Wireframe Magazine #58

Emulation is a dirty word in the games industry, with Nintendo annihilating ROM download sites with zeal. Elsewhere, Apple merrily booted iDOS off the App Store for having the audacity to provide file system access. Meanwhile, many games are at risk of extinction on a daily basis. But who saves them? Historically, pirates: ancient classics have been preserved for all time in digital form by people who made illicit copies of the kind that would make a Nintendo lawyer itch. The industry’s lack of broad interest in and respect for gaming’s past is driven by it being young, profitable, and always about the next big thing. Gamers have been trained to believe in tech evolution above all else and to ditch gaming’s history as detritus. Even this is nothing new:…

It’s January, which means it’s time for a customary look ahead to the year’s most exciting games – you can see our pick on page 26. If you’re into that sort of thing, though, January’s also the month when you start setting the odd New Year’s resolution – and if you’ve been thinking about making a game of your own for years, but keep putting it off, then take a look at our profile of British indie developer Runner Duck on page 76. Just a few years ago, its cofounders, David Miller and Jon Wingrove, were thoroughly miserable: stuck making free-to-play mobile games that had their sights set on wringing money out of their players at every turn. Disillusioned, Miller and Wingrove started spending their evenings making their debut game,…

OlliOlli World’s developer Roll7 wants its game to be accessible. The previous two titles in the series, OlliOlli and OlliOlli2: Welcome to OlliWood, were exceptionally well-crafted slices of hardcore finger dexterity, requiring timing and reactions to be tip-top in order to skate your way through their lo-fi worlds. Both were excellent games, capable of instilling a sense of Zen-like calm as you ran through another flawless combo… but both were also difficult games, where hitting that flawless combo just wasn’t something everyone could do, and making a small mistake resulted in the sort of penalising that puts people off continuing to play. So it’s understandable that the UK-based studio wants its third skateboarding game to bring more players into the fold and help us all engage with that ‘flow state’…

Another part of the flow of OlliOlli World comes thanks to its soundtrack, as Tom Hegarty explains: “A key part of the flow as well has been the music we’ve added over the years. We’ve toyed with lots of different styles in OlliOlli World, but we always come back to this kind of particular style. ‘Swazzy’ music, we tend to call it – electronica, chilled. That really adds to the flow; it allows you to get immersed in the game and really feel like it’s one cohesive experience.” Which begs the question: no skate punk, then? “We have tried it and yeah, it doesn’t work,” Hegarty laughs. “Although some people choose their own music, and you can obviously do that. And if that works for you, then all good.”…

Roll7’s work away from the OlliOlli franchise has, it’s safe to say, not been quite as popular as its BAFTA-winning skateboarding games. But that by no means indicates the studio pumped out a couple of stinkers: Not a Hero was a mix of swift, brutal, and dynamic gunfights with a hint of politics for good measure (and an alcoholic from St Helens), while Laser League offered an inventive, TRON-like future sport in the multiplayer realm. Both are still absolutely worth a play.…

Last month’s edition of Wireframe was a celebration of arcade machines, and here’s a game that aims to capture the hectic, score-chasing tone of a bygone coin-op age. Hailing from Guatemala, 502’s Arcade is a collection of retro-inspired games spread over a variety of genres. There’s a colour-matching puzzler, a top-down dungeon crawler, and a fixed-screen shooter. As you’d expect, they’re all the kinds of games you can get to grips with in a minute or two, and all offer a tough challenge – the overarching aim being to hone skills at each one and make your way to the top of the high-score table. “At their core, each game is a high-score chaser, even when they are all from different genres,” explains developer Bryan Alvarado. “The length of each…