EdgeDecember 2016的目錄

Looking back, we should have been paying closer attention. When Sony announced PlayStation 4, it explained that it was building its console by taking cues from PC architecture. And what do you do with a PC after a couple of years? You upgrade it. The plan for PS4 Pro was right there at the beginning. In this issue we visit New York to see Sony’s new hardware in action (p8) – and return eyeing the biggest 4K TVs our wallets can bear. Microsoft’s Xbox One S has been available since August, and it, too, should’ve been visible from a mile or so out. Sony and Microsoft are watching consumers migrate to 4K displays, and neither company wants you to turn away from your console in order to have Ultra HD…

Multibowl’s madcap tour through hundreds of vintage games feels like something that should have existed a long time ago. Setting two players the task of facing off during ten bouts of classic gaming action, it’s a nostalgic journey through the history of simultaneous multiplayer gaming and littered with novel twists. In the Midway classic Rampage, the goal is to avoid touching the floor instead of causing chaos. Cave’s DoDonPachi appears as a bullet-dodging challenge, with the players’ guns disabled. The action isn’t limited to the arcade – it takes place across an array of vintage console and computer formats. Once a challenge is won and points awarded, it’s onto the next, and the next after that. Multibowl, however, is no compilation. It is consciously a collage; comprised of ‘found’ media…

 “It has nothing to do with me. Metal Gear is espionage with political fiction. There’s no reason that zombies would show up. This is how I see it.” Hideo Kojima – he of the photosynthetic sniper girl, boss made of bees and suicidal sentient mech – is all about realism, you know “It was consistent with Dracula’s set of abilities in the literature. Dracula has always been able to transform into a creature of the night. So we did it. Clearly, we were wrong.” Lords Of Shadow 2 creative director Enric Alvarez on those awful rat-stealth bits “There are a lot of caveats they’re giving customers right now around 4K… There are a lot of asterisks in their marketing. I know that 4.2 teraflops is not enough to do true 4K.”…

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 Destination: future Through the decades, I’ve been privileged enough to see a lot of improvements in the field of gaming. I’ve seen graphics improve markedly; sound is now as good as you could possibly want it to be; storage has increased to the point where it’s practically not an issue; and controllers don’t fall apart in your hands every second week like they used to. I mean, there have been a lot of changes, and quite a few big leaps since the day I first savagely tore apart the Christmas wrapping to reveal the brandnew Atari 2600 which kept my eyes…

Great artists steal, as Pablo Picasso put it, in what we’re just going to go ahead and assume was a forecast about the state of videogames 40 years after his death. But while interactive entertainment has forever drawn inspiration from other forms of media, it has also been equally fascinated by itself. Years ago, lesser developers would hitch themselves to the latest bandwagon – side-scrolling shooters, fighting games, platformers – in the hope of making a quick buck. There’s still plenty of that around, admittedly, but these days the big boys are in on it too. Take, for example, Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare (p42), the latest entry in a series that once looked down upon its host genre from its throne upon a huge pile of cash. COD led…

Developer/publisher Bearhands Games Format PS4, Xbox One Origin Germany Release 2017 We’re crouched behind a large seated man in a white suit, trying to move some bottles on a perilously rattly dumbwaiter so that we can get at the guy’s fancy gold watch. The risky pickpocketing attempt plays out as a series of minichallenges as we carefully guide protagonist Amy’s hand through the narrow path outlined by the game’s UI, align a circle while squeezing the triggers to shrink it onto a dot and trace a pair of arcing lines with both sticks simultaneously. A thumping heartbeat and brooding ambient soundtrack up the tension, before Amy’s shaky breathing concludes with an exhalation of relief as we successfully unclip the timepiece. Now all we have to do is get back out…

Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the man behind Sega Rally, Space Channel 5 and Lumines, took a step back from game creation in 2012 in order to focus on academic work and his band Genki Rockets. But the prospect of working in VR has reinvigorated his passion for making games, and Rez Infinite is the first result of his re-engagement with the medium in which he’s enjoyed a formidable run of successes. We thought you were done with games – what’s the story behind your decision to come back? With every new technology that became available I would challenge myself to take the thoughts, visions and concepts that were in my head and execute them in game form. But once we shipped Child Of Eden, I felt like trying to squeeze all these…

