Edgeの March 2016 の目次

First, we had arcade machines. Drop a coin in the slot, press the ‘1P’ button – a few seconds’ worth of hassle combined – and go. Then came cartridges. Slide one in and flip the power switch: bingo. Given these foundations, it’s hard to imagine how we ever made it through the Dark Age of cassette-based storage, huddled over devices that would take six minutes to wheeze a game’s worth data into the 8bit computers of old. Six minutes! That’s a good round of Drop7 right there. Never again, we swore as we moved on to disks, then carts again, then discs, and beyond. Today, we want everything now. Shut up with your Kickstarter pitch, take our money, and hurry the hell up with delivering the goods. The gameplaying public…

Channel 4 has been experimenting with games for some years now, commissioning educational projects and spinoffs from its roster of shows. But newly formed publishing arm All 4 Games, a mobile-focused endeavour based in Glasgow that’s just announced its launch titles, is set to deepen the channel’s relationship with indie developers. Here we speak to games commissioning editor, and industry veteran, Colin Macdonald about his ambitious plans for the project. How did All 4 Games come into being? I started four years ago and before my time here most of Channel 4’s involvement [in videogames] had been from an educational point of view. My job isn’t to educate but to produce high-quality games that promote Channel 4’s shows to a new audience and engage our existing audience. We got to…

Hardware Polycade Manufacturer In-house If you haven’t yet seen enough arcade machines built for the home, here’s another – this time from a team with lineage behind it. Polycade is the creation of Tyler and Dylan Bushnell – sons of Atari co-founder Nolan – and Charles Carden, and represents their solution to the awkward issue of how to fit authenticfeeling arcade play into a limited space. The wall-mounted enclosure is just 17 inches deep at its most prominent point, and 30 inches wide, and comes with 80 vintage games – including Atari’s first big success, Pong, along with Pac-Man and several Street Fighter II variants – loaded onto an 8GB SD card. The hardware is built around a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B board, running RetroPie emulation behind a custom…

Patience and time I am behind the times. Stuck in the past. I am a lifelong console gamer yet to make the leap to the current gen, and I probably won’t for a while yet (mainly because I still can’t decide between Xbox One and PS4). I have never been an early adopter and have usually waited at least a year before upgrading. I am clinging to my 360 which, even though it has started making some strange noises, is still going strong. I have a cupboard and a hard drive full of unfinished games that will likely be left untouched and forgotten when I do make the switch. I try to hold on to the past, though. I still have a PS2 hooked up to the bedroom TV, on…

On February 17, 2014, Cliff Bleszinski laid out the immediate future of the online shooter with a single tweet: “Wall running is the new cover”. The man behind the game that put the cover shooter on the map sent that curt missive a couple of months before the launch of Titanfall, and two years later, he’s been largely proven right. Shooters are increasingly defined by movement, skills and progression systems; wall running might not quite be the new cover, but Bleszinski’s real point is that shooters have increasingly come to be defined by the things they let you do when you’re not firing your gun. This month’s Hype crop brings further proof of that fact. Tom Clancy’s The Division (p36) would have been a hard sell when Call Of Duty…

Developer/publisher Gears For Breakfast Format PC Origin Denmark Release 2016 Kickstarter’s greatest contribution to videogames is the way it has forced the retirement of the well-worn phrase ‘They don’t make ’em like that any more’. Big publishers may not like the look of them, but players of a certain vintage certainly do, and Danish studio Gears For Breakfast won approval and funding from over 9,000 of them. In the process it raised just shy of $300,000 to make A Hat In Time, a cheerily old-school 3D platformer whose Kickstarter pitch wears the label ‘collectathon’ as a badge of honour. Take that, accepted wisdom. Which is not to say that A Hat In Time is somehow counter-cultural; it’s simply reviving the cultural standards of a couple of decades ago and giving…

