Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2015 i Edge

There is a potency to the Bloodborne Hunter, this crumpled yet noble warrior, contemplating conflicts past and the fevered tussles that lie in wait. His is an almighty image, destined for immortalisation on the cover of Edge. Sometimes, though, there really is nothing for it but to stick an enormous pair of googly eyes right there on the page one. And get on the phone to the ink supplier, because we want the background to be orange. Orange, yep. As orange as can possibly be achieved. Splatoon has this kind of effect. The Nintendo universe is hardly famous for restraint when it comes to splashing a bit of colour around, but this new Wii U shooter raises the bar. From the shocking neon-pink trainers on its characters’ feet to the…

Rami Ismail bids us “good morning” in a voice that betrays his jetlagged state. It’s little wonder he’s tired: three weeks earlier, he left his studio in Utrecht, flying to Chicago to take part in a game jam during the 52-hour train journey from the Windy City to GDC in San Francisco. From there, he visited Boston for PAX, before heading to the UK for Rezzed. “My body has no idea what happened to it,” he says. “It’s the physical recovery of doing three conferences back to back, the mental synchronisation [of acclimatising to] a time zone you’ve only been in for five days, and the emotional readjustment from being among people in the industry you love to being pretty much alone at home. It’ll take a few days, but…

Game Jurassic Park Arcade Manufacturer Raw Thrills Ahead of Jurassic World’s release, Raw Thrills is digging up the predatory stars of the earlier films for Jurassic Park Arcade. The game sees you return to Isla Nublar, finding it overrun and in chaos. Players use mounted, rather than tethered, lightguns, but there are five in-game weapons available, including the descriptively named Shockbolt, cold-spewing Frostbite Cannon and a Titan 2000 minigun, which fires glowing green-tinged tranquilliser darts. The game features nine stages split evenly across three difficulty tiers: Triceratops, T-Rex and Spinosaurus (each of which serves as a boss). The cabinet comes in two flavours: Environmental Sitdown and Motion Deluxe. The latter features ‘Thrill-D’ technology, a system that uses pneumatics to power industrial air springs. The design, Raw Thrills promises, is considerably…

No score draw So you finally went ahead and did it. I never thought I’d see the day where Edge ran a review without a score, and didn’t even print it on another page later in the magazine. I’m intrigued as to why you decided not to put a number on the end of the text, given the number of gaming websites who have happily slapped a score on Bloodborne after what appears to be a similar amount of time with the game. Was it part of the deal with Sony that got you such early access to the finished product? Were you perhaps mindful of the fact that you only gave Dark Souls a 9, only to later return with the benefit of hindsight and award it the score…

Illustration marshdavies.com My 14-month-old son is obsessed with my record collection. It’s quite understandable: while his mother and I have responded to his increasing mobility and wingspan by moving every item of risk or value upwards and backwards to get them out of the range of his somehow perpetually jam-covered hands, the records haven’t gone anywhere. A thousand or so slabs of vinyl sit invitingly at ground level, all within easy reach. And reach he does, so we spent a couple of hours this past weekend listening to what he was pulling out of the racks, moving from golden-age hip hop to classic Laurel Canyon rock, from ragga jungle to late-’90s Dutch trance (laugh all you want, but that amphetamine-paced wasps-in-a-tin sound was one of the few reliable ways to…

Publisher: Campo Santo Developer: In-house Format: PC Origin: US Release: TBC Where Dear Esther explores the sensation of being overwhelmed by a wild, unfamiliar environment that you don’t fully understand, Firewatch is about losing control of one you do. Campo Santo’s debut casts you as Henry, a man seeking a simpler existence in the wilds of Wyoming as a fire lookout. Part fireman, part park ranger, your job is to keep a watchful eye on the habitat that surrounds your tower and protect it from threats. It’s a lonely, inherently ominous existence. You’re not entirely isolated, however: your supervisor, Delilah, is on hand via portable radio. When you’re not hanging from cliff faces, you’ll spend much of the time filing reports to her, exchanging sarcastic quips and making choices that…