Just over three-and-a-half years ago, Mark Taylor was working as an IT analyst, fixing and building servers for a large multinational company. Since then, he’s quit his day job, founded StellarVR, and is now spending his days putting the finishing touches to Korix, his PSVR-based multiplayer tower defence and realtime strategy game. You’ve had quite a journey. How did you became a PSVR developer? It all started about six months before [Oculus Rift] DK2 came out. I was just thinking, ‘This is going to be a game-changer’. I was a gamer in my spare time, and my mind just exploded thinking about everything you could do with it. And then I just thought, ‘How hard can it be?’ [Laughs] I’d recently fixed the plumbing in my house because I was…

Developer Variable State Publisher 505 Games Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now One of the most quietly devastating moments involves a character simply shaking their head sadly FLOWER WALK WITH ME While Virginia isn’t the kind of game to which Achievements and Trophies seem particularly well suited, Variable State has adopted a playful approach to the optional accomplishments, with enigmatic descriptions to be deciphered. The presence of flowers in some scenes at first appears to be a jarring addition – collectibles in a game such as this? – but it steadily becomes one of the many recurring motifs, fitting neatly alongside the northern cardinal, the buffalo, the broken key and Halperin’s treasured locket. It’s a rare opportunity to take pause, and the act itself is peculiarly satisfying…

Developer Armature Studio, Comcept Publisher Microsoft Studios Format PC, Xbox One (tested) Release Out now The hulking Duncan is your archetypal brute, but as with the others there’s real personality in his movement Spoiler alert: someone at either Armature Studio or Comcept enjoyed The Wind Waker’s Triforce hunt. That’s the only excuse we can muster for possibly the most eye-rollingly brazen bit of endgame padding we’ve seen since. We don’t normally give out pointers in how to play a game, but it’s safe to say you’ll enjoy ReCore a good deal more if you spend some time hunting down Prismatic Cores (the game’s most crucial collectible) between critical story missions. The closing stretch is challenging enough as it is. Two-minute loading times aren’t how we’d have chosen to make players…

Developer Intelligent Systems Publisher Nintendo Format Wii U Release Out now STRANGER THINGS A mostly welcome holdover from Sticker Star is the use of Things – giant photorealistic 3D objects that can be instantly wrung out into card form to be used in puzzles and battles. There are fewer of them here, but their elaborate animations are a hoot. A fire extinguisher whisks your opponent to the top of a burning building where they’re liberally sprayed with CO2, while a piggybank launches into an extended breakdancing routine before exploding in a shower of coins. Since Nintendo picked AlphaDream’s Mario & Luigi series to continue its fine tradition of irreverent RPGs with timing-based combat, Paper Mario has evolved into something altogether more quixotic – a decision that hasn’t gone down well…

Jim Ryan is laughing. We’re in New York, where Sony has just unveiled its PS4 Pro hardware, and PlayStation’s global head of marketing and sales has been asked about Microsoft man Aaron Greenberg’s claim that we’ll have to wait for Project Scorpio for the arrival of “true 4K gaming”. “I’m not going to get into that nonsense,” Ryan says, still smiling. “You know, you can talk technical specs, you can talk jargon, but at the end of the day we’ve announced our product with a price, with a date, and we were able to show in my opinion a very impressive range of gaming experiences on PS4 Pro. As far as I’m concerned, that’s it. End of. I’m not going to get into it with him or anybody else. Life’s…

The noise surrounding the re-emergence of virtual reality has made it difficult for developers and consumers alike to separate the opportunity, hype and challenges thrown up by the likes of Vive and PSVR. It’s here that the organisers of a new conference, Develop:VR, are aiming their expertise, with a debut event curated by the team that makes Develop in Brighton a must-attend fixture on the UK game industry calendar. Taking place on November 24 at The Old Truman Brewery in East London, the dedicated VR conference aims to bring some clarity to a scene that is only becoming increasingly crowded. Alongside an expo element, and plenty of opportunities for attendees to exchange business cards, the one-day conference’s most distinct feature is perhaps the effort being made to ensure that Develop:VR…

JUSTIN TIME An evolution of Roiland’s subversive animation The Real Animated Adventures Of Doc And Mharti, Rick And Morty distances itself a little further from its predecessor’s unapologetic Back To The Future parody. The show, co-created by Dan Harmon and commissioned by Adult Swim, was met with ebullient critical acclaim and has now reached its third series. Roiland provides the voices for both lead characters, but has also acted in other series including Gravity Falls, Adventure Time and The Sarah Silverman Program. Along with his TV work, Roiland has also voiced characters for various games, including Dota 2, Job Simulator Co-creator of Rick And Morty Justin Roiland can reel off a long list of animation and acting credits – including, spectacularly, guest spots for both in an episode of The…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar A great game should be one where the player at the beginning doesn’t know what she can or should do An interesting feature of games is that, given any particular example, you can construct a metagame around it, and that metagame might even be more fun than playing the game as the designers intended. Sometimes this takes the simple form of setting oneself ridiculous challenges – beating a level of GoldenEye using only karate chops, say – or sometimes it involves a more sophisticated decision to play with style rather than purely for victory. You can invent a drinking metagame around pretty much any aspect of another game. Or you can make a game out of trying to figure out how to play the game at all. That’s…

