Innehållsförteckning för March 2015 från Edge

When Edge launched, a little over two decades ago, certain parts of the videogame industry were still in thrall to the concept of the interactive movie. It wasn’t until 1996, in fact, that Digital Pictures, the company behind the Senate-baiting, FMV-driven Night Trap, packed up its cameras and called it a day. It may be difficult to believe now, looking back at a Mega-CD title such as Double Switch (starring Corey Haim), but for a brief period this authentic fusion of interactive entertainment and Hollywood felt properly exciting, like a legitimate new form deserving of exploration. But then… pop. Done. Goodnight. In the background, though, the core concept continued to simmer patiently as it awaited some kind of revival. Now, it’s here, albeit in an unexpected form, thanks to Oculus.…

While Oculus Rift competitors were absent at CES 2015, several augmented reality headsets were on display. Where virtual reality HMDs aim to completely immerse you in a virtual world, AR headsets typically use a transparent display to layer information atop the real world. Gaming is, at least currently, in the realm of VR, not AR. CastAR, funded by a 2013 Kickstarter from engineers who worked on VR at Valve, was at CES with hardware that’s on its way to campaign backers. CastAR is the smallest HMD (AR or VR) we’ve seen to date, looking like a chunkier Google Glass than a Rift. The flashiest AR headset at CES, by comparison, was Caputer Labs’ Seer, looking like a cross between Nintendo’s Virtual Boy and a motorcycle helmet. The Seer headset runs…

Playtonic chief Gavin Price claims his company has enough funding to complete its first release, but he’s still keen to secure a publishing deal to expand the project. “We’re in a position where we wouldn’t have to take a deal if we didn’t want to,” he says. “We obviously want to do things our way, but there is a chance for us to work with the right publisher.” And Price is keen to link with an old partner: “There’s a history of working with Nintendo, so we’d naturally love to see our game on a Nintendo platform. If people tell us to make Wii U our target console platform, then we’ve got the flexibility to do that.”…

Keyboardist, guitarist and electronics experimenter Paul Wolinski formed 65daysofstatic along with guitarist Joe Shrewsbury in 2001. After a period of upheaval, the four-piece’s lineup solidified with Simon Wright on bass and Rob Jones on drums. 65days has released five studio albums to date, and Wolinski has also issued two solo records: Labyrinths in 2011 and 2014’s Full Bleed. Given the cover art for Labyrinths, which has a distinctly Psygnosis-era Roger Dean feel to it, and the textadventure-style video for Stitches, were you a Commodore kid growing up? I did have an Amiga, but I had a ZX Spectrum before that, when I was dead little, with Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner. There was a really big gap between the Spectrum and Amiga, and I never had a Mega Drive…

It is your Destiny Destiny is truly one of the best games out there, and has replay value written all over it. However, the one thing that has my mind boggling is the fact that the game doesn’t support couch co-op. Couch co-op would have been perfect for the game, since Destiny requires a lot of teamwork. There are always situations when hordes of enemies are sent towards the players, and moments when it would be easier if there was another person nearby. I have met a lot of friends by playing Destiny. However, the thing that ticks me off the most is the server problems. The game requires all players to play online together. That means that the server has to run a large amount of players that are…

Illustration marshdavies.com Game PR is so bland that anyone who so much as smells like they’re about to contravene it gets attention A few weeks before Christmas, I briefly set NeoGAF on fire. It was the week before the PlayStation Experience. The big Street Fighter V announcement had leaked, and the Internet was hungry for more. That afternoon, I was on the phone when an embargoed email arrived from Sega announcing the localisation of Yakuza 5, a game in a series I adore and which I had just about given up hope of ever playing in English. I even bought a copy during a trip to Japan, resolving that this would be the game for which I would finally learn Japanese. Six months later it is, obviously, still sealed. So…

Publisher Bandai Namco/CD Projekt Red Developer CD Projekt Red Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Poland Release May 19 Newcomers to the fiction shouldn’t worry about playing The Witcher III without prior knowledge. Even for those who’ve followed the whole series so far, the politics and people of this world are difficult to retain, and almost everyone we meet in the first few hours of The Witcher III is new to us. It really does feel like you’re suffering from amnesia when you’re being introduced to a parade of characters whose apparently close personal relationships with protagonist Geralt are completely opaque. The story’s not difficult to follow as such, it’s just that the game doesn’t focus the fiction on the player as if they were the centre of the universe.…