Developer Size Five Games Publisher In-house (PC), Curve Digital Format PC, PS3, PS4, Vita, Wii U, Xbox One Origin UK Release Summer Rebecca Wrenchshaft-Blackcurrant won’t be remembered as one of the world’s finest burglars. But she’s hardly to blame for us not clocking that, while a security camera’s field of vision is indeed curtailed by doors, it’s unwise to expect the same when standing behind a window. Alarms blare, the patrolling robots’ searchlights glow red, and the police are on their way. Fortunately, we’ve inadvertently created the perfect escape route. Having absentmindedly left the front door open, we’re delighted to discover two security bots have left their posts to wander out to our escape pod. We sweep up the cash they’ve left behind, crack them on their heads, and make…

Game Splatoon Publisher/developer Nintendo (EAD Group 2) Format Wii U Release May 29 every year, Splatoon co-director Yusuke Amano goes fishing for squid. It’s a common enough pastime in his home nation, the creatures’ year-end spawning and subsequent migration north across the Sea Of Japan for summer creating ideal conditions for the sport. Yet despite the grin on his face as he announces this, we get the impression the break might have been less restful than usual lately. Wind back to circa 2013 and his then-new project, a four-versus-four multiplayer game full of squid, was in trouble. In trouble with Nintendo’s higher-ups. “[After] the prototype phase, we had all these ideas about the height, the ink, the characters, and the image of the character and the squid,” says co-director Tsubasa Sakaguchi.…

Director, Capcom Were you wary of switching from MT Framework to Unreal Engine 3 for DmC? I’d heard it was difficult to make 60fps action games in Unreal Engine, so that did make me wary. My trust in Ninja Theory’s technical ability – and in particular the results we were seeing right from the beginning of development – soon allayed those fears. What was the response like in Japan to both the announcement and the end result? It was pretty much the same as in the west, I think. It’s fair enough to expect some negative response when it comes to the main character of such a popular series. The announcement caused a stir in Japan in many ways. After it was released, I heard lots of positive feedback. What…

Brian Wilson’s fellow Beach Boys were less than impressed the first time he played them Good Vibrations. Frontman Mike Love thought it madness to ditch a phenomenally successful surf-pop sound for theremin-fuelled psychedelia. “Brian,” he is claimed to have said, “don’t fuck with the formula!” Love lost his battle and the Beach Boys released Pet Sounds, now acknowledged as one of the best albums of its time. But he had a point, one we can imagine is paraphrased frequently in the boardrooms and executive bathrooms of this often risk-averse industry. Yet this month’s crop of new releases yields evidence of a renewed willingness to tinker with the most successful of gaming formulas. In Battlefield Hardline (p108), Visceral shifts the focus from the marine’s tour of duty to the police procedural,…

Publisher SCE Developer FromSoftware Format PS4 Release Out now Just as we thought, the second time through, a little of the magic has gone. The jump scares have lost their spring. Pitch-black rooms and blind corners no longer make us tremble. The servers are now online, and the ground is smothered in messages from fellow travellers, warning of threats and proffering solutions to problems we once struggled with alone. Nice as it is to be proven right, what took 40 hours last month takes just 15 on the second time of asking, the strangling power this gruesome world once held over us no longer so effective now that its threats, tricks and shortcuts have been committed to memory. Then we reach Yahar’gul, and are put right back in our place.…

Publisher Nintendo Developer HAL Laboratory Format Wii U (JP version tested) Release Out now (JP/US), May 8 (EU) H AL Laboratory’s star character has blossomed into one of Nintendo’s most valuable secondstringers of late. Last year’s Triple Deluxe offered perhaps the most persuasive example to date of Kirby’s familiar métier – in other words, easy but dependably enjoyable sidescrolling platformers – while his late Wii U arrival provides a reminder that he’s at his best when moulded into new forms. In Rainbow Paintbrush (AKA Rainbow Curse), Kirby has been reimagined as a rolling ball in a land constructed entirely from modelling clay, and the result is one of Nintendo’s most irresistibly tactile game worlds since the puffball’s own Epic Yarn. Rainbow Paintbrush’s aesthetic is realised with astonishing consistency, right down…

