Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2018 i Edge

Videogames are serious business these days, made by hundreds-strong teams to budgets well into the tens of millions. At the other end of the scale, indies remortgage their homes in order to make a dream a reality. In an era where weapon-balance changes, distasteful monetisation models, or slightly controversial opinions are seen in some corners as an excuse to wheel out the death threats, it’s often hard to remember what got you into videogames in the first place. Games are play – and play is silly. There’s certainly plenty of that about this issue. We’ve lost a lot of sleep of late to Monster Hunter: World, a game which clearly understands it should not take itself too seriously. Yes, sure, there’s a plot about the New World being under threat…

Conventional wisdom has it that, if you want to stand out in a crowded field, you need to specialise. That’s certainly proven true in the Wild Wests of YouTube and Twitch, where passionate players of games can turn their skills into a career. Yet with both platforms still in their relative infancy, any consensus on how to find success on them runs the risk of being proven wrong. What if, for instance, the game on which you’ve built a business and a living goes horribly awry? That’s a problem that Stefan ‘Datto’ Jonke is currently coming to terms with. Across YouTube and Twitch, Jonke spent the first three years of Destiny’s life establishing himself as one of the game’s deepest community thinkers. While others cut flashy thumbskill montages or rounded…

Game The House Of The Dead: Scarlet Dawn Manufacturer Sega The ground floor of a Japanese game centre may traditionally be given over to UFO Catcher games, but every so often a game comes along that’s as sure a crowd-puller as any tantalising pile of out-ofreach plushies. The House Of The Dead is one such game, a groundfloor showpiece that’s finally returning to arcades after a recent round of location tests in Tokyo. Remarkably, it’s the first House Of The Dead game built for the arcade in 13 years; heck, it’s been nine years since the series’ last outing, the Wii Remote-powered Overkill. Things have moved on a lot since then, of course. Obviously, there are more zombies now. While the action starts out gently enough you’re soon facing off…

Song to the Cynic It seems that the next franchise that Nintendo is bringing to smartphones is Mario Kart, one of the greatest multiplayer racing games of all time. I don’t blame Nintendo for making the transition to mobile phone gaming; I’m sure it will be financially rewarding for them, and allow an untapped market to realise the brilliance of all-things Nintendo. However I won’t be downloading the Mario Kart app when it’s released, because I’ve just never really been a mobile phone gamer. Videogames have been a part of my life since the ZX Spectrum days, but it just doesn’t appeal to me to play a videogame on my phone. Even beloved Nintendo can’t sway my opinion on that, unless they can provide a truly original slant on an…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar When we launched Typhoon we were self-funding everything, but within a few months we were fortunate enough to partner with a big publisher, which injected enough money to allow us to grow a small, functioning team and focus solely on making our first prototype. Towards the end of last year we’d put together a solid two hours of our game, which included a fully functioning core loop, and a sample platter of encounters, creatures and mechanics. And while we were excited and satisfied with the progress we were making, we still had a laundry list of issues. Chiefly, we weren’t happy with our visual direction, and we weren’t hitting all of our design goals, but we had a robust chunk of our game working and you could engage…

Developer/publisher 7th Beat Games Format Android, iOS, PC, Switch Origin Malaysia, Peru Release 2018 Our demo of Rhythm Doctor appears to be bugged. On our second boss fight, the game window is suddenly minimised; we’re unable to switch back to a fullscreen view. It’s annoying, sure – but these things happen in early game builds, we suppose. And then, the window starts to move to the music. If you thought Rhythm Heaven games were unpredictable, with their flipper-rolling seals and rhythmic sumi-e painting, then a few choice levels of Rhythm Doctor might give you palpitations. Inspired by Nintendo’s aforementioned series, Rhythm Doctor casts you as a remoteworking cyber-surgeon in a surreal hospital drama. Treating patients is as simple as hitting a single button on the seventh beat – of their…

All The Dead Bones is game about suffering as seen through the eyes of other people, a memoir of growing up with a severe spinal deformity that keeps its audience at a pointed remove. Written mostly in the secondperson, the game forces the player to occupy a range of uncomfortable perspectives with regard to its writer and designer, Owl Cave CEO Olivia White: a stranger hurling abuse in a park, a catastrophically self-satisfied surgeon, a distracted shopper, a surgical rod. “Basically, I didn’t want players to play as me,” White tells us. “My experiences were my own – and all the incidents in All The Dead Bones happened – and since part of the plot revolves around my feelings of alienation, I didn’t want to give people the impression that…