The Long Dark aspires to make players contemplate their situation even as it tries to kill them. This is a human disaster, and the surreal aesthetic enforces the sensation of clinging to a rock adrift in the cosmos. Indomitable mountains, backlit by the Northern Lights, are as they ever were, unperturbed by geomagnetic events even as humanity gives up its hold on the planet.”One of the most incredibly rewarding moments for me,” Van Lierop says, “was when we first shared the build with some of our backers and we started to get feedback. Somebody wrote in and said, ‘I was freezing to death; I had no food; I didn’t know where to go, so I climbed to the top of highest peak that I could find and I died watching…

Publisher/developer Avalanche Studios (Expansive Worlds) Format PC Origin Sweden Release Out now (Early Access) Running won’t work. Oh, the functionality for it is fine, but The Hunter: Primal discourages making swift movements by spawning dinosaurs behind you when you do. Pack hunters and Tyrannosaurus rex aren’t just drawn to your trampling feet, they’re born of them. It’s the sort of quirk expected in an Early Access title, particularly the spitand-glue survival and hunting sims that now run rampant in Steam’s storefront of worksin-progress. Here, however, it’s hard to tell whether a draconian penalty for jogging is suspect coding or a statement of intent. Primal is a prehistoric standalone spin-off of The Hunter, a free-to-play bloodsport sim and acquired taste. The Hunter is berated and praised in equal measure for its…

Perhaps more surprising than anything you’ll find in Survarium is that Vostok has embraced free-to-play as its business model. Silver is earned every match, while gold is handed out less generously and can be obtained via credit card. “We’ve seen so many games that have created a bad image for free-to-play,” Yavorsky says. “The public understanding of it changes bit by bit, though, [and F2P has] a lot of potential because it is still evolving. From a dev’s point of view, it takes a gigantic amount of game design, data analysis and whatnot to find that right recipe to make your game look fair in the eyes of the players on one hand and be able to earn enough cash to finance your studio… But we don’t offer power for…

Lionhead is evidently proud of its bespoke global illumination system, which it developed internally once it became clear that Unreal Engine 4’s original setup wasn’t quite good enough for the needs of the studio’s artists. “Unreal 4 has been really good in terms of quality and efficiency and material work,” lead engine programmer Ben Woodhouse tells us. ”But we wanted all the lighting in Legends to be dynamic to give us a lot of variation, so that we could change the time of day, and have shots with lots of lights in. So we wrote a system based on our LPV [light propagation values] and we’re using that now. Even the bounce lighting that comes off objects is dynamic as well.” “It also makes it easier for us to make…

Fifty Shades Of Grey is regarded as the moment the eBook became truly mainstream, but can Meg Jayanth see a text adventure equivalent? “The thing is, people like being told stories – around a fire, over the dinner table, through lines of text on paper, on screens. That more people are reading on screens definitely opens up the doors for blockbuster, mainstream interactive fiction. The only reason the next Fifty Shades couldn’t be a text game is if nobody tries to make it. And hey, why not sexy text games? Imagine an interactive version of Fifty Shades where you can tell Christian Grey to bugger off in chapter two and go out with that nice bloke at the coffee shop down the road?”…

Destiny PS4 Three hundred hours and counting later, we’re no longer at war with the Fallen, Hive, Vex or Cabal, but Bungie. The game’s myriad economies, its infuriating RNG and, in the new raid especially, punitive mission design mean that we’re constantly seeking out new ways to somehow cheat the system. Cheese? Hardly. To us, it feels more like fair reprisal against a cruel, cackling master. Persona 4: Golden Vita We load up our year-old, mid-game save file with trepidation. Few games make much sense after that much time away, so surely an arcane JRPG will be impenetrable? Yet reentry proves smooth, and within minutes we’re destroying demons and chatting up classmates like we’ve never been away. As we slip back into the winning blend of stat-heavy dungeon crawler and…