Illustration box-kite-curve.com The games I haven’t finished must outnumber the games I have by more than ten to one. I don’t know whether to be ashamed of this. Yeah, I probably should. Oh, and I’m not talking about games I’ve reviewed. And, of course, I don’t count online events or theoretically unwinnable experiences such as Tetris and stuff. I’m talking about the grim realisation that I simply am not as good at singleplayer gaming as I would like to be. Casting aside my natural self-deprecating nature and assuming that I’m not utterly dreadful at games, it set me wondering why I have the ability to pay good money for an entire start-to-finish experience created by an industry I love, and one I work in, only to abandon it before I’ve…

Troy Baker is fast becoming one of the most recognisable actors in games, with a list of roles that includes Joel from The Last Of Us, Infamous: Second Son’s Delsin Rowe, and now Nathan Drake’s older brother, Sam, in Uncharted 4. Despite his success, Baker didn’t plan to have a career in games. He has worked in film, TV and anime, and once had his sights set on rock’n’roll stardom. Have you always been into games? It’s a little bit of a fairytale story, because six or seven years ago when I first moved to LA and played Uncharted, there’s not one bit of me that thought I would be in the game, much less playing the older brother to Nate Drake. I don’t know if you’re a fan of…

Illustration marshdavies.com Writing in Guantánamo Diary, the recently declassified and published (though still in a redacted form) memoir of his imprisonment and torture at Guantánamo Bay, Mohamedou Ould Slahi relates how one of his guards suddenly received new orders to be nice to him. The guard brought him some home comforts, including muffins, a TV and a PlayStation 2 console. The guard was “a big gamer” himself, but Slahi was not overly impressed. He told his jailers: “Americans are just big babies. In my country, it’s not appropriate for somebody my age to sit in front of a console and waste his time playing games.” Slahi goes on: “Indeed, one of the punishments of their civilisation is that Americans are addicted to videogames.” You and I may agree that videogames…

Final Fantasy has always revolved around its enemies as much as its party, an imaginative cast of stepping stones paving the way to your next levelled-up stat. FFXV (p38) isn’t making any concerted effort to change that, but it is presenting its ecosystem as a living web of placid and aggressive creatures that coexist in a deeper way than simply occupying the same field. It might be a presentational rather than mechanical shift, but it’s a fashionable one in light of the survival genre’s ever-swelling mass. The Flame In The Flood (p48) is one of that legion, offering up a more intimately scaled depiction of battling the elements. What it and FFXV share is that both make bonfire light a ring of temporary safety – here discouraging wolves and drying…

Publisher/developer Tarsier Studios Format PS4 Origin Sweden Release TBA The wooden chair creaks and scrapes noisily across the floor as a tiny, hooded girl drags it into position. An ominously atonal arpeggio sounds from a swinging piano as she steps tentatively across its keys. To see better in the near-total darkness, she raises a lit match, only to be greeted by a groaning figure looming from the inky shadows behind her. Then she huddles beneath a sink unit as wandering hands grope blindly around, ten impossibly long fingers reaching ever closer. Until recently, Tarsier Studios was best known for its work on the LittleBigPlanet series, producing downloadable content for the two PS3 games before collaborating with Double Eleven to bring the series to Vita. The nightmarish imagery in the atmospheric…

Publisher/developer Drool Format PC Origin US, South Korea Release 2016 Thumper feels like the game equivalent of a practice space jam. That’s not to say it lacks focus, but riding its winding, neon-drenched tracks reflects the meandering process that led to its current state. “We knew the mood we wanted early on,” says Brian Gibson, one half of developer Drool and formerly an artist on Amplitude, Guitar Hero and Rock Band. “We’ve gone through a lot of iterations with different styles of music and visuals. It’s slowly just evolved to fit the mood we were trying to go for from the beginning. I wish I could say we knew what it was going to be right off the bat, but I love where it’s gone. We probably could have shipped…

Since joining Nintendo in 1986, Katsuya Eguchi has worked his way from course designer to director and producer, launching a number of series for the Kyoto-based publisher. He’s best known for being the father of Animal Crossing, but Star Fox, Wave Race and Wii Sports all grew under his guidance. Now he’s EAD’s general manager, lining up Splatoon for its worldwide release. We ask him what it takes to make a shooter in 2015. Given that it’s a brand-new IP for Nintendo, what are your hopes for Splatoon’s future? We think the Splatoon IP has huge potential. First off, the whole playstyle where a match is won or lost based on the total area you’ve managed to cover with ink of your team’s colour is completely different to any existing…

