Killzone 2 Shoots Up Your Browser

A Killzone 2 add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer turns your everyday internet browsing into a Time Crisis-style shoot-em-up.

Regardless of what you think about the game, Sony’s gotta earn some credit for its marketing of Killzone 2, which has gone beyond what we’d usually expect from a gajillion-dollar ad campaign. First there was the “playable” TV ad that was built from the game engine that you can download from PSN and mess around yourself. Now here’s a fun little distraction for your slow Friday workday: a browser toolbar that lets you do some Helghast killing right in the middle of your preferred internet browser.

Here’s how it works: You register and make a username/password, install the program, restart your browser, and there’ll be a not-too-obstructive toolbar underneath your default browser one. Enable that and you’ll see the thing will start “searching for Helghast.” At this point you may as well go back to your regular online activities while you wait for the thing to work its magic. Go read Missed Connections on Craigslist and pray the girl you saw downtown wrote about you or something.

Eventually, your browser will start flashing all these alert messages, and Helghast soldiers will start popping up right on top of whatever you were doing at the time. You click on them to shoot, and get bonuses for headshots, multiple bodyshots, etc. When you’re done, your score gets uploaded to the site’s leaderboards. You can even start up a “squad” and play with up to four other people on other computers. Pretty nifty.

Only thing is, just be sure to have your browser pointed to the right website when you’ve got the toolbar enabled. Wouldn’t want some Helghast interrupting on certain online activities. Actually, Alice over at the Wonderland blog, who stumbled on this thing in the first place, was reading about our very own Unskippable when she was attacked by Helghast. “I disabled the toolbar, because I really wanted to go read The Escapist, but as promos go, this is pretty cute,” she wrote. Read The Escapist, huh? Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.