Developer Cavalier Game Studios, Tequila Works Publisher Tequila Works Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin UK, Spain Release 2017 The idea for The Sexy Brutale had been bouncing around in the heads of brothers James and Charles Griffiths, plus collaborator Tom Lansdale, for a while. But the unusual, time-bending premise makes for a difficult elevator pitch, so, with experience at the likes of Mediatonic, Lionhead and EA behind them, the trio set out on their own – founding Cavalier Games and setting up shop next door to Hello Games’ old Guildford premises – and began work on a demo. “We knew that it was always going to be complicated to explain,” design director Charles tells us. “So we decided just to build it out to prove it can be turned…

With Rigs Mechanized Combat League, Guerrilla Games Cambridge is attempting to redefine the online team shooter for VR while at the same time creating a deep game into which players can comfortably pour hours of their time. Here, game director Piers Jackson and art director Tom Jones set out how PSVR has helped them to achieve that goal. How have you found working with PSVR? Piers Jackson From my perspective, the hardware has been really exciting. It’s been really refreshing after a couple of decades working in the game industry to see something quite as revolutionary as PSVR. I think there is genuine magic in VR, and I think PSVR is doing a really fantastic job of it. What do you think it is that makes PSVR feel revolutionary in…

Who doesn’t want to look into a mirror and see Batman staring back, at least for a moment? Rocksteady has taken that fantasy and built a detective story around it, repositioning players in the Dark Knight’s evocative world. Game director and co-founder of Rocksteady Sefton Hill discusses the challenges and pleasures of rebuilding a much-loved character in VR. What was your goal with Batman Arkham VR? We wanted to create something that was really VR focused, and designed for PSVR from the ground up. So a lot of traditional mechanics and systems, and really our learnings of the past however many years, have gone out of the window, and we had to relearn those skills and that craft. That gave us a really good start, and there was a great…

Format Xbox One, PC Developer Moon Studios Publisher Microsoft Studios Origin Austria Release 2015 You may already view Ori And The Blind Forest as something of an anomaly among Microsoft’s Xbox One portfolio, but you don’t know the half of it. It was 2010, and Thomas Mahler and a small team of colleagues had assembled a prototype for a game called Warsoup, a hybrid of firstperson shooter and realtime strategy game, inspired partly by Mahler’s spell at Blizzard, where he worked within the cinematics team on StarCraft II. The project attracted the attention of several publishers, but of all the interested parties, Microsoft seemed the keenest. It then offered a piece of advice you could never imagine hearing during any videogame publisher’s E3 showcase: ditch the guns. Mahler was surprised,…

Developer Playground Games Publisher Microsoft Studios Format Xbox One Release Out now It’s hard to chide a game that lets you design a race full of Volvo estate cars and christen it Dadmobile Throwdown This, surely, is going to be a big one. Australia, after all, is the sixth-largest country in the world, and so as we start out in its south-eastern corner, tooling around on a beach just off the Great Ocean Road, our minds are dizzy at the scale of it all. Up the road is a reasonably faithful recreation of the town of Byron Bay; it’s been ripped out of New South Wales and landed in Victoria, but we understand some creative liberties need to be taken. Loading the game’s map we trace the cursor up the…

“You can extrapolate various meanings from what actually happens in the end: it’s quite ambiguous” Virginia composer Lyndon Holland responded to an advert posted by Variable State co-founder Jonathan Burroughs on an indie game forum, seeking a musician to work on a narrative game influenced by Twin Peaks and The X-Files – Holland’s two favourite TV shows. We talk to the creators about the game’s unorthodox storytelling approach, and the vital role played by its soundtrack. Virginia’s credits acknowledge Brendon Chung’s Thirty Flights Of Loving as a key influence. How did that shape the direction of the game? Jonathan Burroughs We always knew we were going to do a story-led game and it had been Gone Home and Kentucky Route Zero that [co-director] Terry [Kenny] and I had been talking…

