I would first like to extend my apologies to all my readers who have likely been wondering where the updates have been over the last month. Life kind of caught up with me and my paying job overtook most of the time that I had to do more interesting things. I’m ramping back up now with a big push from friends and family, so I will be getting back up to speed with the gaming world and getting ready to buckle down to more interesting content. New domain is on the horizon, now that I’ve decided on the name, so it will be a busy month of May.

Now back to business.

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I was shamelessly positive about the latest in the PixelJunk series – Eden – when it arrived on the PlayStation Store last year. While the game had its issues, it was what I consider to be a standard of what kind of games the platform should be expecting. Beautiful graphics, unique and interesting gameplay and it was an experience that did not feel like a flash game, a chopped-up version of a retail release or a pet project – it felt whole and had all the trappings of a quality platformer, something that doesn’t happen all too often in modern gaming. Needless to say, this put me at a high anticipation level for the next entry in the series, and while it seems my initial prediction that series 2 of PixelJunk would be hitting mid-2009, we are getting the fourth entry in the series so far in an unnamed and oddly familiar looking shooter/puzzle game that has been given the name of PixelJunk 1-4, and the master of all things Q Games Dylan Cuthbert wants you to come up with a name.

While I tend to not push out previews and early impressions, especially when it is all based on a YouTube video rather than any high quality captures (and the fact that the website is littered with “concept images”), I thought that it is interesting to see the direction they seem to have taken with the new game. It has a similar feel to that of Eden, with 2D, high quality painted landscapes stuck in the background while you traverse the foreground with a tiny avatar, in this case what looks like a hovercraft or ship, and solve puzzles built into the level in order to progress. It’s probably the most similar title since their first entry – Racers – was eponymous to the fact it was a racing title and Monsters was a tower defense game, so they seem to have chosen a direction based on the success of Eden while perhaps taking away some of the more frustrating elements. You move a ship around an underground world filled with water, magma and earth and use the various materials against each other to clear pathways, all the while firing at enemies that are trying to hinder your progress. A little bit of a side scrolling shooter mixed with some simpler rock-paper-scissors style puzzles may certainly prove to be interesting. Cuthbert even mentioned that there will be a small story with this one, which is a big divergence for the more casual approach that their titles have taken thus far. And yet they don’t know what to call it.

Naming contests are not completely foreign to video games, although the recent history of letting the fans determine the marketing materials and names hasn’t always turned out to be a great decision. F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin is the most recent game that I can recall that had this issue, with the “Name Your Fear” contest allowing players to pick their favourite name, ultimately ending up with something that sounded very generic and nondescript, especially considering they originally lost the F.E.A.R. name. Games have also taken to allowing communities to choose the covers for games, with Resistance 2 taking this approach which turned out with less-than-stellar results. While it is a cute trick by community managers to allow fans to make ultimately useless decisions regarding the games for their sake, the non-fans and broader market may be more affected by decisions made by a group of people with little marketing experience and more push for the dramatic or flashy. Q Games have taken the more safe approach of avoiding voting systems altogether and simply having fans write in their ideas to be handpicked by the company for the most fitting, which is likely already kind of decided on and they are hoping someone may spark up the same idea that they are already thinking.

Excuse my cynicism, but the idea of allowing fans to control the marketing push is a bit of an odd reality. I am a firm believer in the wisdom of crowds, but the audience that this particular kind of contest caters to is likely already looking to have that item on their shelf, and any change in title or design is likely generated to serve the best matching colour scheme for their game wall. Cuthbert is taking one cool approach to this an adding the fan’s name to the list of credits, ultimately immortalizing them within the game itself, so I will play the role of hypocrite and likely take a couple of guesses as to what they may consider to be the best name for the game. I’m just hoping that PixelJunk: Contests Are Silly is not already taken.