Table of contents for Xmas 2016 in Edge

Las Vegas might be famous for its ‘gaming’, but there the term has a very different meaning. Its connection to videogames has so far been limited to the Evolution Championship Series, an annual fighting-game event, and the occasional Halo tournament. That, though, is about to change: a permanent esports venue, owned by Millennial Esports, is soon to throw open its doors. Having recently formed through the merger of digital esports company Pro Gaming League and financial firm Stratton Corp, Millennial Esports had its choices when it came to selecting a location for its first venue. But, as CEO Alex Igelman tells us, “Las Vegas was a no-brainer. Vegas is the entertainment capital of the world and esports is the entertainment of the 21st century.” Igelman hopes that Millennial Esports’ new…

Duncan Beiny, better known as DJ Yoda, is an award-winning DJ who has pioneered his own unique style. He combines apparently disparate elements of pop culture to create his worldrenowned mixes and stunning audiovisual shows, and has also released three fulllength albums of original music. Beiny also took on an advisory role in the creation of DJ Hero, and is now working with events promoter GamerDisco on a History Of Gaming audiovisual show as part of the London Film Festival – a creation which he plans to tour next year. How did your involvement with History Of Gaming come about? I really like theming my shows, and a lot of my mixes are themed. I’ve done an ’80s one, a ’30s one and a country-andwestern one. A theme helps me…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar You’re probably familiar with Bernard Suits’ famous definition of a game: it is, he says, “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. I’ve never been quite satisfied with it myself. Aren’t all obstacles unnecessary, by definition? They get in your way when they shouldn’t. It is certainly not necessary, for example, to put hurdles in the middle of a running track. People from Usain Bolt to Mo Farah run their races happily without them. But the moment you decide to put the hurdles there, they become absolutely necessary to the performance of a 110m hurdles race. A game’s obstacles are necessary to the structure of the game: they define it. So let’s forget about obstacles and try this instead; videogames are the voluntary submission to unnecessary discomfort. In…

Should we ever find ourselves seeking a change of career, we now know we can cross ‘professional burglar’ off the list. If there’s one thing Hello Neighbor has taught us, it’s that breaking and entering is a lot tougher than television and cinema have led us to believe. Then again, few movie thieves have ever come up against an opponent as smart and adaptable as the titular resident of the house across the way. It’s the fierce orange glow coming from his cellar door, which is clearly visible through his front window, that first tempts you to investigate, not to mention that his front entrance has been left invitingly open. But no sooner have you reached for the handle than a loud musical sting plays and you spin around to…

HAJIME TABATA Director, Final Fantasy XV Final Fantasy XV, perhaps more than any other game in the series, is a departure from the format laid down by the early games. How did you decide what of the series’ tradition could be thrown out, while maintaining some essential feel of Final Fantasy-ness? It’s not easy to put into words. We certainly didn’t try to create a title that just focused on revisiting memories we have from past Final Fantasy titles. Rather, we wanted to create the best RPG we could for this time, with the time we were given. The question of how we could retain that essence of Final Fantasy within the new formula we came up with came later. Essentially, we wanted to have the base game in place…

On the main floor of 343 Industries’ office, in Redmond, Washington, sits the Halo Museum, a growing collection of replica sci-fi weapons, Master Chief costumes and statues of some of the Halo series’ most notorious enemies. Constructed to mark the 15th anniversary of the original game, the museum today serves as both a showpiece for visiting press and an attraction for children from the Make A Wish foundation, who wish to see where and how their favourite videogame is made. Packed with items, the museum is also a reminder of why 343 was founded, the enormous responsibility it inherited, and the pressures that continue to hang over it. Taking over from Bungie, the original creator of Halo, whose rapport with fans could hardly be overstated, 343 had to work hard…

