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The Platinum Team is proud to announce the release of PlatinumQuest, the long awaited modification to Marble Blast! This new mod takes over Marble Blast Platinum in both name and title as the new official mod of MarbleBlast.com.
Through almost 8 years of development, PlatinumQuest has seen two separate development teams as it slowly came to fruition. This highly anticipated update contains more than 130 new and exciting levels, as well as dozens of new features. PlatinumQuest is the largest addition to the Marble Blast genre and we're sure you'll appreciate the work that went into it.
As you may have guessed by the name of this update, PlatinumQuest requires players to beat levels and special challenges in order to progress further through the game, as well as unlock unique Bonus levels. While PlatinumQuest aims to be easier than its predecessor, there are still mind-boggling challenges that will stump even the experts!
Included in this update is a massive upgrade to the base engine of the game, allowing players to select graphical enhancements including marble reflection, texture quality, animated backgrounds and more! Additionally, we've added improved joystick support for Xbox controllers which even work for several of the game menus. Users who enjoy making levels will find several major enhancements to the Level Editor, as well as several cosmetic changes. All levels also have a neat camera preview system, allowing you to showcase the level itself. The level select screen has been greatly modified and now shows many levels at once, giving you an easy way to find and select the level you want to play.
PlatinumQuest adds several major gameplay features, including new Powerups, a Hint system (available to Custom levels as well), general tips and trivia, as well as a new level progression system. This system requires players to beat previous levels (for the main game levels) as well as more specific challenges that unlock Bonus levels. There is much, much more in PlatinumQuest than can be covered here, so be sure to play and explore it thoroughly!
However, with all of these exciting new features, our minimum system requirements have changed, and now require:
- Windows 7 or later / macOS 10.7 or later
- DirectX 10 hardware:
- GeForce 8000 series or higher
- AMD Radeon 2000 series or higher
- Intel HD 3000 or higher
- Note that you may have to run on lower graphical settings depending on your hardware.
- 2GB of free disk space
- Internet connection is required for online play
- Mac users need to install an Xbox controller driver for Xbox controller support
We hope you enjoy PlatinumQuest as much as we have working on it!
- The Platinum Team
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We're nearing the release of PlatinumQuest. In fact, we are so close to release, that we have an actual release date...
It's in two days, on July 6th!
During July 5th we will move the site to maintenance as we get it ready for PlatinumQuest. Once we're back up PlatinumQuest will be featured front and center. Returning players will be able to download it just by running the Marble Blast Platinum Launcher.
- Matan and The Platinum Team
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The PlatinumQuest Speedrun competition comes to a close. The $15 Steam Summer Sale winners are Nockess and El_Robert! Nockess has had no competition to his beautiful 10.725 on Having a Blast, while El_Robert managed an awesome 32.728 on Work in Progress, barely beating Frostfire by roughly 0.05 seconds. You can view both videos right here:
Congratulations again to the winners!
Matan
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Hey all,
With the Steam Summer Sale 2017 going on, I was thinking about being generous and giving a couple of people some smiles, so why not a competition?
The competition is very simple:
Open up the PlatinumQuest Demo and speedrun one of these two levels: Having a Blast , or , Work in Progress
To prove your time, you must do it on video and upload to YouTube (it can be unlisted).
The top time in each level will award its owner $15 worth of games for Steam, however it only pays out once so you can only receive $15.
In case someone gets top spot for both levels, then the next prize is as follows:
- If it's the same person for 2nd place on both levels, he receives $15
- If it's two different people for 2nd place on both levels, each one receives $10.
The only other rule is that you must have a Steam account in order to participate.
If you win, we'll add each other as friends, tell me the games you want and I'll purchase them for you. No gift cards will be given instead as this prize must be used for the Steam Summer Sale 2017.
The competition begins... now... and ends on the 2nd July. Anyone can play, as long as they have a Steam account.
Good luck to all,
Matan
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Hey all,
If you aren't following our Twitter account then you probably haven't heard that we have finished all SinglePlayer levels for PlatinumQuest. This major milestone means a lot, since PlatinumQuest started as SinglePlayer only. Now we just have to make the Online section work nicely with the multitude of features it adds (spoilers: it doesn't work that nicely). I find it rather interesting that the SinglePlayer levels are split into two eras: 2009-2012 with the original Platinum Team, and then 2015-2017 with a whole new Platinum Team (save for me). In most of 2012 and the entirety of 2013-2014, we had no new levels. I'm pretty sure parts of 2015 had none, but I digress. The ideas of what makes a level and how this evolved really shows.
We still have to wrap up all the corners of SinglePlayer and blast through Online before we can release.
In addition to all that, I'm super happy to tell you about the new Replay System. It replaces all current and previous recording systems (rec/avi/mov/mp4) with a new rrec format which allows you to painlessly record a run, restart without any player input and recognise when you finish a level (prompting you to save). You can then replay the level and it'll keep recording on a new file. It works with all PlatinumQuest's features, including Hunt mode. You can replay the recording on video in any resolution, framerate and OS, giving it very good stability. When you play Online, it will automatically record your run, and should you get a World Record, immediately sends it to the server, so we don't have to worry about missing runs when it comes time to make videos.
This rrec format will be required for all future World Record Rampages (excluding MBG, which continues with rec/avi/mov/mp4) as default.
As this system does use its own versioning system, any future versions of this game that change the rrec version will not have their recordings work with the release version, and vice versa.
Whatever the case, I'm excited that we've made so much progress, and I'm looking forward to releasing Soon (TM).
Until next time,
Matan