Outlast, Slender, PT: many of today’s horror titles owe a debt to Frictional Games. Founded in Skåne, Sweden, in 2007, the studio has skewed the genre away from guns and upgrades, and towards players relying on stealth and their wits. The Penumbra series came first and was a moderate success, but then followed Amnesia, the game that established Frictional as a dark master of the genre. Launched in 2010, when horror games were largely in thrall to Resident Evil 4, Amnesia brought terror of a different kind, stripping players of weapons and forcing them to run and hide. It spawned plenty of imitators – Alien: Isolation, Miasmata and Erie also owe the studio credit – but Amnesia got there first. But it didn’t do it overnight. Although it now has…

Publisher EA Developer Visceral Games Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release Out now Battlefield Hardline’s criminals are incredibly well behaved. That’s not to say the ne’er-do-wells have reformed their ways, or that they aren’t intent on bringing our investigation to a halt in a hail of bullets. But they’re a fair-minded lot – once arrested, they’ll lie contritely still, quietly waiting while we mop up the rest of their colleagues, not once thinking to alert them to the presence of the sneaky cop with a seemingly unlimited supply of handcuffs. It’s a well-intentioned design decision that aims to make Hardline’s stealth-focused campaign gameplay more manageable, but one that requires no small suspension of disbelief on your part, and exposes the game’s occasionally oversimplified systems. You can lure a single enemy…

Publisher Devolver Digital Developer Dennaton Games Format PC (version tested), PS3, PS4, Vita Release Out now Hotline Miami was an action game disguised as an art game disguised as an action game. It was about mood as much as hair-trigger score chasing, and it made the two work together in a way that few games manage. For the adept, able to clear each stage with a half-ingrained, half-improvised run of deadly plays, it was about the fragile thrill of raw power. For those who struggled through each stage over the course of a thousand deaths – often the same person, just at an earlier stage of their development – it was about punishment: the catharsis of violence being met with sudden violence. To the extent that it stumbled, it stumbled…

Given that the fallout from Games For Windows – Live (GFWL) is still being felt eight years after its launch, it takes no little chutzpah to get onstage at the Game Developers Conference and announce a new Windows gaming initiative. But if Xbox boss Phil Spencer’s GDC keynote is to be believed, things are on the up. Windows 10 will bring all of Microsoft’s gaming platforms together, from high-end PC to mobile, while PC players won’t face a repeat of GFWL’s online multiplayer charges. Xbox One, meanwhile, has seen an uptick in sales thanks to a price reduction and several exclusivity coups. We meet Spencer to discuss scepticism, VR, and the future of Windows gaming. Are you concerned that people will associate your Windows 10 initiative with GFWL? This will…

WEBSITE Arcade Adventures www.bit.ly/creativepour Designer and illustrator Joshua Ketchen has reimagined a handful of classic videogames as they might have appeared were they the subjects of the kind of tatty sci-finovels that prop up secondhand book stores’ collapsing shelves. The covers (complete with distressed edges) cover quite a span of videogame history, reaching from EarthBound and Mega Man through to BioShock and Pikmin. Ketchen makes excellent use of the mustard yellows and greyblues associated with the charismatic pulp covers of the ‘60s and ‘70s, creating images that twist the familiar into new forms. For all the obvious body horror and action potential of the other games, however, it’s Pikmin that ends up being the best fit, coming across as some kind of melancholic kids’ novel with distinctly darker undertones. VIDEO…

Illustration marshdavies.com On the first of the month, the floodgates to my home broadband reopen after a week of self-imposed rationing. All of the pent-up PSN freebies, Steam updates and Apple Family Sharing resumes after being paused lest we overrun our broadband cap. Metered data is more or less a standard practice on mobile devices, but home broadband practices vary around the world. In the US, generally speaking, home broadband is available for a monthly fee rather than a metered rate, whereas in the UK and Canada, metering and caps are more common, even if unlimited plans are increasingly popular. And even when access is ‘unlimited’, in practice throttling and caps – especially during peak hours – lead to stalled downloads and buffered streams. I have the misfortune of living…