T he best and most transformative addition to the Gears arsenal isn’t actually a weapon. The Fabricator is essentially a portable 3D printer. Carried by two or dragged by one, it uses the energy harvested from defeated enemies to produce a range of fortifications. These include spike strips, shock sentries, turrets and even a weapons locker, ideal for storing more powerful ordnance and refilling their clips so they’re ready in a pinch when things get hairy. These base-defence elements reinvigorate the reliably robust Horde mode, providing more room for tactical play; a simple example would be placing decoys to funnel waves towards choke points. The Coalition has given Horde top billing at the heart of an admirably expansive suite of multiplayer modes, and it’s easy to see why: this is…

What is Frederick Barbarossa’s problem? Only a few turns earlier we made a trade deal that was supposed to see Roman silk and marble traded for German gold for decades to come. Suddenly Barbarossa declares a ‘surprise war’, as Civilization VI calls it, pitting his army against forces that are almost twice as powerful as his. The same mindless, hard-topredict risk-taking is displayed by the Empire of Kongo, which uses the fact we took one of its cities in an earlier defensive war to repeatedly start wars it has no hope of winning. We’re coasting toward a military victory, despite never having declared war on anyone. Something’s amiss at the heart of Civilization VI. As with previous games, we’re placing cities on a hexagonal grid, climbing the tech tree and…

There aren’t many games that can claim to be physically irritating, but SuperHyperCube can take its place among that rarified group. Kokoromi’s trippy shape-matching game is beautiful, sure, but its only application of VR is to obfuscate your task as you manoeuvre an ever-growing mass of blocks through increasingly complex gaps. The result is a game that might well give you a crick in the neck. That’s not to say it isn’t initially charming. You start every round with a single cube that you can rotate on three axes, travelling forward through a neon-tinged vacuum from which walls, punctured with holes, emerge. The first one contains, simply enough, a corresponding cube-shaped hole. Once you pass through it, two more cubes are attached to your starting block in a random orientation,…

I’ve just spent about an hour creeping towards the enemy bunker. Bullets have flown past me every inch of the way. I’ve seen several of my squad members obliterated by mortar fire and my own health has been reduced to a point where if I survive this, I’ll need a walk-in bath and a stairlift for the rest of my days. It’s true that only the dead have seen the end of war, but I just want to keep going to see the end of this mission. With that bunker full of furious servicemen and women gone, our brave tanks can flood through and add years to the war, thus giving me great value for money as a member of the game-buying public. It has to go and it has…

The market didn’t like it, of course. When, on October 20, Nintendo finally unveiled its vision for its next generation of console hardware – a system that functions both as handheld and home console, slotting into a dock connected to a TV – its share price fell 6.6 per cent. The following day it fell again. Out rolled the doom-mongers, pointing out that this was even worse than the 5 per cent dip that followed the Wii U announcement – and we all know how that turned out. Context tells a different story: Nintendo is having a good year, sales down but profits up, the Pokémon Go craze sending its stock soaring, the unveiling on Apple’s stage of Super Mario Run boosting the company’s share price by a further 25…

WEBSITE Moat Door Skip bit.ly/moatdoorskip Watching the highly skilled speedrunning community dismantle and reassemble Mario 64 over the years has been a source of continual fascination (tinged with no small amount of incredulity). In the scene’s latest development, a small group of players has not only managed to break the world record for an any-per-cent playthrough – in the process wiping around 39 seconds from the previous record, which is the largest single improvement since 2007 – but achieved it by unlocking what’s described as the “holy grail” of Mario 64 sequence breaks, the Moat Door Skip, which requires frame-perfect timing. This detailed, jargon-heavy writeup of the technique, which is presented alongside a video of the world-beating run, is well worth a look even if you’re not into speedrunning. VIDEO…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar A s a parent, it’s inevitable that someone will ask you for advice on their own impending parenthood. But even now, with my son closing in on his third birthday, I’m still not sure what to say. I remember asking the same question and people would tell me to enjoy it, which at the time felt reassuring but now, with the benefit of hindsight, seems like a thoroughly cruel joke. Instead, leveraging my experience of sitting across tables from videogame developers who have just been asked something they’d rather not answer, I choose to reframe the question. Do I have any advice? Well (quick, awkward glance to PR rep), we’re not talking about that just yet – please look forward to Gamescom. Steve, it’s Gamescom for that, right?…