Although Dangerous can be played in a broadly solitary manner, every mission or trade run that you complete will cast its ripples throughout the galaxy’s economic and political infrastructure. But while flying in munitions or propaganda has some small influence, you can also engage in full-scale wars. Conflict Zones, which come in high- and low-intensity forms, plunge you into large-scale battles with dozens of ships and can result in the ousting of a controlling government. Frontier CEO David Braben promises that there’s even more to come. “They’ll be dramatic events in updates that people can choose to participate in,” he says. “You’ve already seen smaller ones, but there will be events where systems are changing in a way that you can benefit from or interact with in a way that’s…

Life Is Strange co-opts many elements not normally seen in the adventure genre, perhaps the most incongruous of which are collectibles. Taking the form of a series of photo subjects dotted about the place, they represent something of a missed opportunity. While they could advance the game’s themes of individuality and creativity by allowing you to find and frame your own shots, instead you’re simply prompted to hit a button when standing in the right location, unlocking preexisting images. The results are added to Max’s journal, which provides all the location and character info you’d expect, but also offers excellent insight into Max’s thoughts on the bizarre events unfolding around her.…

Unlike Dead Island, Dying Light doesn’t need to be rescued by the maxim that everything is better in co-op, but Tech land reprises the feature regardless. Combat’s certainly made easier with extra pairs of hands, but traversal’s a different matter. No clipping means your path won’t ever be blocked by an ally, but one sewer mission’s linear path proves difficult to parse with all those extra bodies in the way. Challenge invitations appear every few minutes, both out in the world and in missions, adding a layer of friendly competition on top of proceedings. For the more antagonistically minded, there’s Be A Zombie mode, in which you invade other players’ worlds at night as a fast, agile, and quite infuriating hunter.…

LANDMARKS 1 Mindfield Games’ HQ is located in a converted warehouse facility next to Pohjoissatama Harbour in Helsinki. 2 New and old in the city of Oulu, northern Finland. Finger soft has made its home in Kempele, an Oulu municipality. 3 The Finnair Skywheel grabs attention across the harbour from the HQ of Neogames Finland, located in the Katajanokka neighbourhood of Helsinki. 4 The Kiasma art museum in Helsinki. 5 Built in 1940, the Helsinki Olympic Stadium hosted the 1952 Summer Olympics When writer William Goldman pronounced that nobody knows anything, he was talking about the movie industry, but it feels increasingly applicable to the world of videogames. When Apple launched its App Store, for example, no one projected that the company would pay revenues of $10 billion to developers…

Founded 2012 Employees 14 URL www.fingersoft.net (publishing enquiries: publishing@fingersoft.net) Selected softography Hill Climb Racing, I Hate Fish Current projects Planet Racer (working title), Free Racing (working title), plus TBA STUDIO INSIGHT Jaakko Kylmäoja Vice president, publishing Starting out with novelty camera apps, Fingersoft enjoyed steady success until the release of Hill Climb Racing, at which point it shifted into a different gear. With installations of its Android/iOS games now beyond the 350m mark, the developer/publisher has a huge, and hungry, audience. VP of publishing Jaakko Kylmäoja tells us more. In such an incredibly competitive market, how do you think Fingersoft stands out? We’re kind of like a punk band, fighting against big corporations in the game industry. We have a small team making games, and some of them might look a…

Founded 2010 Employees 12 URL www.traplightgames.com Selected softography The Hero Current project What On Earth! STUDIO INSIGHT Riku Rakkola CEO and co-founder Jari Paananen Artist and co-founder Riku Rakkola’s game-making roots lie in the Amiga days, but his company’s second title, What On Earth!, feels every inch the modern mobile production. Jari Paananen joins him to tell us more about the thinking behind the game. Why did you decide to create a game centred on user-generated content? Riku Rakkola [Co-founder] Sami Kalliokoski and I have always had this passion for physics-based games, because of the potential they provide for emergent gameplay. It’s super-interesting to see what people do with the tools you give them. It’s really appealing that you can’t predict entirely what will happen with the gameplay – you just create…