Game designer and Escalation Studios co-founder Tom Mustaine talks us through working closely with Id to create SnapMap (below), and how building levels for the original Doom kicked off his career. How did you get started making levels for Doom? The first time I played Doom on my dad’s 486, I took a left in E1M1 and saw those stairs ascending up to the green armour room with those huge picture windows looking out to what felt like an infinite sky. I knew then I’d do anything to find out how to make levels for Doom. I spent months digging up every possible tool and resource to build content for the game, and from there it was a rollercoaster of making hundreds of levels and mods, including some that made…

Matt Korba and Paul Bellezza were students at the University Of Southern California in Los Angeles in 2007. Just a year later, they found themselves running a game studio. Its first game – The Misadventures Of PB Winterbottom, a whimsical and beautifully drawn puzzler that enjoyed favourable comparison to Braid when it was released on Xbox Live Arcade in 2010 – was originally Korba’s graduate thesis. Having submitted it to the IGF and taken it to E3 with IndieCade, the pair ended up signing a publishing deal with 2K, and thus The Odd Gentlemen came into being. Appropriately, their very first office was in a University Of Southern California building, right above where they had worked on Winterbottom as students. Bellezza has since moved on to Riot Games, but Korba…

Developer/publisher Thekla, Inc Format PC, PS4 (tested) Release Out now There’s a moment of revelation late on in The Witness that profoundly changes your relationship with the game, elevating it from something already very special to a work of astonishing ingenuity. But we’re willing to bet that most players won’t reach that point, 20 or so hours in, because Jonathan Blow’s latest game has a greater propensity to divide opinion than any other in recent memory. And not least because of the remarkably steep challenge it presents. An open-world puzzle game, The Witness allows you to wander freely across an idyllic (if ecologically volatile) island as you tackle hundreds of electronic-maze-based conundrums. Blow’s gloves come off early and you’ll clatter into some real head-scratchers soon after leaving the cosseting fortress…

Developer/publisher Red Hook Studios Format PC Release Out now It’s a surprise to find that this relentless numerical tangle of a dungeon crawler is a human story WHISPERER IN THE DARK Your relation, who wrote that fateful letter summoning you to the family abode, narrates actions and events as you traverse the underworld, and without his interjections much of the gravitas that accompanies simple decisions would be lost. Each observation is presented in an approximation of Lovecraft’s weighty, suspenseful prose, sometimes too consciously grandiloquent but close enough. Voice actor Wayne June takes credit for much of the impact: like the narrator of The Rats In The Walls, cracks in his sanity are suggested rather than stated. His narration is authoritative but afflicted by strange pacing and stumbles, a reflection of…

Developer/publisher Numinous Games Format Ouya, PC (tested) Release Out now Many virtual dragons have fallen at our hands. For once, however, we find ourselves in the presence of a beast that cannot be slain. On March 13, 2014, five-year-old Joel Green died, having lived with terminal cancer for four years. His parents Ryan and Amy had already opted to chronicle Joel’s short life in a videogame, and have done so in the form of 14 short vignettes, which movingly follow the family’s response to the diagnosis. At times, their approach is unexpectedly playful. The striking, beautifully lit low-poly art is presented from numerous perspectives; we view the world through Joel’s eyes and those of his parents, but often we’re an outside observer. Though this sometimes makes for an uncomfortably voyeuristic…

Illustration box-kite-curve.com This is about what everyone starts thinking about after the game has scooped the jackpot: a sequel. Lots of sequels You know the band Sigur Rós, right? Yeah, you do. Three Icelandic lads who do catchy ethereal post-rock warbling. In 2005 they put out a song called Hoppípolla. Something about jumping in puddles. But you will have heard it a lot. In adverts, the stirring bits of music they play at courageous-children awards – that sort of thing. Anyway, legend has it that the moment they finished it they started referring to it, gleefully, as The Money Song. They knew they had a big hit on their hands. They simply knew it. And, yep, it was. I’ve had the pleasure of working on a few games like this.…