Developer/publisher Format Origin Release Supergiant Games PC, PS4 US 2017 Supergiant’s artists might have done rather too good a job with Pyre. It is, after all, set in a purgatory from which we’re supposed to want to escape. Yet this vibrantly colourful world, with its exotic sights and strange creatures, keeps giving us reasons to want to stay. And so naturally we’re disappointed when our time here comes to an end. Happily, we’re not at an event with a queue of impatient punters waiting for us to hand over the controller; we can just start the preview build over again, and so we do. “That’s a good sign!” laughs writer and designer Greg Kasavin, as we discuss his studio’s third game, which seems to mark an appreciable change in direction.…

You can thank sketchy netcode for Nidhogg 2. The first game’s online mode was, at launch, not quite fit for purpose, this frantic, twitchy fighting game suffering from anything other than perfect conditions. Messhof co-founders Mark Essen and Kristy Norindr have already patched Nidhogg’s netcode twice; even now, with the sequel announced, a third such update is in beta. “We knew we wanted to add things to Nidhogg, but we also wanted to make sure we spent as much time on the netcode as possible,” Norindr tells us. “That took a lot longer than we thought it was going to, but we finally got to a point where we could get excited about adding things. But the list had grown so long that it felt more like a sequel.” It…

We thought it was a simple question: what is the best game of Edge’s lifetime? Not your favourite, or the most important, or influential. The best. It is the sort of question those of us that play games are used to answering, and a process we enjoy. Yet apparently to people who make games for a living, being asked to identify one game as the greatest of them all is something akin to torture. One developer sent us a shortlist of four, asking us to help them pick a winner for them. One entire company – we shan’t name names, but it’s conspicuous by its absence from the following pages – declined, saying it wasn’t in its spirit to single one game out, since doing so would be unfair to…

STILL PLAYING Destiny: Rise Of Iron PS4 While elements of the power curve rankle, our time with Rise Of Iron has become a good deal more enjoyable now that we’ve reached the endgame, and can focus our attention on the activities that will take us to the level cap. It won’t take long, but no matter – it’s probably time we got around to playing all those other games anyway. Forza Horizon 3 Xbox One We found Playground Games’ replotting of the Australian southeast a little jarring – and we’ve only holidayed there. Passing the controller to a visiting citizen of the land down under, we expected them to be thrilled, but the sketchy geography, and a selection of cars and music that’s hardly culturally ’strayan, meant our guest turned…

Ah, we love the look of napalm in the morning. A clear sunrise is an odd sight indeed in Mafia III’s New Bordeaux; the sky’s an impossible shade of orange, as if someone is conducting chemical weapons tests in the nearby bayou. Mafia III’s lighting is all over the place. Sometimes the world is bleached in a carpet of white light, while at others a mystifyingly aggressive use of bloom frequently sees protagonist Lincoln Clay obscured from view entirely. At times, when you’re not being blinded, or baffled, by the light, you can see what developer Hangar 13 was going for: a sun-blanched, washed-out presentation designed to emphasise that this is a game set in Louisiana’s grimy, awkward past. Then the sun comes out again and you can’t help but…

Well, we didn’t quite cry. When Area X, the new area created by Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s team at Enhance Games, was unveiled at the Tokyo Game Show, many of those who played it were reduced to tears. We will admit that, during the game’s boss battle, as the music built to its crescendo while particle showers fizzed all around us, we welled up a little. But that was more to do with the fact that our entire body was tingling. We first played Rez Infinite while wearing a custom-made suit adorned with 26 points of vibration. At the time it felt remarkable. Now, we realise it was barely necessary. Area X is astonishing, certainly, using the PS4 hardware to fling thousands of particles about in a level in which you have…