They say familiarity breeds contempt, but in videogames, it often yields sympathy. To love a series of games is to look past its little flaws; over time, such quirks become part of the charm of one of your favourite games. And when, eventually, a kink is smoothed out, it feels like a giant leap forward. But only in its own context. Monster Hunter: World (p104) arrives in, series die-hards will tell you, its most accessible form to date. That’s meant as a compliment, though beginners may see it differently. Yes, this most languid, grindy and impenetrable of action RPGs has never been less languid, grindy or impenetrable. Yet it is still all those things to an extent, and without the context of previous games, newcomers will still have to put…

Developer Yakuza Studio Publisher Sega Format PS4 Release April 17 Yakuza 6’s narrative builds to one of the finest climaxes in the series – perhaps, in fact, the best of the lot They have a saying down in Okinawa, the sleepy southernmost prefecture of Japan where, back in Yakuza 3, Kazuma Kiryu ran an orphanage for a spell. ‘Hara hachi bu’ is an old Confucian teaching that roughly translates as ‘eat until you’re 80 per cent full’. Kiryu may not spend much time at Sunshine Orphanage in Yakuza 6 – it quickly becomes apparent that he’s needed elsewhere – but he certainly has need of that lesson on his latest, and final, journey. The series’ timeworn health system has finally been overhauled, with the culinary wares on offer at local…

Developer Zoink Games Publisher Electronic Arts Format PC, PS4 (tested), Switch, Xbox One Release Out now It’s a game that celebrates the idea of two disparate beings finding a shared language to overcome their problems When Fe’s credits roll, learning that its game director was also its art director hardly comes as a surprise. That’s not to suggest it lacks substance, but it’s a game that relies on the goodwill it frequently banks with its looks to forgive some of its exasperating faults. And it really is beautiful: pulsing light juxtaposed with inky shadows in a delightfully angular, otherworldly forest setting that elicits wonder and trepidation. If there’s a whiff of familiarity about the way it looks and feels, that’s because it’s been gazumped slightly by Ubisoft Reflections’ Ode. That…

Dave White is a Liverpudlian artist who has been hailed as “the UK’s Andy Warhol”. A key player in the ‘sneaker art’ movement of the early 2000s, his work has led to several collaborations with Nike, including the release of his own version of the classic Air Max 95. Currently based in Dorset, his rural environs have sparked a recent professional interest in wildlife – but as a visit to his studio reveals, there’s still plenty of time for games out in the sticks. What’s your earliest gaming memory? I was seven years old, in Southport, where there was a skatepark that I would go to every day in the summer holidays. This guy rolled up with a big box on wheels, unwrapped it, all these crazy alien graphics on…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar Asign of the conservative nature of the videogame industry is that the most exciting announcement in ages was that of Nintendo Labo. Going back to its roots as a manufacturer of playing cards, Nintendo unveiled a set of cardboard-andstring peripheral kits for the Switch that turn the console into a tiny honky-tonk piano, an extendable fishing rod, a remote-controlled car, and even a kind of exoskeleton for controlling an in-game giant robot. There is more fun new thinking here, evidently, than in scores of brown-and-green thirdperson climbing-and-face-shooting simulators. Shares in Nintendo soared by $1.4 billion on the announcement. Some commentators looked askance at the prices of the kits (£60 to £70), and wondered exactly how long a cardboard peripheral would last in the hands of an enthusiastic child…

Developers love solving two problems with a single idea, and so do we. This is a curious month for Hype: on one hand we have teams of veteran developers going back to ideas they explored in the formative years of their careers. On the other, young, small teams are exploring the future shape of music games. Two very different groups with wildly varying philosophies on the future of interactive entertainment – and both summed up by a single headline. Magic. Underworld Ascendant (p36) sees members of the team behind genredefining 1992 RPG Underworld: The Stygian Abyss reunite to see what modern processing power, and 25 years of progress in game design, can do for an idea that proved the genesis for the immersive sim. Likewise, Two Point Hospital (p46) sees…

Developer/publisher Dumb And Fat Format PC, Switch Origin Canada Release 2018 When you want a player to feel like a big deal in a videogame, giving them a big sword to wave at their problems is usually a good call. In Wandersong, however, the first weapon our genderless hero finds is casually tossed aside, a ring made up of eight coloured sections appearing instead. Moving our cursor around it produces a merry series of musical notes, and our surroundings immediately begin to bob along to our song. It’s no blade, we suppose, but we suddenly feel pretty powerful nonetheless. It wouldn’t make much sense to give a bard an instrument of death as opposed to, well, an actual instrument. The idea to cast a musician as the hero came from…

