85w ago - Today Klei Co-Founder Jamie Cheng has announced that Shank 2 will be coming to PSN complete with sharper graphics and new co-op functionality.

To quote: I'm here to talk a bit about our newest PSN title -- Shank 2! Honestly, it's been a fantastic journey. We bet everything on the first game, and the fans both supported us and gave us meaningful feedback on the game.

The encouragement has not only allowed us to survive and thrive, but gave us a huge reason to take a look at the game and make big improvements. I'm here to talk a bit about what we've been working on.

Let's start with the art. As you may know, our entire art team consists of professional animators and painters from the 2D animation industry, and again Jeff Agala directed the visuals. The goal here was to blow away our previous fidelity and set a new bar for ourselves.

To do that, we doubled the resolution of all the source character art to push the graphic novel style, adding a huge amount of extra detail to the environment and even doubling the amount of animation in the game.





We've also worked hard on making environments are far more interactive -- collapsing ceilings, crumbling floors, fiery environments, barrels and other large objects that...

144w ago - Klei Co-Founder Jamie Cheng has announced that Shank will be hitting PSN tomorrow, and he shared a launch trailer video and costume unlock code today too!

To quote: Over the last few days, we've been announcing the Shank Costumes over at the official Shank blog, and divulging how to unlock them on our Twitter account.

Jeff asked if I could divulge one unlock criteria especially for readers, so obviously I complied. The costume I chose was one that's close to impossible to stumble across.

So, today's special is costume number 8 -- the ANY-S costume!

Unlock Criteria

After completing the single-player campaign, input a slight modification to the classic Konami code: up+up+down+down+left+right+left+right+circle+x.





As you can guess, these outfits are odes to our own geeky fantasies. Naming them was a fun little exercise. Did you know that "Droid" is trademarked? I didn't.

And with that, I'm off! Enjoy the launch trailer and let me know if you have any questions!

145w ago - Today Klei Co-Founder Jamie Cheng has made available a video on their upcoming title Shank for PSN, which showcases combo, grappling and weapons vignette.

To quote: I decided to have a little fun with the game and record some of the combos we came up with using the standard-issued weapons. Below is the result: a vignette of Shank wailing on a poor dude.

Keeping your enemies tied up in combos, grappling enemies to deal additional damage, and using moves such as the pounce-shotgun tactic to keep enemies at bay, becomes increasingly important in Shank as enemies become progressively smarter -- especially in Hard Mode.

If you look really hard, you'll notice a couple moments briefly pixelated (pixel-censorship gives me the chuckles) due to this being a public video and the ratings boards saying "tsk tsk." Don't worry the actual game is in all its uncensored glory.





Also: lots of people have been asking us about the score of Shank -- we've released the first track on our facebook page, and we asked people to help hit our goal of 1500 fans before releasing the whole soundtrack to our fans. We did that in three hours. (Thanks!) and the soundtrack is now being remastered for everyone...

147w ago - Today Klei Co-Founder Jamie Cheng has detailed the challenges of Skank's PSN co-op campaign as part of an EA video interview.

To quote: I'd like to share our journey leading up to our decision to include a co-op campaign in our new title, Shank - and why we felt so strong about creating it as a separate mode altogether.

When Shank was shown at PAX 2009, there were two questions that I couldn't answer which came up over and over again. The first was, "What platform is it coming out on?" The second "is there going to be co-op?"

I answered the first question, with my own question. I stuffed our dev kit into a ghetto cardboard box, labeled with a large question-mark and strung a handful of controllers (including Atari and Dreamcast ones) from underneath it for added effect.





At the time, nobody had played Shank, and I didn't have platform approval yet. Thankfully, the gaming community and our fans spoke up, and I got my wish -- we were able to negotiate a deal to bring the game to the PlayStation Network.

The second, co-op question - proved to be much trickier.

On one hand, we felt strongly about the classic, couch-play...