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How much value do you place on your time? That’s a question Nintendo is stealthily asking Switch owners to answer as it finally unveils plans for its long-awaited premium online service. The home console-handheld hybrid has had one fatal flaw since its launch in March of 2017, and it’s one that Nintendo is now finally addressing, although it is doing so in a somewhat unsatisfactory fashion. As it stands, it’s impossible to transfer your save data off of the system; you can’t back it up onto a personal hard drive, you can’t shift it between the hardware and an SD card, and there is no option for cloud saving. Given that the Switch works best as a handheld device, the spectre of loss, theft or accidental damage is ever-present. The…

“4A WANTS TO INTRODUCE PLAYERS TO FAR MORE OF POST-APOCALYPTIC RUSSIA THAN THEY’VE EVER SEEN” It’s not just the death of single-player games that has been greatly exaggerated – it’s the death of the mid-tier developer, too. Fortunately we have the likes of Ukrainian/ Maltese dev team 4A Games flying the flag for titles that aren’t costing the world to create, but are providing players with incredible worlds to explore… just ones that aren’t quite as big, free and open as the ones Microsoft and Sony spend tens of millions of dollars on to get made. Metro Exodus, the third title in the post-apocalyptic depression simulator series, finally makes its move to the surface in a sustained fashion – so is it open world? Not quite. 4A and Deep Silver,…

AIR HOCKEY 29 July 2008 One of the App Store’s earliest successes and a must-play game for its time, Air Hockey is a rare example of an iOS game from the earliest days of the format that is still playable today. It’s also a multiplayer game, as two players can sit at opposite ends of the device to control their paddle. The smooth animation and ease of control made it incredibly intuitive to pick up for anyone with an iPhone, regardless of their gaming background. METAL GEAR SOLID TOUCH 18 March 2009 An early example not only of a triple-A franchise making a move to the iPhone, but of how most publishers were thinking about the format at the time. Metal Gear Solid Touch wasn’t a very good translation of…

Q. HOW LONG IS IT? First play through is about ten hours – much the same as recent Quantic Dream games. Q. BUT PLENTY OF REPLAY VALUE? Definitely. Detroit is a far more sprawling and varied kind of experience than most narrative games. It’s possibly even more branching than Heavy Rain or Beyond. Q. DOES DETROIT GO ‘FULL CAGE’? If by ‘Full Cage’ you mean getting lost in spirituality and existential issues that have no bearing on the story, then no. Detroit has its heady moments, but its themes are actually well grounded.…

New to State Of Decay is a sickness that cough drops ain’t gonna cure. Blood Plague is spread by special types of red-eyed zombies that pop up near fleshy, pulsating blobs called Plague Hearts. Take enough damage from an infected zed, or linger too long by a Plague Heart and you’ll contract the disease. Left untreated, infected survivors die and become a Plague Zombie. You know you’re sick when a countdown timer appears on screen, giving you three real-time hours to find plague tissue samples and synthesise them into a cure. Destroy every Plague Heart in your town using as many explosives as you can carry to destroy the Blood Plague threat once and for all.…

Depending on which leader you choose, the campaign could be easy or hard in Total War Saga: Thrones Of Britannia . Some kings start with a large swath of land, a significant retinue and a sizable army. Others begin their reign with little more than a backwater fiefdom. With how similar each faction’s units are, your starting position is the biggest difference you’ll find between them. However, you’re far from limited to the historical outcome when choosing a king. Each faction can make a play for conquering the British Isles, no matter how improbable that might be.…

WHEN KONAMI RECENTLY announced that it would begin focusing on the lucrative mobile market instead of traditional console games there was uproar from the videogame community, but ultimately the announcement was just Konami being Konami. After all, this was a company that started off in 1969 as a jukebox repairer and rental service. It gave that up in the late Seventies when it moved into arcade videogames, and it’s looked for good opportunities to expand its business ever since. In addition to making console games and the aforementioned mobile titles, Konami also creates the successful Yu-Gi-Oh! trading card game and runs health and physical fitness clubs across Japan, as well as pachinko and pachislot machines. It remains a dominant player in the industry, and it’s behind a number of big…

I JUST DIDN’T WANT TAKE ON A PROJECT WHERE I WOULDN’T HAVE COMPLETE CONTROL Released: 1994 Format: Mega Drive, PC, SNES Publisher: Virgin Interactive Key Staff: Louis Castle (game director), Seth Mendelsohn (lead designer), Barry Green (SNES programmer), Rob Povey (Mega Drive programming), Erik Yeo (assistant designer) PRESSURE CAN BE A FUNNY OLD THING. Few developers want to have to endure the trials that come from a corporate publisher or big-name license, but in doing so it can often lead to a greater product in the end. This pressure – as the old adage goes – ultimately leads to a diamond, and that’s certainly one way of looking at The Lion King. What is widely considered to be one of the best platformers of the 16-bit generation, it has since…