OSVR, or Open Source Virtual Reality, is the only thing standing between the nascent VR market and a premature death, at least if Chris Mitchell, Razer’s product marketing manager, is to be believed. In his own words: “If we don’t build this, the virtual reality ecosystem will never survive.” It’s big talk for a project that, even after a press release, media briefing and one-on-one interview with Razer, still feels nebulous. Razer, of course, made its name with gaming peripherals, ergonomic gaming mice and keyboards, but OSVR is not so tangible. The company’s plans do include hardware: a $200 head-mounted display, which it calls the Hacker Dev Kit, is due in the summer, and measures up reasonably with the Oculus Rift DK2 unit. But the Dev Kit is not OSVR…

Currently residing at the National Museum Of Scotland (NMS) in Edinburgh, the Game Masters exhibition brings together over 100 games to chart 40 years of gaming history. Except instead of retelling the tale of gaming’s past, this exhibit looks at gaming through the lens of the auteurs and pioneers who shaped it, such as Tetsuya Mizuguchi, Warren Spector and Hideo Kojima. Game Masters was conceived by Conrad Bodman, formerly head of exhibitions at the Australian Centre For The Moving Image (ACMI) and now working at the British Film Institute, and follows on from a previous exhibition called Game On, which presented a more general history of games. “This show is intended to be a developer-led show as opposed to a straight history,” Bodman says. “It brings to the surface a…

“When you experience Oculus technology, it’s like getting religion on contact. People that try it walk out a believer.” Are you ready to convert to the Church Of Oculus, as represented on Earth’s plane by Reverend John Carmack? “If it ends up not being released in Australia, just pirate it after release. No need to send us any money. Just enjoy the game!” Hotline Miami 2 designer Jonatan Söderström cheerfully circumvents Australia’s ratings board “Without a workforce that more closely mirrors the population, we are missing opportunities, including not understanding and designing for our own customers.” Intel CEO Brian Krzanich on why his company has started a $300million diversity drive “No one wants to lose a match by being outnumbered while their teammate shoots grenades into their own forehead 1…

Paul Wolinski finds himself in a position that’s simultaneously intimidating and enviable. His band of 14 years is enjoying a not-inconsiderable cult following. He’s released music in a solo capacity, and produced a series of remixes. He’s studying for a PhD in electronic music, which he hopes will “focus on more sound installation stuff”. But perhaps the greatest demand on his time right now, and certainly the highest-profile project that 65daysofstatic has yet undertaken, is to craft the music for Hello Games’ ambitious, fully procedural space exploration title No Man’s Sky, even showing up at The Game Awards to help promote the already-anticipated title.…

Illustration marshdavies.com Let me just play the game and see whether I like it, rather than having to figure out what the hell it is in the first place One advantage of being someone who mostly writes about subjects other than videogames is that I am happily interested in the moments when it seems that I am a particularly stupid, or at least irredeemably non-‘core’, player. And so I here confess: I did not understand Housemarque’s Resogun. My friends were raving about it on Twitter, so I bought it on its PS4 release, and spent half an hour marvelling at the pretty visuals – remember the time when voxels were the future of 3D exploration games, instead of the future of retro shooters? – and wondering what the hell I…

After over two and a half years in full development, Day Z still doesn’t have a fixed release date. The process has been far from straightforward, admittedly, but the genre it gave rise to also has problems finishing. Survival is a struggle, and survival games need that struggle to be everlasting. To the dev, a well-stocked inventory can be as damaging as a game-breaking bug; to the player, a rucksack full of beans and bullets is the only measure of progress. With tension like that, where does survival go from here? This month’s Hype crop yields a range of answers to that difficult question. The Long Dark (p42) may have caught your eye with its bright aesthetic – a game full of colour and beauty in a space built on…

There are varying opinions on The Witcher’s muchdiscussed sexual politics, but at least things have progressed a little since the original’s card-collecting fuckmemento subgame. Things are tough for women in the world of The Witcher – as they are in Westeros, say – but we’re happy to report that not every woman in The Witcher III is a witch, a wife or a prostitute. It’s made immediately clear, however, that the game is not afraid of showing skin: during the opening, the camera tries hard to spoil a refreshingly tender moment by dwelling lasciviously on both a bathing Geralt and the naked, reclining body of one of his more interesting lovers, Yennefer.…