Dan Schreiber is a writer, standup comedian, TV presenter and producer, while Andrew Hunter Murray is a writer for Private Eye who also performs on stage. They’re also both part of the team of researchers behind UK panel show QI, and co-host – along with James Harkin and Anna Ptaszynski – its spinoff podcast, No Such Thing As A Fish. Here the pair discuss arcade humiliation, installation woes, and exploding bananas. What’s your favourite videogamerelated fact? Dan Schreiber I love that Nintendo used to run love hotels – that’s incredible. It’s not your usual company trajectory like, I don’t know, ‘We’ll start with model cars and then we’ll make real cars.’ I also really like that Robert Ballard, a leading oceanographer who discovered the wreck of the Titanic and also…

Illustration marshdavies.com It’s a wonderfully silly game, yet maybe it would also be a really good exercise to use in couples’ counselling It might seem weird to think videogames used to come with manuals – at least to people who have known only hours-long tutorial levels, GameFAQs, instructional videos on YouTube, and whatnot. But they did. The manuals were concertinaed cassette inlays, and later little in-box booklets, describing not only the controls but giving backstory and advising on techniques and tactics. The best game manuals were tiny works of literary art in themselves. I was one of those who religiously sat down and read the entire manual before ever starting to play the game. But the manual is a moribund form now, and hours of FMV exposition and NPC nagging…

Tim Schafer Founder and CEO, Double Fine What did you take away from Psychonauts that might affect how you approach the sequel? I think in the first game I approached it like an adventure game, where I worked on the story and the environments first. We were working on the protagonist at the same time, and by the time his movement came online it broke all of our levels. Ed Fries saw some of the struggles we were having nailing the gameplay and said, “When I visit developers in America, they always have these big, beautiful environments first and then they work on the central character; but when I go to Japan, they always build the character first and build out from that.” So for Psychonauts 2, the first person…

Soma PC A user-created mod entitled Wuss Mode transforms the way you play Soma by robbing its creatures of their aggression. Well, mostly: some of the fish still bite, and chase sequences remain in place. But nothing can inflict any damage on you. While it would be a game-breaking alteration in most titles, here you’re afforded more time to drink in the disquieting atmosphere of Pathos-II. This War Of Mine PS4 11 Bit Studios’ harrowing wartime survival sim becomes even darker with the introduction of children into the mix. But the upsetting theme isn’t the only thing that makes the console version harder to play. A lack of guidance, an inadequately small UI and inferior controls mean that, despite the additions – which include a new home base and fresh…

“As far as I’m concerned, I’m designing a game where people will get out of it as much as they’re ready to get out of it” With only a few panel solutions still eluding us, we speak to The Witness creator Jonathan Blow about his ambitions for the game and how he feels about the way things turned out – somehow avoiding spoilers in the process. The way you teach the game’s mechanics is subtle. It’s kind of amazing that that actually works, right? It depends what school of thought [a game designer is] in, but if you play a Nintendo game, there’s a little character telling you every obvious thing over and over again for hours, right? And that’s not the way that I like to do it, generally.…

Developer/publisher Campo Santo Format PC (tested), PS4 Release February 9 Henry and Delilah become increasingly agitated by the implicit threat of some unseen, unknown antagonist NEGATIVE OUTLOOK A firewatchman’s lookout tower has all he could ever need – unless he needs the bathroom, in which case he’s two flights of stairs and a sprightly walk away from the outhouse. Henry should, by rights, be spending the majority of his time up here, checking for signs of fire. After the first night’s break-in, however, he seems to want to get out of there as often as possible. By the game’s end it’s used to signify his increasing agitation, the typewriter he brought to write thoughtful journal entries now being used for half-paranoid guesses at what might be going on outside, pinned…

Discoverability continues to be a serious, often debilitating, issue for mobile game developers – a problem we find Channel 4 addressing directly on p16 – so it’s no surprise to see the topic front and centre during this year’s London Mobile Games Week. While the five-day conference, which is built around Mobile Games Forum 2016 and also takes in Pocket Gamer Connects, is ostensibly a celebration of the industry, many developers warn of a dire situation for small-screen developers. “Things should have got better by now,” Team Lumo game designer Jonathan Evans says during a Pocket Gamer Connects talk. “The tools got better, the hardware got better, and we’ve got so many more players… but we seem to have invented the ‘zombie developer’. The zombie developer makes games, but he…

