Futurlab, the makers of Coconut Dodge, have been long and hard at work on their next Mini, a vertical space shooter based on a teleportation mechanic. The good news is they finally have almost finished it and plan on a submission to Sony in February, which would mean a release date in the first week of March if everything goes smoothly.

They also recently had a focus group test the game, where it was very well received, which makes me wonder if we will see shameless knock-offs of it, like what occurred with Coconut Dodge?

The screenshots didn’t really give a sense of gameplay, but this gives a good idea of what the game is like. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a movie is worth a thousand pictures (unless it’s a movie by Uwe Boll). Also reveals an interesting twist—improved graphics when played on a PS3. That seems to be a first.

Hungry Giraffe should be out this week free for PS+ members in Europe, then next week for PS+ members in North America. Then available to buy after two weeks being exclusive for PS+ in each respective region.

Twisted Dragon updated their site with more info on their upcoming Mini, Defenders of the Mystic Garden. As they previously mentioned, it’s a tower defense game where you must protect the gnomes’ garden from being pillaged by a horde of ravaging something or other.

You do this by placing a number of adventurers of various classes at certain points on the map, who then attack the incoming invaders. Apparently they will patrol a given path rather than simply stay fixed like a tower, and they can also level up. As shown in the picture, each map has three different difficulties.

Laughing Jackal’s next upcoming Mini, Hungry Giraffe, has a release date of February 8th February 1st in Europe for members of PlayStation Plus and will be available to the rest of us 2 weeks later for £2.49/€3.49. No news on a release date for North America.. February 7th for members of PS+ in North America, and 2 weeks later available to buy for $3.49.

Update: New information on the release date from Al of Laughing Jackal, and they added a page on their website for the game, with new screenshots.

Although the title artwork really reminds me of Gauntlet (except in this case, I think the Elf has more than enough food), apparently it’s a tower defense-style game. We had a lot of those early in the life of the Minis program, but there haven’t been any recently that I can recall.

Although Alawar still hasn’t released all their titles that have previously been rated by the ESRB (going all the way back to May of last year), they keep getting more titles rated. This time around, the second in their very long running Farm Frenzy series, the creatively titled Farm Frenzy 2.

The first title in the time management series, Farm Frenzy, was ported to Minis about a year ago and has remained fairly high up on the PSN ratings charts.

Update: The ESRB also just rated a third Farm Frenzy title – Farm Frenzy: Pizza Party.