Developer Q-Games Publisher SIE Format PS4 Release Out now It doesn’t wilfully withhold information, but it takes some time to acclimatise to what you’re supposed to do CORE OF THE ORIENT Despite its Soviet propaganda aesthetic, The Tomorrow Children has a distinctly Japanese influence: it’s there in the colossal Gojira-esque monsters, but also in the way it promotes the idea that the hardest workers will earn the greatest rewards. There may even be something of the autobiographical about it. Lead designer Dylan Cuthbert did, after all, leave Britain as a teenager to work with Nintendo in Japan – might the early confusion and awkwardness of communication reflect the challenges of a second language and a new country? The striking image of a lone reflection in the window of a train…

Developer/publisher Santa Ragione Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now RADIO STAR Audible through Lella’s car radio, the game’s soundtrack, composed by Nicolò Sala, goes a long way to helping flesh out the game’s acute sense of place. Touching on prog rock, scratchy post punk, and even new wave, it’s a fine foil to the blazing countryside and dilapidated coastal towns you’ll drive through. The soundtrack might be short, with only four tracks commissioned for the game, but the songs are memorable, framing the melancholy and rebellion at the heart of it. The beauty of the road movie has always been its ability to bottle the feeling of an era. Think of Easy Rider and its sober reflection on the failure of ’60s counter-culture, or Thelma & Louise…

Illustration box-kite-curve.com You can’t show someone how a game feels. You can’t describe it, either. You simply have to get them to play it Have you ever noticed how TV adverts for videogames never feature any dialogue from the games themselves? What? Oh, of course, you don’t watch TV. Nobody does these days. But anyway, you’d think that if some vaguely famous people have wanted to pay for their divorces by doing voiceover work for the videogame industry, you’d surely want them in the ads? But you don’t, because it costs far too much. The moment their voice is broadcast on the telly or radio or, basically, anywhere outside of the game, the terms and conditions of their contract change and they can legitimately charge the Earth. Next time you…

Search hard enough and there will always be a metric by which a trade show’s organisers can demonstrate yearon-year growth. This year, the Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association (CESA), organiser of the Tokyo Game Show, pointed to a record number of companies in attendance: 614, up from 480 last year. It’s a boast, however, that doesn’t quite tell the whole story. This year there were almost a hundred fewer stands on the show floor of Chiba’s cavernous Makuhari Messe exhibition centre than in 2015. Moreover, many of those were of a far more modest size. In part, this is as much a reflection on the current state of videogame trade shows as it is of the Japanese industry proper. E3’s future has never been less certain, as more companies choose to…

TV SHOW Dara O’Briain’s Go 8 Bit www.bit.ly/dbgo8bit While Steve McNeil and Sam Pamphilon’s live videogame show was a hit on the Edinburgh circuit, its move to Dave, the UK’s TV home for semi-scripted banter, isn’t quite as successful. While the show’s creators, host Dara O’Briain and, in the Dictionary Corner role, Eurogamer alum Ellie Gibson, all know their onions, the pool of comedians willing to go on a Dave panel show who also know and love games is, it turns out, the centre of a rather small Venn diagram. Susan Calman and Ed Byrne are naturals; others less so. For years, commissioners have claimed TV and videogames don’t mix. This isn’t quite the elegant riposte we were hoping for, but as the show beds in, and producers get a…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar It’s the clunk of the cartridge in its slot, the click of the power switch, the feel of that flat, dinky controller My raving days are long behind me, but I was saddened nonetheless by the recent news about Fabric. I don’t actually have much of a personal affinity with the London club, which has lost its licence after a couple of drug deaths – I went on opening weekend, a story I tell to make myself feel less ready for the glue factory in a profession that tends to skew a little younger (OK, a lot younger) than me, but that’s about the extent of it. Instead it’s about what it represents. Chances are you’ve seen the list doing the rounds of all the clubs that have…

Developer Activision Publisher Infinity Ward Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin US Release November 4 Before they could discover new worlds, the first astronauts had to rediscover movement, adjusting to an environment in which the only meaningful prepositions are ‘towards’ and ‘away’. In transporting players to Earth’s orbit and beyond, Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare is attempting its own reinvention, but the shift is, so far, oddly lacking in drama – grounded, as ever, by the pressures of balancing the gunplay for returning players and the fawning yet selective consultation with real-life military authorities. During the campaign’s handful of zero-G sections, there’s a grappling harpoon you can use to ping between chunks of free-floating debris, an acceleration of flanking that’s exhilarating but not transformative. You’ll also board a starfighter that…