AP/Press Association Images “We call him R2 Square, because those are the buttons you press on the PlayStation to get his curling shot. He always scores like that.” Paul Pogba pours praise on Juventus teammate Paulo Dybala AP/Press Association Images “Y’all fucking server is fucking wack, man. It’s that difficult to play somebody online? What the fuck is you doing, Bill Gates? Fix yo’ shit, man!” Snoop Dogg keeps his cool when a server outage scuppers his Destiny plans “No head tracking, low field of view, essentially a monochrome 3DTV… The association of the Virtual Boy with VR hurt the industry in the long run.” Fair enough, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, but where’s Rift’s Teleroboxer, hmm? “One of the things that concerns me is as we get bigger as a…

PODCAST Bithell Games Podcast www.bit.ly/bithellgamespodcast It’s been running in tentative form since the beginning of December in the shape of four practice episodes, but the Bithell Games Podcast kicked off 2016 with its first episode proper. Hosted by Thomas Was Alone and Volume designer Mike Bithell along with Bithell Games COO Alexander Sliwinski, the podcast is an informal chat about games, the team’s experience of making them, and “the random stuff” the pair don’t find time to talk about during work. It also features regular guests, and in episode one topics of 2015’s best games and the daunting task of organising appearances at key game conferences are discussed. Bithell and Sliwinski prove to be charming hosts with a great deal of insight into the machinations and peculiarities of the videogame…

Illustration marshdavies.com There may be a ceiling on Valve’s ambition, but it makes sure it reaches for the skies anyway This profession is, famously, riddled with perks. Champagne on tap. A lifetime’s supply of those tiny little hamburgers. All the free games you could ever play, and all the cocaine you can eat (you eat cocaine, right?). We live lives of such largesse that we’re often mistaken for rock stars. We’re not, of course (well, maybe YouTubers are). But there are perks and by far my favourite is the way you get to sit in rooms with people who are much smarter and more important than you’ll ever be, and speak to them as equals. My first overseas gig for Edge was a roundtable interview with some of the biggest…

Developer/publisher Blizzard Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin US Release Spring Outside the entrance to Blizzard’s California headquarters is, obviously, a giant statue of an orc. Surrounding it are a series of bronze plaques that spell out the company’s values. “The primary value, that sits front and centre, is ‘Gameplay First’,” Jeff Kaplan, Overwatch’s game director, tells us. “Our philosophy is, do the right thing for the game, build engagement with players, and we’ll find ways to be successful from there.” It is this ethos that has led to Blizzard deciding that Overwatch’s post-launch character and map releases will be free of charge. It is not ruling out paid DLC down the line, but for the time being everything that follows Overwatch’s spring launch will be free. It’s a refreshingly…

Developer Silicon Studio Publisher Square Enix Format 3DS Origin Japan Release Out now (JPN), February 26 (EU) Bravely Default may have been a cumbersome title, but it was an apt one for a Japanese roleplaying game that spent as much time falling back on established ideas as it did attempting to streamline and refine the systems that had, in part, caused the genre to fall out of favour in the west. In most regards, this follow-up isn’t nearly so bold, feeling more like an expansion than a sequel. And yet it continues the original’s fine work with a raft of subtle but meaningful improvements that trim the grind still further, while empowering the player to set their own pace. Efficiency is rarely the first thing we look for in a…

Game Doom Developer Id Software Publisher Bethesda Softworks Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin US Release 2016 On stepping into Id Software’s Richardson offices we’re warmly welcomed by Donna Jackson, the company’s larger than life – and thoroughly Texan – office manager. Better known as Miss Donna or Id Mom, she sits behind a reception desk that’s positioned in front of a wall-to-wall glass cabinet stuffed full of trophies and Id history. “How y’all doing?” she asks, elated that we could make it all the way from England to visit. She joined the company 24 years ago, back when John Carmack was still wrestling with the task of repurposing the Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3-D engine for what would become Wolfenstein 3D. Carmack, along with the rest of the company’s…

