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Experimental Gamer is proud to announce that the Wild West-flavored RPG Boot Hill Heroes is now on PlayStation Mobile. The first game in a three part saga, Boot Hill Heroes has been in development for three years and is finally ready for the PlayStation community.

The premise of the game goes like this; after an alleged attack by the Chepakwik Native American tribe, Bronco County is on the brink of war. Only a farm boy who knows the truth can stop it. Together with three companions – a gun slinging desperado, a Native American princess, and a Calamity Jane – he must expose a conspiracy by bringing to justice the six outlaws of the notorious Saints-Little Gang.

Imagine those classic RPGs of the 90s (Final Fantasy, Earthbound, Chrono Trigger) but reinvented as a gritty, spaghetti western with vicious outlaws, brave lawmen and the untamed wilderness. It’s a journey through cow towns, Native American villages, ranches, mines, prisons, and into the soul of the American Wild West.

But what makes Boot Hill Heroes more than just being a Dragon Quest game based in the Wild West, is its fast-paced, real-time/turn-based hybrid combat. You must stay on your toes, as victory is determined not only by what actions are chosen but when they are executed!

And what RPG could be complete without an epic musical score? We have the terrific and prolific Jake ‘virt’ Kaufman behind the soundtrack – the genius behind titles like “Shantae,” “DuckTales Remastered,” “Double Dragon Neon,” and too many other masterful soundtracks to name here.

Finally, Boot Hill Heroes is coming to PlayStation Mobile with exclusive content, “The Hangman’s Ballad.” In this side story, featuring new areas, weapons, and bosses, you must traverse a treacherous mountain pass to track down a blood-thirsty outlaw.

Gameplay Strategies:

• Talk to people! Not only do conversations with the residents of Bronco County add flavor to the story, but occasionally their words will give you various “perks” that assist you in combat.
• Try out new Vantages as you learn them and consider their effectiveness. Even if a Vantage does not appear useful at first glance, it may be effective in the right situation or when used with other complementary Vantages.
• Anticipate your opponent’s attacks by looking for the white line indicator on their power bar. If the indicator is further to the right of the power bar then, the cost is greater, and you can assume the attack is likely to cause more damage. Make sure your characters activate an evasive or blocking stance before the attack is executed to mitigate that damage.
• Likewise, if an opponent is using an evasive or blocking stance, it might be a good idea to wait until the stance wears off and conserve your power. Or else, use a stunning attack to force them to drop the stance immediately.
• Pummeling your enemy with status ailments is often a good strategy. Keep in mind that status ailment-causing vantages will stack with status ailment-causing weapons. For example, using the “Flame Arrow” Vantage with a bow that is already imbued with fire attributes will further increase the chances it will set the enemy ablaze.
• Look around for materials you can pick up in towns and in the wilderness. Materials can be sold for cash to buy better equipment. They can also be used to imbue weapons and armor with various status ailments and properties.
• Winning a challenging battle often comes down to using the right move and the right time. So if a battle becomes too heated, keep in mind you can pause the battle clock at any time and carefully queue up your actions.

Want to know more about the story, mechanics, or cool features of Boot Hill Heroes? Ask me in the comments below! Also you can reach out to me through Twitter or our website.

PS Vita owners can download Boot Hill Heroes from the PlayStation Mobile section of PlayStation Store for $7.49; Owners of PlayStation certified devices such as the Sony Xperia Z1S smartphone, HTC One or Sony Xperia Tablet Z, can also get it through the PlayStation Mobile Store. Click here for a full list of the certified devices or here for installation instructions.

If you think a joke’s funny, commit to it. Run straight into that wall, tell every excruciating detail of that embarrassing story, and laugh uproariously in that child’s face. Every year on April 1, officially the most hilarious of days, disappointingly few April Fools’ jokes go beyond a little work in Photoshop and a press release of top bants. League of Legends has committed to the joke.

Riot Games today actually properly released a new ‘Ultra Rapid Fire’ mode, supposedly as a preview of an upcoming balance patch. Playable for the next week, it cuts ability costs and cooldowns to turn LoL into a ridiculous mess of silliness.

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Wow! It's finally being announced! On April 1st, by total coincidence!

Hello PlayStation.Blog!

I’m Alex! I work with Sean and the gang at Hello Games. We made Joe Danger, the super-colorful, super-challenging racey platformy series starring a fat little stuntman! People have seemed to like it loads, calling it all kinds of nice things like “astounding” (Official PlayStation Magazine) and “perfect” (Game Informer).

So, you might remember that we’re bringing Joe Danger to PS Vita, and I’m here to tell you that we’re nearly finished! Also, I wanted to tell you some super special news.

So first up, both of our big-console games, Joe Danger and its sequel, Joe Danger 2: The Movie, are running on PS Vita at a smooth-as-butter 60 frames a second, looking clean as you like, and they play so, so nicely in your hands. 60FPS has always been so important to us, because that’s how the games we grew up with ran. So it’s fantastic that Vita can make it happen, especially since it totally looks just as good as the PS3 version. We’re pushing about 400k polys a frame, which is pretty amazing. It loads real fast too. :)

You won’t believe the work that’s gone into making this happen – our friends at Four Door Lemon have done an amazing job squeezing Danger into such a small form factor. We’ve always prided ourselves on our games running perfectly, and we’re so happy that Vita totally lives up to it.