RIDICULOUS BOSS BATTLES Resident Evil games have always had larger-than-life boss battles thanks to the various viruses unleashed by Umbrella. But with that particular avenue closed for Capcom, it had to rely on over-the-top QTE-driven scenarios, ridiculous creatures and a whole host of mind-boggling battles. MICRO-MANAGEMENT Resident Evil 4 might have ditched most of the retro stylings of the series in this instalment, but it wasn’t about to get rid of its most popular frustration. The game could only be saved at typewriters that were littered across the world without explanation, and item management still had you re-organising suitcases. STUPID PUZZLES There is no way out of this room. But oh! Look, what’s this we see?! Well now, that’s a platinum sword mounted on a gold plaque, and that there…

SPLATOON 2 It may have launched last year, but Splatoon 2 continues to be Nintendo’s best online multiplayer game. The developer’s continued support has been excellent to see, while the wonderful community that has built up around the game has only ensured that the fun never seems to subside. If you’re subscribing to Switch Online, you need to be playing Splatoon 2. SUPER SMASH BROS. Everybody knows that Super Smash Bros is only as good as the people you’re playing it with. That’s why getting yourself a subscription to Switch Online is going to be mandatory come the launch of Super Smash later this year. Details on the ground are light right now, but if history has proven anything it’s that this will be yet another epic instalment to the…

Honestly, the first time we saw Battlefield V in action (before we had any concrete information) we were immediately lulled into believing that we might indeed be seeing the return of Battlefield Bad Company. It wasn’t only the buoyant tone that the trailer struck, but the destruction. The sweet, beautiful destruction. Battlefield V will feature highly destructible environments, with weapons and vehicles able to literally tear them apart dynamically. It looks incredible. “We’ve completely revamped the destruction system,” Battlefield V design director Daniel Berlin explains. “Meaning that it’s actual parts of the building that you see collapse, crack and then actually fall apart. It’s much more dynamic, and it’s different every time.” This is because the destruction engine is entirely physics based, with DICE sinking considerable effort into getting rid…

What would hell be without its own form of social media? “This is one of those occasions where we liked the idea before we even knew how we were going to do or use it,” laughs Krankel of the decision to have the demons of hell subtweeting you every step of the way. “The way it works now is that Bicker [that’s the name of Hell’s social network] is intended to be pretty passive for the player. It allows them to see an inner monologue of what’s happening for the other NPCs on screen without having to delve completely into a new dialogue tree with them.” “On a small level, let’s say you’re playing beer pong and you totally screw up a shot, a couple tweets might show up in…

MEN OF WAR 2009, PC The sequel to the equally-good Soldiers: Heroes of World War II, Men of War is a confident, tough real-time tactics title that errs slightly too far towards the micromanagement end of things. Still, it’s one of the best emergent storytelling games out there. COSSACKS: EUROPEAN WARS 2001, PC If you can stave off famine and keep your troops provided for, Cossacks allows players to build an army of pretty much unlimited size. That’s something everyone wanted from their RTS titles at the turn of the century. Fortunately Cossacks is also really well made, and good fun, too. MAGRUNNER: DARK PULSE 2013, PC/PS3/X360 It’s not all wargames from Ukraine, as Magrunner proves. This title from Frogwares is a first-person puzzle title that combines sci-fi with Lovecraftian…

INDEPENDENT SPIRIT Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes probably isn’t going to be the game that you think it is. The same can largely be said of just about anything that has carried a Goichi Suda credit over the last 25 years, but it’s especially true here as Grasshopper Manufacture embraces the spirit of independent development. “The important thing for us, when considering the scope of Travis Strikes Again, was the team size. We started with only four people and now we are up to 15. It is indie-sized in both the team and the budget as well,” Suda tells us. “These limits have sort of determined the style of the game that we are creating. We decided to break away from tradition and go after something new.” Even though…

15 MINS The initial panic and tension of the opening scene is probably still lingering, but Detroit settles into its more languid early pace pretty quickly after that. 6 HOURS You should be more than halfway through the game at this point, and have firmly established the kind of characters Markus, Kara and Connor are. 4 DARK NIGHT Having completed the game some time ago, you can now dip back into key scenes or give the whole game another play through to find those loose threads.…

Endgame saves can be imported to Deadfire , bringing with it all the major choices made through the original. If you didn’t finish the first game (or just don’t want to use your old save) you’re also catered for, with a robust ‘player history’ option allowing individual choices to be selected before starting a new game. So it’s impossible to get into Deadfire without having played the first? No, the game goes out of its way to welcome in newbies – as well as definable (or preset) histories, jargon is explained when hovered over with the cursor, so with a bit of effort you’ll never be lost. Those of us averse to reading, however, will be utterly adrift.…