Developer SIE (Project Siren) Publisher SIE Format PS4 Origin Japan Release Nov 30 Kat’s clutch of abilities, gifted to her by a stray cat in the first game, remain intact. Chief among these is the ability to ease and tauten the Earth’s gravitational pull at will, using this to blast herself from sidewalk to tree branch, from rooftop to steeple, along tumbling airborne lines. As in the first game, manoeuvring Kat with precision as she topples through the air while carving clouds and skimming buildings takes a little practice. At times you may curse the cat for not simply giving her the more straightforward ability to fly. But the gravity shtick clicks into a more logical place when you fight your first enemyThe unceremonious exit of Hekseville’s nefarious, power-hungry mayor…

Crytek has already made its presence known in the VR space with the ambitious, if flawed, The Climb. Now the studio is taking on PSVR with firstperson adventure Robinson: The Journey. Executive producer Elijah Freeman talks us through Crytek’s unique vision for VR, and how the company is maintaining its reputation for astonishing visuals. Many developers working in VR warn against displaying too much detail, but both The Climb and Robinson revel in it. What’s your view on that? We want our environments to tell part of the story. And graphic fidelity is one of our hallmarks. If you talk to anyone about a Crytek game they’ll say, “Oh, it’s going to look beautiful”. But at the same time, when you’re talking about a VR game, that’s not exactly an easy task…

CV Charlie Brooker’s affection for games dates back to the 8bit era, but he began working with them closely during his time on PC Zone magazine, where he reviewed countless titles and also produced the Cybertwats comic strip. He went on to create the celebrated satirical website TVGoHome, as well as writing a TV column for The Guardian. He’s also written for TV extensively, contributing to or creating shows including The 11 O’Clock Show, Brass Eye, Nathan Barley, Dead Set and, of course, Black Mirror. Brooker has also put games on TV with Gameswipe and How Videogames Changed The World. The technologically focused, darkly comic TV series Black Mirror has established itself as the modern equivalent of creepy classics such as Tales Of The Unexpected, the kind of show that…

Founded 2011 Employees 60 Key staff Romain de Waubert de Genlis (co‑founder and creative director), Mathieu Girard (co-founder and production director), Max von Knorring (marketing and communications director), Corinne Billon (art director), Jeff Spock (narrative director) URL www.amplitude-studios.com Selected softography Endless Space, Endless Legend, Dungeon Of The Endless Current projects Endless Space 2 The story of Amplitude could be a story from the studio’s Endless universe, or any 4X game for that matter. The Parisian team saw an opportunity to impose itself between the established old guard of Civilization and the fledgling indie 4X developers, though the latter camp was a benign presence offering little in the way of real challenge to Sid Meier’s powerhouse. Enter Amplitude in 2011, led by former Ubisoft producers who, whip-smart and ruthless, exploited their…

It’s the work of a studio that understands that the genre in which it plies its trade has become too serious They will tell you Forza Horizon 3 is the best arcade racer of its generation. And they’ll be right, to a point: with its bright blue skies, winding roads and cheery presentation, Forza Horizon 3 is the closest facsimile of the classic arcade racer that either Xbox One or PS4 have yielded to date. Yet this is also a game where you can spend two hours nudging sliders this way and that to optimise the performance of one of hundreds of perfectly recreated licensed vehicles. Stick all the assists at the maximum and, sure, you won’t spin out if you take a corner too quickly. But this makes Forza…

Developer Bungie Publisher Activision Format PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now “Déjà vu,” he says during Sepiks Perfected – summing up, with inadvertent elegance, the entire Destiny experience ARCHON TAKE THIS Deep in a corner of the Plaguelands is the Archon’s Forge, an enclosed arena in which you can summon encounters and boss battles, similar to The Taken King’s Court Of Oryx. But what should be an evolution of the Court’s better ideas instead feels like a step back. Matchmaking is sketchy, loot drop rates are miserly, and the items required to kick off a fight are hard to come by and even harder to hold, since you’re limited to one per character. Crazily, if you don’t jump down from the holding room into the arena within a few…

Developer/publisher Blizzard Format PC Release Out now For the first time in years, it’s easy to meet up with other players, drawn together by enticing new stories ISLE BE BACK Legion takes place across a new landmass, The Broken Isles. It’s split up into five new zones to explore, four of which can be visited in any order thanks to the new level-syncing system. There’s also a new starting zone for players who pick the Demon Hunter, which sets up the hero’s tragic narrative suitably before throwing them into Dalaran, the main city hub from where you’ll set out. Existing areas of Azeroth don’t go entirely untouched: as you travel around these older locations, bespoke invasion scenarios can occur, drawing players together to take on incoming hordes of enemies and…