Update: The DLC has now been submitted both to the App Store and XBLIG peer review!

I’ve found the process of retreiving artworks from an elusive concept artist to be quite tedious. These people, ‘the creative people‘ as the politically-correct term seems to be these days, tend to turn into ostriches whenever a situation revolves around their previous creations, presumably because they see it as a flawed thing from the past, an ignomous monster they’ve spawned and are terribly ashamed of.

If you ask me tho, there’s nothing wrong with it. In fact I quite like the first version of Father Richiardo, the nun’s mentor.

In the updated version of Twin Blades Father Richiardo will be the central hub not only for the story as he gives indications to the nun, but also as a 24/7 convenience store as he’s now holding the shop accessible anytime between missions. That’s right, no more waiting until the End of Day to buy new weapons!

Next up we have a tree who’s role isn’t as central in the storyline, but is a nice tree anyway.

All that green stuff (along with many others) fit particularly well in the forest level, which has a certain eerie touch that make it particularly charming (if you take no notice of the zombies).

Feel free to send us your comments if you’d like to see more artworks!

I love fanmail.

It’s one of these things that make me happy when I get up in the morning and find some of you guys’ food for thoughts in our internationally renowned inbox info@press-start-studio.com.

Carlos sent us a couple mails (and comments on our blogs, and on our facebook page, and on our twitter too) because he’s very enthusiast about the nun using a katana or a chainsaw (and wearing a nurse uniform).

But before I bring this to the attention of my fellow co-workers at the next deliciously weird and exagerately long monday afternoon meetings (codenamed ‘Weekly Code-Graphics-Design-Finance-Business-Planning Round Table’), I really wonder about the relevance of the katana thing.

See if you ask me katanas are way overrated. Picture yourself in the street fighting for your life against zombies. Now would you rather have a stylish katana or an giant scythe in order to give you as much reach as possible and keep the brain-suckers away from your own grey matter?

Besides, everyone uses a katana these days. Take Highlander for instance, why would scottish Mc Leod use one of these instead of a more traditional claymore? And thus the filling scene where he explains that he felt in love with a Japanese girl who died in his arms and voila, katana.

Nowistanding my confidence that Bruce Willis would have picked a badass scythe if he could in pulp fiction, I appeal to your reason with this shiny new poll which may or may not be broken because it’s the first time I experiment this plugin.

Update: Aymar provided us with this really cool proof-by-image link, check it out!

The trailer is live with footage of the update content of Twin Blades, showing off slaaaaaash combos! (applause) The mini map! (applause) New environments! (applause) The story mode! (applause) Badass bosses! (booo)

Let us know what you think of the new content in the comments!

Twin Blades’ update is coming end of march (of this year) on XBLIG and the App store, and we’ve got a screenshot to prove it, featuring the second boss in its dedicated arena!

The scenario gave us a hard time, but it’s finally over with and we are satisfied with the outcome. You guys asked for a storyline and you are gonna get it, hard!

All of the graphic assets are now complete and it is up to Jeff & Fab our two code monkeys to finish the thing (which should take a couple of weeks because of all the stuff we kept adding into the game design while they were asleep).

More screens and vids coming in very soon!