One of the most impressive things about Conan Exiles is its world. Not only truly massive it's also wonderfully varied. You’ll start out in the desert and spend many hours here before seeing anything else; however, waiting for you deeper in the game are much less arid climates. There are jungles and rolling highlands, forests too and each of those has a whole set of its own monsters. Much farther in you might reach the frozen wasteland at the top of the map with mammoths and all sorts of classic wintry goodness. Survive that and you’ll make it to a volcanic hellhole that really is only for the absolute survival game masochists.…

How did your team get to work on the project? We drove down to Manchester for a meeting with David Ward, and a short time later we got a call asking us if we could port Yie Ar to ZX Spectrum, Amstrad and C64. Of course we said yes. Did you face any problems? As production got underway the Amstrad and Speccy versions progressed really well, but the C64 was struggling due to the size of the graphics and the programmer’s inability to get a decent multiplexer working. Then all the games had problems with memory, as we really couldn’t fit everything in. My Assembly coding had improved well enough to get involved, so I started working on compression-based sprite systems, which could decode on the fly, a form of…

“Fantastic! The colours and graphics are incredibly colourful and clean. The control is absolutely flawless, which makes the game so much fun to play. The Lion King is challenging enough for the older gamer and still fun for the kiddie in you” Electronic Gaming Monthly, 1994 “Oh, boy, did we want to give this a perfect score – but we just couldn’t. Despite some of the best sound and graphics we’ve seen this year and lots of challenge, Lion King’s game play just isn’t on a par in pace and consistency with past classics like Aladdin and Jungle Book.” GamePro, 1994…

ZELDA ESSENTIALS Available in a variety of colours and t-shirt styles, from slim fit to long sleeve and ‘relaxed scoop’, we really like this homage to the Zelda series and its wide array of tools and toys. Truly these are your dungeon-exploring essentials. www.designbyhumans.com ROLLING Part of an excellent range of new Insert Coin Katamari tees you can find now, this little number really tells you the whole story as the prince looks to roll up some small items and work his way up to what looks like a postbox. Nice. www.insertcoinclothing.com CUPHEAD YOU DIED T-SHIRT An excellent pick for a Cuphead design, the most-seen image of anyone’s experience playing the game is your ghost floating away as you lose your last life. It’s all the more punishing when it…

The most curious and influential NPC of the game is going to be the faerie, Mr Fairweather. He is the one who will give you the Kynseed, beginning your journey through generations in the game. He is also the one who will give you skills and items, but at the cost of years of your life. He is the malevolent, but not entirely unhelpful force working behind the curtain of the game and he’s massively influenced by classic British folklore as well as some more recent stories. “From growing up where I used to live in North Yorkshire, the whole place was steeped in folklore,” design director Charlie Edwards tells us as we explore the origins of Mr Fairweather. “There’s druidic stones everywhere, and you get ghost stories and pubs…

Why was it so important for DICE to put such a strong emphasis on team and squad play? DANIEL BERLIN, DESIGN DIRECTOR: At DICE, we play Battlefield a lot. We have our own setups, we have our own matches, and people stay late in the evenings to play their own game. We are fans of the game ourselves. Improved squad play is something that we talk about so much internally, so this time around we thought we should make it true – for real this time. The good thing about this is that it rings true with the community as well. We listen to the community so much, and so it’s something that we feel we want to infuse the game with even more. It seems to be something that…

Drinking your way out of hell isn’t going to be easy. Eternal beings have a high tolerance for alcohol and have, subsequently, developed their own array of hellish cocktails that help take the edge off after a long day of enacting torture. For humans, such as Lola and Milo, there’s going to be a little bit of a readjustment period. “There will be drinks that just give you basic liquid courage and those that make you more boisterous and out there than you might have been otherwise. Then there are more specific drinks…” Krankel teases. “There’s also a category of very specific off-the-menu drinks that do crazy stuff. You might drink a shot that makes you vomit your conscience up as a little character; that character runs away, crawls up…

METRO 2033 2010, PC/X360 Taking place mostly underground, Metro 2033 began the tale of the survivors of nuclear war making their way through the new ‘normal’ of life in Moscow’s network of underground railway tunnels. It’s bleak, terrifying, depressing, and something of a diamond in the rough. Those tunnels are a mite too samey after a while, mind. METRO: LAST LIGHT 2013, PC/X360/PS3 A step forward in all the right ways for the series, Last Light saw the Metro series moving towards a more open, explorative style of play, while still very much maintaining a linear approach. The sequel also saw 4A games move slightly away from the hardcore survival game approach of the original, though, of course, it was still prevalent. METRO 2033/LAST LIGHT REDUX 2014, PC/PS4/XBO There are…