Publisher: Square Enix Developer: In-house Format: PS4, Xbox One Origin: Japan Release: TBA You’d understand if Hajime Tabata were feeling the pressure. Here, after all, is a man who has spent his years at Square Enix working not on the main Final Fantasy series, but its spinoffs, and not on consoles, but handhelds. Now he finds himself at the helm of Final Fantasy XV, helming the debut proper on modern consoles of a series whose name is, if not mud, then not what it once was. Yet he insists he’s not feeling the strain. “I get asked this a lot, but I don’t feel under any particular pressure,” he tells us. “A big part of it is that I am very busy, so I don’t really have time for it.…

Publisher/developer The Molasses Flood Format PC, Xbox One Origin US Release TBA We’re hungry, sodden and deathly cold. The reason for most of that misery is that we fell from our raft while negotiating a particularly tricky section of rapids just minutes ago. After clambering back on board our rickety vessel, we managed to force it through the argumentative currents to an island. Now we approach the entrance of an abandoned church, hoping to stabilise our body temperature until we can search for firewood in the morning. But, suddenly, we have bigger problems: just feet from relative safety, a wolf leaps into our path, head down, and begins moving purposefully towards us. It’s early days for hardship-strewn ramble The Flame In The Flood, but it’s already a powerful, melancholic entry…

Format 360, PC, PS3 Publisher Capcom Developer Ninja Theory Origin UK Release 2013 Rarely can there ever have been such a great fuss over a hairdo. It all began in late 2010 at the Tokyo Game Show, where Capcom unveiled DmC: Devil May Cry with a short trailer showing off the new-look Dante. Younger, grumpier and a good deal darker on top, this angsty smoker was nothing like the cocksure, silver-bobbed protagonist fans knew. The reaction was far from pleasant. Ninja Theory creative chief Tameem Antoniades puts it bluntly: “The vitriol was immediate, aggressive and relentless for the next two years. Without a second of gameplay being shown, it had been written off as a disaster in the making.” Looking back at forum threads from the time, you can see…

Grand Theft Auto V PS4 GTAV’s re-release may have come with a host of improvements, but its online component runs off the same wonky rack of servers as before. A planned evening with the long-awaited co-op heists turned into a frustrating few hours of dropouts and error messages. A few days later, the heists proved to have been worth both the wait and the matchmaking headaches, but the worldsubsection1s best-selling game deserves a better network backend than this. Ryse: Son Of Rome PC With a new graphics card to put through its paces and no copy of Crysis 3 to hand, we turn our attention to the PC port of Cryteksubsection1s Xbox One launch game. As was the case at launch, itsubsection1s the art direction, rather than the resolution or…

ASo the DLC you did restaurant named Ishimura, a water feature that looks a lot like a Marker: Hardline creative director Ian Milham’s past as art director on horror series Dead Space is hinted at by the profusion of references tucked away in the latest Battlefield. But Visceral is by no means a studio dwelling on its past, as Milham tells us when we talk to him about the process of reshaping a much-loved series into something new. It’s rare to see a studio pick up such an established series and put its own spin on it. How did you approach that challenge? We’re all hardcore Battlefield fans, and have been playing it forever, but to really get fluent in what makes it work, there was no substitute except to…

Publisher Microsoft Studios Developer Moon Studios Format 360, PC, Xbox One (tested) Release Out now, 2015 (360) The belated rollout of Xbox One’s screenshot feature couldn’t have been better timed; Ori And The Blind Forest is easily among the best-looking games of the generation so far. Its vibrant setting is proof that with the right level of care and a sharp eye for fine detail, even familiar elemental themes – water, ice, wind and fire – can be made to feel exotic. It’s also a reminder that a call for darker shades needn’t mean artists packing away their brightest colours. Sunset Overdrive didn’t hold the title for long: Moon Studios’ debut has the most vivid oranges on Xbox One. Even before you reach the Valley Of The Wind, an endearingly…