UTRECHT, THE NETHERLANDS – December 1, 2010 This week the armies of Swords & Soldiers bring their tactical action gameplay to different shores yet again! After duking it out on pearly white beaches of the WiiWare service the brutal Vikings, the vicious Aztecs and the devious Chinese arrived last month at the pitch black moutains of the awe-inpsiring PlayStation®3 system. Infusing the game with a new innovative online mode and eye-poking HD & 3D graphics the PS3 version exposed console gamers to the glory of cartoon warfare in a way never before seen on this planet. And now the Swords & Axes have been sharpened to do it all over again: Swords & Soldiers has arrived on PC & Mac! So now the everlasting wars are no longer contained to the living room. Featuring the same 30 level single player campaign, customisable skirmishes, 3 highscore bonus games and Steam powered online functionality, the PC version has every bit of brawn as the PS3 version.
Support us by buying it from our store (http://ronimo-games.com/SwordsAndSoldiers/html/store.html) or get it from Steam! Both routes will get you the Steam enabled version which can then be installed on Windows as well as OSX.
But PS3 owners aren’t left out in the cold, as they shouldn’t be these days. Because this week, we added Move support to the PS3 version. Ever since Sony showed a cursor supporting controller and we announced that we’d be porting our cursor-based game to the system, people have been doing the math. And we’ve reached the same conclusion: Swords & Soldiers should support the Move. So now it does! Our office has seen lots of battles trying to determine the definite control setup, but we’re still undecided. So give them both a solid try, and let us know which setup has you preference!
Finally, we’ve also updated the demo on PSN. Apart from adding Move support, it now has some later levels from the game to give players a better taste of what Swords & Soldiers is all about. So if you haven’t checked out the demo or felt the first version was a bit too easy or missed Move support, go check out the new version!

SAN DIEGO, Calif. July 12, 2010 – Today, Sony Online Entertainment LLC (SOE) and independent videogame developer Ronimo Games announced a collaborative effort to bring Swords & Soldiers, a side-scrolling, real-time strategy game, to the PlayStation®Network.

Swords & Soldiers is an innovative strategy game featuring lush graphics, smooth controls, strong online integration and fresh gameplay. Commanding the armies of the burly Vikings, the vicious Aztecs or the cunning Chinese, players create powerful units, cast devastating spells and travel the globe in search of the ultimate trophy.

“Swords & Soldiers is the perfect blend of real-time strategy and bold 2D graphics and will include innovative features that players have not yet experienced on the PlayStation Network,” said Micah Loucks, Senior Producer at SOE. “Collaborating with Ronimo Games is a great opportunity for SOE to continue to bring interesting and unique titles to the platform.”

In Swords & Soldiers, players can acquire resources, assemble armies, thwart enemies and dominate opponents, while earning up to 20 PlayStation Network trophies. As players advance, new modes and minigames will be unlocked. Gameplay is available in single and local and online multiplayer modes. To play online, players can enter Matchmaking Mode at any time. Once a suitable opponent is found, the current gameplay will be paused until the battle is completed. With Matchmaking Mode, there is no waiting to battle and no break in the strategy action.

“PlayStation Network is an ideal platform to bring fresh gameplay experiences to a broad audience,” said Fabian Akker, Co-Founder and Game Designer at Ronimo. “And SOE has been a great partner in getting the game on PSN.”

Swords and Soldiers is scheduled to launch on the PlayStation Network early this Fall. For more information, please visit www.swordsandsoldiers.com.

Thanks to our presence on WiiWare, we’ve met quite a few smaller developers around Europe, developing WiiWare games. So we’re friends with all the developers who made Toki Tori, NyxQuest, Heron Steam Machine, Diatomic, Bonsai Barber and Zombie Panic in Wonderland among other games.

Same goes for the guys who made Max and the Magic Marker. They’re a Danish developer called Press Play. We’ve first met them in Madrid, and we’ve been drinking beers with them ever since. When we first saw Max and the Magic Marker, we’ve been very excited to see what the end result would look like. And it does look good! A fun and charming platforming puzzler in which you solve puzzles by drawing. The lines you draw get solid and then react realistically to the ingame physics. So you can really let your creative juices flow. Actually, there’s even a imagination mode, where the whole world transforms into an awesome scribbly version of itself.

If you want to give it a try, they’ve put a demo of the game online right here. Highly recommended. But of course, that’s just a demo. The full game is now finally available for WiiWare. So if you like the demo, go get it!

If you haven’t connected your Wii to the internet yet, or know someone who hasn’t, you’re in luck! There’s a way to get Nintendo points for that, which can be spent on great WiiWare games. If you help someone get connected you both can get 500 points each. There are also other bonusses, if you connect 10 people you get all Nintendo made games for the NES, and if you connect 20 people you get all games for the NES, SNES and N64 systems! So check out the guide here, and get connecting!

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A new year, new chances, new games! But last year had some pretty good games as well. These are some of the favorites at Ronimo base, in random order:

Best renaissance simulator: Assassins Creed 2
With mercenaries and prostitutes at every street corner, weirdos running across rooftops and stabbing random people, the renaissance was apparently a rough time.
Best lack-of-Diablo 3 soother: Torchlight
It was a lot of fun while it lasted, but now the hunger for Diablo 3 returns stronger than ever. Playing an early version in Cologne didn’t help either.
Best exploding character: ‘Splosion man
One of the most frustrating game experiences ever created, but you just can’t resist the enthousiasm of the ridiculous ‘Splosion man.
Best use of a stretchable robot: Machinarium
If you’re stuck: stretch. Or squeeze. And marvel at the cool art, that always helps.
Hardest game to stop playing: League of Legends
You can hear it’s sounds of epicness blended with loud yells of victory and frustration coming out of our office nearly every evening. Promises of quitting are heard almost as often, but I have a feeling we’ll be playing quite a bit longer.
Best game by Ronimo: Swords & Soldiers
Ok ok, it’s also the only game we released, but we still reckon it’s pretty good.

Actually, according to Gamerankings, our game was:
-2nd all time Wii strategy game
(Behind Little King’s Story, beating Pikmin 2)
-10th 2009 strategy game across all platforms
(Behind games like Plants vs. Zombies & Warhammer 40k, beating great games like Fire Emblem & Anno 1701)
-3th WiiWare game
(Behind Lostwinds 2 & Monkey Island chapter 3, beating awesome games like NyxQuest & Bit.Trip Void)
-30th all time Wii game
-14th 2009 Wii game
-121 all 2009 game
-1274th all time game
-115th all time strategy game

So, there you have it!  Time to start 2010 proper with some new releases. Hopefully we’ll be able to tell you more about those soon.