So what will you get with the two games? Let’s talk numbers. Joe Danger features 84 levels, including the Director’s Cut and Laboratory stages, and 25 characters to play as. Joe Danger 2 features 85 levels — including 15 from the Undead Movie Pack we originally released as DLC for the PS3 version — and a whopping 35 playable characters. Seriously, there are dozens of hours’ play in these two releases. It takes our tester, Gareth, nearly three solid days to play through them both. Honestly, this makes him really happy.

We’ve also brought loads of improvements we made in Joe Danger 2 to the original, so both games automatically download ghosts to race against, plus they have online leaderboards and there’s a full complement of Trophies to collect. We wanted these games to be the best versions you can get.

“Alex!” you’re potentially shouting. “I’m stoked to hear this, even if it’s little more than I’d expect of Joe Danger. But there’s one more thing I need to know about. The original games somehow use pretty much every button on a DualShock, so how the heck do you play it on Vita?”

A fine question! We’ve spent a long time tweaking the controls to feel great on Vita, and we think you’ll like the results because they’re really simple! First, we’ve added touch controls for the menus and the Editor mode! This makes the games really easy to navigate. And in play, the only differences are that Circle now tricks as well as punches, while Triangle is a second trick button. The bottom line is that it feels so natural; we’ve been racking up some crazy scores already!

OK, so that’s the main course. Now onto the pudding: that special news. Following a little pub chat with our friends at Media Molecule (and then some rash late night promises) we’re really excited to announce that they’ve have helped us to put three new characters in Joe Danger 2!

You’ll be able to play as Tearaway’s Atoi and Iota (Tearaway is a completely lovely game that everyone should play, btw).

And there’s some guy called Sackboy, too? Maybe you know about him.

They fit so nicely in Joe’s colourful world. Sackboy is in our game! Sackboy! It’s so good. Thanks, Media Molecule! Hey, maybe Joe can take a holiday in LittleBigPlanet sometime?

So that’s us. We’ll be following up with release dates really soon, but for more news on all things Hello Games and Joe Danger, why not follow us on Twitter and Facebook, and maybe come visit our website! Thanks so much for reading!

The Major League Baseball season has started, so now it’s time to see how your team will do when you’re controlling all of the action as MLB 14 The Show launches today on PS3 and PS Vita. The Show is the highest rated sports video game over the past eight years, and we at San Diego Studio want The Show to keep getting better, because we think baseball is better. We feel incredibly fortunate that our game will be available across three different platforms this year, so that every PlayStation gamer can experience all of the new additions that we incorporated into The Show.

You can pick up a copy today and check out our new additions, which include: Quick Counts, which helps you play a full nine-inning baseball game in less than 30 minutes, a revamped Road To The Show experience, and an all-new Online Franchise mode. Also, don’t forget to check out the PlayStation Sports Pack Vol. 1 as well, which includes both MLB 14 The Show and NBA2K14 for PlayStation 3.

This year’s version of The Show will be feature complete on PS3, and when our PS4 version launches on May 6th, you’ll be able to carry over all your save data to the next generation. So, dust off your cleats, get in the box, and get ready to take your team to the World Series, because MLB The Show is finally here.

With so many Dote ‘em ups loose in the world by now, who has time to play them all? Especially when they’re only in open beta testing. Best to wait until they’re done enough to officially launch, then mosey on in and see what they’re all about. Now’s the time to hit Prime World, as after months of open beta testing it’s been declared cool to fool and has actually, properly launched. It’s free-to-play, of course.

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The problem with turning this into a regular column is that I have to write it regularly. I have clearly failed this week, but that shouldn’t stop you enjoying day-late development blogs and GIFs from around the web.

Includes: dinosaurs, Nikola Tesla, flight sandboxes, conference tables, ‘game jams’.

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Another pixelated retro action-platformer? I know, I know. But this one has a frog! Also, Kero Blaster is kinda the latest tadpole offspring from indie legend Cave Story‘s design/writing/sound/everything wizard, Daisuke “Pixel” Amaya, and it looks like a rather sumptuous offering in its simplicity. It’s leaping jetpacking into action – as frogs are wont to do – next month, and you can see a trailer below.

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The Red Solstice is currently heading to the mid-point of a fairly solid Kickstarter campaign but I predict great things for the future. It’s an eight player coop squad shooter based on a Warcraft mod called Night Of The Dead and one may be the only game in existence to jettison zombies rather than cramming in as many as possible like the deranged operator of a bilious battery farm. It’s the Warcraft origins that caught my attention though – by 2021, will people be travelling around the world to play The Red Solstice in enormous tournaments, larger and more cash-corrupted than the FIFA Pepsi Gazprom World Cup? Stranger things draw a crowd.

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It is the year 2014, and somehow on our wobbly stacks of gamerly plates we have more space games than we know what to do with. I refuse to look this (largely crowdfunded) gift horse-shaped starship in the terribly located exhaust port that resembles a mouth. That said, many of said spacefarers – Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous, Limit Theory, etc – are shooting for the stars with massive Do Everything Be Everything universes, and there’s something to be said for focus. That’s what the brilliant-looking Enemy Starfighter offers in spades. Each level sees you pre-plan your leap into a system from a top-down strategic map and then execute it from the cockpit with squad in tow. It’s a magnificently svelte concept, and there’s a new trailer of it in action below.

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