Battlezone’s evocation of Tron, with its low-detail architecture and vehicles accented with flashes of neon, feels emblematic of the popular perception of VR. Rebellion’s game provides an opportunity to dive into a similarly unfamiliar, sterile world and do battle with beings that make no effort to hide their digital provenance or polygons. Its stripped-down tank combat is bold and exhilarating on first exposure, but over time the simplicity at its core corrupts that initial appeal. It’s thoroughly enjoyable while it lasts, however. The tanks are a pleasure to control, gliding across arenas’ surfaces with satisfying inertia as you take cover behind scenery and circle enemy vehicles. While they feel a little slow traversing the large maps, a smart risk/reward boost system allows you to move with greater alacrity at the…

Developed in-house by the first studio to get its hands on PSVR hardware, long before it was ready for the playing public, VR Worlds should serve as something of a best practice document. In reality, it’s a little more patchy than that, a grab bag of short experiences and games that inevitably feels disjointed. But at its best, the package does a good job of whetting the appetite for PSVR’s considerable potential. The compilation’s headline attraction is undoubtedly The London Heist, a beautifully presented short tale of gangland violence and betrayal that’s told through a mix of smart interactive cutscenes and great use of Move controllers. A scene in which you must locate a diamond in an ornate desk before shooting your way out of the building sees you grabbing…

The thousands of pages that have been printed in Edge’s first 300 issues have documented great change. Screenshots show game worlds and characters steadily evolving from angular planes of colour to nuanced places and people, while titles and editorials depict the rise and fall of trends, genres and companies. These incremental processes are constant, but it’s also possible to identify individual moments during Edge’s lifetime that have lead to lasting steps forward. It’s often hard to judge these moments at the time they happen. Take Wii. For a few brief years it was the brightest light in the industry, a piece of hardware that seemed to have rewritten the rules of control and have finally opened videogames into the true mainstream. Producing superlative software and marketing it with laser vision,…

“We start with the goals we want to achieve. Power in and of itself is not a goal. The question is, what that power makes possible.” To PlayStation 4 lead system architect Mark Cerny, the answer to that question was, unfortunately, Knack “If democracy is a computer game, and Hillary is completing women’s 100-year quest to get to the Oval Office, it kind of makes sense that this would be the final boss.” John Oliver puts the election race in terms we understand “We are coasting on novelty, and the initial wonder of being something people have never seen before. But we need to start judging ourselves. Not on a curve, but in an absolute sense.” If it helps, Oculus CTO John Carmack, we’re all judging Palmer Luckey “We shouldn’t…

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a New Nintendo 3DS XL, supplied by the Nintendo UK store Sabotage What’s this I’m hearing about Game stores attempting to charge for PlayStation VR test sessions? Strike me down, but that doesn’t seem like a very effective method of – for the lack of a better word – ‘selling’ this concept to the general public. In some respects this kind of action is sort of expected from the nation’s least favourite videogame outlet. Their prices for trading in games, for example, often end with me exiting the store with games still in hand. In all seriousness, I can’t imagine that Sony has given Game its support for doing this. It leaves…

Numbers never lie Eventually, the number becomes a problem. Were Activision still counting, this year’s Infinite Warfare would be called Call Of Duty 13. Four games in, you’d forgive Capcom Vancouver for ditching the digit and going with a subtitle instead – but no, here comes Dead Rising 4 (p36), its name instantly saddling it with the burden of its muddled past. Numbers imply a continuation, a gently iterated consistency, and that is precisely what Dead Rising 4 is. New toys and tools; improved and streamlined mechanics; and a bigger, more beautiful world. It returns to the original game’s shopping mall, and brings back its protagonist. Fortunately for Capcom Vancouver and Microsoft, Dead Rising’s core loop of increasingly bonkers zombie-splatting is as engaging as ever. But there is something about…

Apart from that messy business of occasionally unhinging their jaws to eat, snakes can often appear rather graceful creatures. Whether gliding silently through grass or coiling around trunks and branches to climb, they cope well enough with having to get around on their bellies. Granted, we’d never thought too deeply about their handicap until now: the genius of Snake Pass is that it breaks down that instinctive motion into a tricky multi-step process, the mastery of which provides the main challenge. Those bright, cartoonish looks belie a game that takes the art of serpentine movement very seriously indeed. Snake Pass breaks down the instinctive motion into a tricky multi-step process The simple act of moving forward, for instance, is complicated by the fact that snakes don’t gain momentum by sliding…