The blockchain is boring. Yes, it’s the tech industry’s latest obsession, a buzzword whose mere mention will send investors the globe over scurrying for their wallets. (A struggling drinks company saw its stock price almost triple after it changed its name from Long Island Iced Tea to Long Blockchain). But it’s ultimately about databases on the internet, a deeply technical infrastructure which only engineers truly understand. Those that do get it will tell you that it’s incredibly powerful. The blockchain is a complete revision of how databases work – and, since databases drive almost everything, it has the promise of changing how the world works in many ways. The result is that blockchain is both difficult to understand, and feels a little dangerous. It’s behind the rise of cryptocurrencies such…

Having no game-over state is quite unusual… Yeah. One of the old, old games that was an inspiration for me in this regard is the original Wing Commander. That had a whole separate storyline – essentially a ‘losing’ campaign – if you failed your mission objectives but didn’t actually die. It blew me away at the time; I was amazed that much effort went into it. And they never did it again with a Wing Commander game. I always had a sneaking suspicion as to why, and having now gone through a similar experience, I understand more viscerally. (laughs) It’s not something that most players will see, but for the ones that do, it results in a more memorable and impactful experience. We try to load our games with as…

Developer/publisher Capcom Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now (PS4, Xbox One), Autumn (PC) Its technical virtuosity comes secondary to the inventive brilliance of its creature designs Okay, the Scoutflies can stay. Tracking a beast in Monster Hunter used to mean scouring a cluster of small, self-contained zones, linked together via narrow paths – and brief loads – before stumbling across your target and immediately tagging it with a paintball, lest it disappear from view. The paint, as seasoned hunters will attest, would naturally wear off over time, forcing you to apply a fresh coat during longer fights. Now, instead, we have a cloud of luminous insects that flits between objects of interest, not so much drawing your attention as insisting on it. Eventually, they’ll hover near a…

Developer Team Ninja Publisher Square Enix Format PS4 Release Out now You’ll eventually uncover a singular, sophisticated addition to the genre underneath all the clutter Team Ninja’s latest is a mechanically excellent 3v3 multiplayer arena fighting game, and nobody is playing it. We can’t blame them: Dissidia Final Fantasy NT’s core is a spirited take on the genre, mantled in a mess of inadequate base content, poor presentation and technical issues. Yes, you can enjoy its lavish fan-service battles on a superficial level, but getting the most from Dissidia NT requires a significant time investment. Finding ways to meaningfully invest time in becoming a consistently great player is difficult: instead, we spend plenty of it pondering where it all went wrong as we wait, twiddling our thumbs, to be matchmade,…

Dan Salvato is the creator of Doki Doki Literature Club. The innocuousseeming, free-to-play visual novel took the internet by storm last year with its devious manipulation of anime clichés and players alike. Salvato, previously best known among the speedrunning community, has now been thrust into a mainstream spotlight. Here, we discuss DDLC’s success, and how his niche interests have shaped his outlook, and output, as a game developer. How did you get into speedrunning? In college. I think speedrunning comes from a desire to get the absolute most out of a game that you love, that you’ve probably already beaten a thousand times. I saw a video on Ebaumsworld of someone beating Super Mario Brothers 3 in 11 minutes, and all these Super Mario 64 speedruns. And I got involved…

WEBSITE The Videogame Soda Machine Project bit.ly/vgsoda Jess Morrissette must be thirsty. The Political Science professor and amateur game developer has taken it upon himself to document every known case of a soda machine appearing in a videogame. There are close to 1,700 examples on his regularly updated blog, from the infamous Nuka-Cola outfits native to the Fallout series (including vending machine assets from the cancelled Van Buren project) to drink distributors to the less obvious Outlast and Virtual Boy game Nester’s Funky Bowling. It’s a wonderfully useless effort, with fans sending in snaps too. If you’re oddly fascinated by this sort of thing, there are links to similar blogs on the ‘About’ page, a little below a curious admission from Morrissette: not one of his games features a soda…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar A friend of mine has a wonderful theory about what happens when you die. Rocking up at the pearly gates, or the river Styx, or the precipice to the endless abyss of nothingness or whatever, he reckons you’ll be presented with your life statistics; a reams-long list of all the things you did, big and small, during your short time on Earth. Your average hours slept each night; the number of trains you caught; how many drinks you bought for people you’d only just met, or times you passed wind in public. This is a fine pub-table subject, since you can really get into the weeds with it – and we have, over the years. My personal favourite is a record of the number of times you unwittingly…