Given that this is a Grasshopper game, you just know that Travis Strikes Again is going to feature pretty awesome music to compliment the wild action. This time around, the studio is putting the talents of a DJ duo to work. It’s something Suda is hugely excited about, particularly as Travis Strikes Again is going to feature such a wide variety of worlds and gameplay styles. “Sometimes we let the composers do just about whatever they want, sometimes we sit down with them and have detailed meetings. For this game we are working with DJ Abo and DJ 1-2,” Suda tells us. “They both love games and they are young creators. I think that this is a really fresh combination and I hope that it creates a lot of energy…

While we would certainly recommend playing Detroit in long, clean chunks, we also have to tell you to drop out back into the main menu from time to time. You see, the android there, who at first appears to be a host to the experience, turns out to have a lot more to say and many more interactions to offer the deeper you get into the story. It’s a small touch, but one we liked quite a lot. There are also a series of questions that you will be asked, and you will be shown percentages of what other Detroit players answered. These questions will have to do with themes touched upon in the game, such as the role of technology in…

We tend not to get too caught up in the concept of the uncanny valley, because it has always struck us as a little unfair to expect videogames to master utter realism when they are simultaneously delivering interactive entertainment that is so much more demanding than a still image or fixed camera experience. That said, Quantic Dream likes to work on the very edge of the precipice, striving for greater realism with each passing game. A new engine with Detroit brings fantastic new lighting, more camera control, great textures and less rubbery faces. But it’s the movement that kept catching us as we played. It just feels a little too stiff at times, lacking the fluidity and naturalism of something like an Uncharted or Assassin’s Creed.…

It’s easy to focus on the mechs and all the cool guns you can attach to them, but the importance of the people you hire to pilot them shouldn’t be neglected. As you level up your pilots, their improved stats will help you get more out of your mechs. They also gain active and passive special abilities that can be of crucial importance in battle. Sensor Lock, for example, is great to use at the beginning of a turn to remove ‘evasion’ from an enemy mech and make it easier to hit for the rest of your team. Breaching Shot, on the other hand, can take a mech that thinks it’s safe by surprise, ignoring the ‘cover’ and ‘guarded’ statuses when you attack with a single weapon.…

How did you come to work on Combat School ? I’d been doing some freelance projects for Ocean Software for the French home computer range by Thompson (M05, T07-70, T09) but had originally approached Gary Bracey as an Amstrad CPC programmer. He offered me the CS gig, but wanted me to work in the office in Manchester as a contractor still. I agreed readily as the bedroom-coder thing was getting a little old. So – I moved to Manchester and spent the next three months living in a B&B in Chorlton-cum-Hardy and working at 6 Central Street squeezed between Mike Lamb and Ronny Fowles. Did you have access to the original source code? No – we had an arcade machine from which a video was captured and…

BACKGROUNDS When it came to in-game backgrounds, there was quite a good bit of distinction between the two versions. The stronger colour contrast of the Mega Drive (right) meant that there was a better clarity between the darkest parts and the colours were a little brighter, but often it was too dark to make out the details of some stages. The SNES (left) had more pixels in its backgrounds, however, which meant that certain levels had much greater detail and were softer in appearance as a result. SPRITES Whether it was the animation or the detail of the game’s characters, this is an area where the two were practically the same – likely a result of Disney’s demanding expectations and Westwood’s determination and knowledge. The more muted tones of the…

■ Resident Evil 4 was supposed to be one of three GameCube exclusive Resident Evil titles, joining a remake of the original and the prequel Resident Evil: Zero. It would later be ported to just about every console on the planet. ■ This is the final Resident Evil game to feature the input and creative overview of series creator Shinji Mikami. The creative director departed the company and linked up with his former colleagues Atsushi Inaba and Hideki Kamiya at Clover Studios, going on to develop the legendary God Hand.…

LOGITECH PRO GAMING HEADSET MANUFACTURER: LOGITECH PRICE: £84.99 Logitech’s Pro series has just had another member of the family added, with this excellent new headset now sitting alongside its mouse and keyboard offering. So far these Pro devices, built with input from esports professionals, have been sleek, simple and highly compact designs, and this gaming headset is no different in this regard. First of all, if you know anything about our taste in headphones then you’ll have guessed that we love the simplicity and understated nature of these. No flashy lights and a clean matte black finish make them nicely understated. All of the effort in the design, therefore, has been pushed into build quality and comfort, both of which score highly for us. The plastic frame is solid, the…