We’re standing in a darkened space save for the stars around us and a golden object in the distance. We walk up to it, except we’re not really walking, more like gliding, and as we get closer it becomes clear this is some kind of space probe. It’s one of the Voyager craft, sent into the outer reaches of the solar system in 1977. Attached to it is a golden record etched with sounds, images and music intended to communicate the essence of humanity – a time capsule of sorts. Playing as an extraterrestrial who has come across the crashed Voyager probe, we’re charged with using that golden record to reconstruct a future, submerged Earth. The world looks very different through these eyes. “There’s something a little disorientating at first,”…

THAT DIRECTOR HAJIME TABATA HAS MANAGED TO BUILD ANY SENSE OF COHESION WITHIN THESE STIFLING CONSTRAINTS IS EXTRA ORDINARY Most kingdoms, even those built in videogames, are founded on some kind of violence, usually seeded in disagreements over the rules, boundaries and leadership, finally resolved by a political or military show of strength. Final Fantasy XV’s backstory is more bloodied than most. Here is a game that, during the course of its decadelong development, has endured overthrows in name, direction and governance. Final Fantasy is a series that thrives on reinvention, mixing familiar elements – the orphan protagonists, the crystal McGuffins, the rambling landscapes, the towering chickens, the airship silhouetted in the sky – in novel ways. Final Fantasy XV is, however, something else: a game built from the fragments,…

We don’t often feel obliged to open a review by mentioning the game’s soundtrack, but Battlefield 1’s stunning Hans Zimmer-esque orchestral compositions warrant unusual measures. Simultaneously forlorn, blusterous and rousing, they perfectly encapsulate the game’s bittersweet character as 64 players hoping for acts of heroism, a general good time and MVP rewards clatter headlong into at least some of the tragic realities of World War I (see Post Script). Battlefield 1’s soundtrack will haunt you even when you’re not playing. But that might not be much of the time, given how good the latest entry in DICE’s long-running series is. It’s so good, in fact, we were somewhat wrong-footed. After all, the past couple of entries have conditioned us to take low expectations into what will likely be a tiresome…

Guerrilla has achieved the seemingly impossible. RIGS, the studio’s futuristic PSVR sport game, fails to induce the fit of vomiting we fear will follow in the wake of our dizzying opening minutes of play. This is despite the serious demands it makes on your brain’s positional certitude – you’ll dash-strafe, double-jump and quick-turn around multilayered arenas in an effort to keep track of five other players and, in one game type, repeatedly hurl yourself through an oversized goal hoop. It’s a game-design document that reads like a checklist of what not to do in VR, but somehow it all hangs together without incident. That’s not to say RIGS is an easy ride: players with particularly sensitive constitutions are likely to suffer when the pacy matches spool up, and even those…

There’s a reason the vast majority of rhythm-action games are set to such upbeat backing tracks, and if you weren’t aware of it before, you will after about five minutes of playing Thumper. This foreboding work is what happens when two former Harmonix developers, tired of making music games where the band plays on and the crowd goes wild even though you just made a terrible mess of the solo, strike out on their own, taking a genre and subverting its every convention. Suffice it to say, this is no dance party. You control a metallic, beetle-shaped craft that’s haring lightning-fast along a track through a hellscape made of neon. Obstacles come at searing pace; taking one hit will lose your chromatic shield, but a second will kill you, depositing…

Batman Arkham VR’s runtime may be brief – about 90 minutes, depending on how long you linger in each location – but it’ll make you feel more like the Dark Knight in that short window of time than any other Batman game to date. The evocative act of slipping into that infamous cowl and utility belt isn’t even diminished when you inevitably start dancing like an idiot in the mirror Rocksteady handily provides. This waifish game is a series of short set-pieces in which you get on with various iconic Batman tasks – such as being standoffish to Alfred while he patiently tries to help, or tormenting the Penguin for information – in between pawing at, picking up and chucking over your shoulder (or directly at Alfred) everything that isn’t…