Developer Otherside Studios Publisher 505 Games Format PC Origin US Release 2018 You can’t overstate the importance of Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss. A fully textured 3D firstperson game released in 1992, it brought the rich choice and consequence of 2D RPGs into a sprawling underground world of twisting passageways and dark chambers. Objects had physical attributes, so they’d fall and bounce when thrown. Doors could be broken, carefree experimentation with its spell system of verbs and nouns opened up multiple ways of tackling every situation, and once you’d learned their languages, you’d talk with your enemies as much as fight them. Open-ended, atmospheric and embodied, it was the game that launched Looking Glass Studios and the careers of developers Warren Spector, Doug Church, Paul Neurath and many others who…

Developer Two Point Studios Publisher Sega Format PC Origin UK Release 2018 Two Point Studios has a chronic case of the giggles. It is visibly, and audibly, delighted to be working on a spiritual successor to Theme Hospital, the 1997 title that won hearts with its smart blend of sim management and goofy humour. Two Point Hospital is a return to the good old days for ex-Bullfrog and Lionhead Studios developer Gary Carr. “I wanted to work on something like Theme Hospital again, appealing to a broader range of people,” he says. “Fable had a broad fanbase, but to be honest, that was just not my thing. God games are the games I really enjoy working on.” Sensing change at the now-shuttered Lionhead, Carr approached fellow developer, and now co-founder,…

Rare is, in the best possible way, out of its depth. The maker of Banjo-Kazooie, GoldenEye 007 and Viva Piñata used to be fiercely insular, operating behind tightly locked gates in its remote Twycross country estate. Its latest game, however, marks something of a sea change for the studio. Sea Of Thieves is the antithesis of anything that has ever fit onto a cartridge or between four walls, a sprawling multiplayer title hoping to connect players all over the world via a single shared pirate fantasy adventure. It is designed to be accessible to everyone, to generate genuine and unique stories of competition and cooperation between all kinds of players – and to thrive as a community-led creation in the ‘games as a service’ model that has become a staple…

The best way to start understanding the blockchain is to understand what it proposes to replace. Traditionally, transactions between people which require trust, such as financial transfers, have been conducted by trustworthy organisations like banks. In an imperfect world in which someone might run off with your money, banks have risen as institutions that can be relied on to ensure such transactions are carried out to the letter. These institutions, however, tend to be private, and the systems they use are out of the control of the people who rely on them. Blockchain technology completely revolutionises the nature of making trustworthy transactions. A blockchain is a ledger: a record of transactions which is stored across many computers connected by the Internet. This decentralised nature means that no one owns a…

Founded 2013 Employees 20 Key staff Joe Brammer (producer/studio lead), David Jones (lead designer), Kevin Chandler (lead programmer), Howard Philpott (creative lead) URL www.bulkheadinteractive.com Selected softography Pneuma: Breath Of Life, The Turing Test, Battalion 1944 (Early Access) Current projects Battalion 1944 Unusually, it’s quiet inside Bulkhead Interactive’s spacious Derby offices. Then again, this might not be the ideal time for a visit. After two years in development, the studio’s third game, multiplayer WWII shooter Battalion 1944, has endured a rough start, with servers struggling to cope with overwhelming launch-day demand. Producer Joe Brammer and his colleagues spent the subsequent weekend in the office rectifying the problem, and their efforts seem to have paid off. Everything seems to be in working order as we watch numbers updating in realtime, the morning figures dipping…

There are missteps, sure, but they’re ones taken in the right direction We’re sure it’s a happy accident. Idle awhile on Monster Hunter: World’s title screen and the music will likely remind you of another popular cooperative multiplayer-focused game. Evoking Destiny certainly isn’t the worst idea, not least with Bungie’s game currently leaving its players a little ill at ease. Some will have drifted to the likes of PUBG or Fortnite, but Capcom’s game is another potential alternative – and it’s precisely that kind of player that World is seeking to win over. There are more obvious signs that this most Japancentric of series has been taking notes from western games as it attempts to provide a friendlier welcome to rookie hunters. Its ill-judged opening, for example: a sub-Uncharted set-piece…

Publisher Bandai Namco Entertainment Developer Arc System Works Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now We left our visit to Bandai Namco HQ for E313’s Dragon Ball FighterZ story with one question. While Arc System Works appeared to have successfully delivered a game that would appeal to two very different groups – the genre-novice DBZ fan, and veteran fighting-game players – how did it intend to bridge the gap between the two, helping the former on the long, tough road to becoming the latter? The answer, sadly, is that it hasn’t. Dragon Ball FighterZ is two games in one. It is two very good games, too. But it’s hard not to see it as a missed opportunity, a game that seemed perfectly placed to solve its genre’s biggest…