Junk in the Trunk

PixelJunk Monsters, the little game that could, is becoming the little game that could do a little more, with the upcoming expansion, PixelJunk Monsters Encore.
4/14/2008 2:26 PM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 2

Crispy Gamer: Is there a thematic or story connection between these games?

Morton: No, there's nothing that strings from game to game. They're games that Dylan was planning on doing early in his career; it just happened that he came into game design at the beginning of the move to 3-D, so he had to let these ideas sit a while. Now he's going back and making these 2-D games he's always wanted to make.

Mars: Though what does pull the PixelJunk one series together is pushing the use of 1080p and making sure the games look absolutely beautiful.

Crispy Gamer: Given that it the original PixelJunk Monsters was a PSN download, and thus not that expensive, will Encore be super-cheap, like $2? Will there be a combo where you can buy both it and the original together?

Mars: The price point on Encore hasn't been finalized yet, but you will need Monsters to play it. They also haven't announced whether there will be a bundle of the two.

Crispy Gamer: Does Encore fix any mistakes or bugs in Monsters?

Morton: We've actually changed a couple things around with the balancing. On the original, there were three towers. On the new island, there's a fourth, the ice tower, and there's also a reduction in the cost of the Tesla tower.

Crispy Gamer: Is there anything you considered putting into Encore, but decided to instead hold for PixelJunk Monsters 2: Electric Boogaloo?

Mars: There actually hasn't been any talk of doing a sequel.

Morton: Though just the fact that there's an expansion pack for Monsters is interesting unto itself because none of the PixelJunk games were ever planned to have sequels or be turned into franchises, they were just games that Dylan wanted to do.

Crispy Gamer: Does that mean that, because there weren't plans to do an expansion, doing one was difficult from a technical standpoint?

Mars: Absolutely not. The way the team is set up, and the way the tech works, it was very easy for them to go in and make new maps, and it was easy for them to make the expansion work right, as well.

Crispy Gamer: Finally, for people who haven't connected their PS3 to the Internet, has there been any talk of someday releasing a bunch of the PixelJunk games?

Mars: Since the initial talk with Q-Games, we've talked about doing a bundle once the first couple games in the series were done, so that's definitely something we're planning.