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Beat Hazard Ultra coming September | PSNStores

Beat Hazard Ultra coming September

Posted by on August 9th, 2011 | 0 Comments | Tags:

In a post today on the PlayStation.Blog, Steve Hunt, CEO of Cold Beam Games took the floor to talk about his PSN game, Beat Hazard Ultra. We’ve covered the game in the past, but it bears repeating how cool an idea the game really is.

Beat Hazard Ultra is, in Steve’s words, “a twin stick arcade shooter that is entirely powered by YOUR music! Just copy some music on to your PS3 hard drive, or use the built-in songs, choose a track, and be dazzled by the eye-bleeding visuals as you blast away at enemy ships to the sound of your favourite pumping tunes.”

Steve goes on to write that everything you see in the game is dictated by the music you’ve chose, be it your firepower to the amount of foes flying at you. Each track will produce a unique level. He also goes on to explain some of the other features in Ultra, such as Boss Rush and Survival modes, along with unlockable perks and in game challenges, along with both online co-op and head to head play.

However, Steve also goes in to detail on his history, and how he’s always been a massive PlayStation fanboy, to the extent that he even had one of those strange Net Yaroze devices back in the day, the titular device being a strange half devkit that allowed people to create little games that often came packaged on demo discs. Now, Steve explains what it took to get Beat Hazard Ultra running on PS3 far better than I ever could, so I’ll let him take it from here;

And a massive challenge it was! However, as with any big project, I just broke it down and took it a day at a time. With the help of the awesome support guys at Sony, six months later here it is – Beat Hazard Ultra running on the PS3! I can’t tell you how rewarding that feels! In that time I’ve learned many new skills, from writing a renderer on the PS3, to coding a Digital Signal Processor which runs asynchronously on the PlayStation SPUs and is used to analyze the music in real time.

Crikey, that’s a real undertaking for one guy. Beat Hazard Ultra will be out this September, and it really does seem like a labour of love.