Dominic Wheatley set up UK videogame publisher Domark in the early ’80s with business partner Mark Strachan, inspired entirely by an encounter with a Commodore 64 and the arrival of adventure games. Taking the fledgling company’s brand from a portmanteau of their names, the pair quickly secured Games Workshop legend Ian Livingstone to write their first title, Eureka. From there Domark grew quickly, publishing one of James Bond’s first interactive adventures, before eventually merging with Eidos via a reverse takeover, establishing one of the UK’s most important publishing houses. Having guided Eidos through the debut of Tomb Raider and beyond, Wheatley eventually took a back seat, focusing on other business. Until now, that is. Stepping up as the head of Curve Digital Entertainment – itself formed from the recent merger…

If a sequel wasn’t exactly inevitable when Schafer wrote Psychonauts (alongside Valve writer Erik Wolpaw, then of satirical game site Old Man Murray), he already had plans to develop its narrative across multiple games. This is, perhaps, a clue as to what we can expect from a follow-up. “There was a backstory that involves a curse put on Raz that we hint at a little bit in the game,” he explains. “He tosses off a line about his whole family being cursed to die in water and stuff like that, and there are some posters in the Meat Circus [stage] that allude to the other family in the circus that had a feud with your family, the Aquatos.” It’s such a subtle reference that Schafer was confident no one would…

Though wilfully reductive, the ‘walking simulator’ label emerged from a crude attempt to categorise the kind of narrative-focused firstperson experience exemplified by Dear Esther. Detractors take issue with a perceived lack of gameplay (in the traditional sense) and find no comfort in brooding atmospheres, layered storylines or the opportunity to explore new places. But the kinds of games that antagonised those hidebound players were very much the product of a writer’s vision, whereas in this issue we see two examples of the vaguely defined genre as interpreted by game designers. The Witness (p106) takes a simple gameplay premise and wrings what appears to be every possibility from it over the course of dozens of continually surprising hours. And then the game goes even further. Firewatch (p114) similarly subverts expectations, though…

Publisher 2K Developer Firaxis Format PC Release Out now Ostensibly it’s a game about overthrowing aliens, but really it’s a war against the forces of probability UNDER THE RADAR You start most encounters incognito. Your soldiers can only be detected if you move them into clearly demarcated zones of enemy influence, fire a shot, or kick a door down loudly when moving through a building. These periods of stealth action let you set up cathartic ambushes. A soldier in overwatch takes reaction shots on the enemy turn, should an enemy move through their field of view. When in stealth, you can place all but one soldier on overwatch within range of the enemy. When you order the remaining soldier to fire at the enemy, they scatter. The motion sets off…

Developer Phosphor Games Publisher Imperative Entertainment Format PC (version tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now Tedious dialogue only highlights Portal’s genius in, to use the technical term, letting you bloody get on with it ENIGMA VARIATIONS The other Heroes Reborn tie-in game, Enigma, on tablet and smartphone, shares a fair amount with Gemini, but even more with Portal. You’re another teenage girl called Dahlia, using skills such as timeshifting and telekinesis to try to escape a sadistic testing course. Gemini’s approach feels fresher, largely due to feeling like an adventure rather than a series of capital-P Puzzles. None of the characters are part of Heroes proper, though, nor is anything that happens there important for following the story in the games. But both games are endlessly better and more…

Developer/publisher Night School Studio Format PC, PS4, Xbox One (tested) Release Out now (PC, Xbox One), TBA (PS4) Five teens visit an apparently abandoned military island to drink, party and investigate weird signals emanating from nearby caves. What could possibly go wrong? Oxenfree’s premise is Teen Horror 101, but there’s something more interesting bubbling beneath the surface. Its early stages in particular are rich in intrigue and humour. Predictably, the group is soon separated; as Alex, you’re asked to reunite with your friends, while figuring out what’s going on. Are they dealing with a temporal anomaly, an extraterrestrial presence, or ghosts? Should she search for best friend Ren or try to mend fences with the astringent but clearly unsettled Clarissa? And when will hanging around with her new stepbrother stop…