Publisher/developer Slightly Mad Studios Format PC, PS4, Wii U, Xbox One Origin UK Release March (Wii U TBC) Slightly Mad Studios’ decision to delay Project Cars’ 1.0 release was a savvy one. When we previously played the game, its handling exhibited a tendency to fluctuate between temperamental and listless, but it’s improved considerably since then. As promised, the game now opens with a selection of handling presets, offering three simple starting points for a racing sim that is already highly customisable (you can, if you so wish, even assign buttons to adjust seat height, angle and distance from the wheel). From these broad foundations, it’s easy to then further tweak your setup, such as starting with the Novice profile, but opting for manual gears and no traction control. There’s still…

Steam pundits aren’t the only community Expansive Worlds supports: The Hunter’s first T rex – before this spin-off had been conceived – was created by an intern from a Swedish game design school. Many among Expansive Worlds’ staff sit on educational advisory boards, taking pains to build ties with the next generation of developers. “They are really well prepared to start working in a studio,” Holfve says, “and they’re being productive from week two at least. They’ve got all these fantastic ideas that us old farts have stopped thinking up.” It was the enthusiasm with which interns set about modding The Hunter that convinced the EW team that Primal was worth pursuing.…

Publisher/developer 17-Bit Format PC, PS4, Vita Origin Japan Release 2015 When we previously tuned in to Galak-Z, 17-Bit CEO and creative director Jake Kazdal described his retro-themed space shooter as the modern antidote to endless twin-stick blasting and a thousand circles of bullet hell. Not that you’d know it just by looking. With its cel-shading, pause screen drenched in VHS stutter and CRT fringing, teleplay credits before every mission, and asteroids that break into chunks at the merest brush of a hot-pink laser bolt, Galak-Z continues to lean heavily on the visual language of ’80s Saturday morning anime and ’70s arcade cabs. After over a year spent retrofitting Roguelike elements into the game, nothing about Kazdal’s early mission statement has changed either, yet everything is subtly different. Where once freeform…

Game Fable Legends Publisher Microsoft Developer Lionhead Studios Format PC, Xbox One Release 2015 By the end of Fable III, Albion had lost its magic. This most quintessentially British of game worlds was no longer such a green and pleasant land. The Industrial Revolution had transformed Bowerstone into a factory town, all belching chimneys, filthy slums and open sewers – grim with one ‘m’ instead of two. While Lionhead’s reluctant to admit it, when it talks about trying to recapture the magic of Albion, it’s not just referring to taking Legends back to a time when Will users were more prevalent either. “It’s an opportunity to reset things, and try a new direction,” says studio director Stuart Whyte. It’s a good time for a change. The studio’s figurehead, Peter Molyneux, left…

“The best thing about reading reviews of 80 Days is that when people describe the game, they rarely describe the mechanics, but instead describe the adventure they had – how they fell in love, were robbed, fell ill, crashed a ship and were stranded, and so on,” Ingold says. “Each story is their own. As a company, we want to make more ambitious and broad experiences, but without losing sight of our starting point – that players should leave the game with the story they were in still shining in their eyes.”…

John Dale Co-founder, The Assembly Line What inspired Pipe Mania’s theme? Did you or any of the Assembly Line team have any real life plumbing experience? [Laughs] No, not that I’m aware of. I don’t think there was any particular starting point where we said, “Let’s do something plumbingfocused.” No, I think we came at things from a different angle there. Do you remember what the response from players was like at the time? It was one of those things where we knew fairly early on that we had something that was better than average, because everyone we showed it to got into it quickly and was enthusiastic about it. It came together really quickly, and whereas some games have you sweating blood and putting a lot of effort into…

We’re starting to miss cartridges. The current generation of console hardware may offer the sort of visuals we’d have thought impossible 20 years ago, but they sure come at a cost. This month a disc arrived with a covering letter explaining that a minute-long hang on the splash screen was a known bug. In the context of this generation’s loading times, we might never have noticed. Thankfully, games themselves are getting better at delivering players into the action in timely fashion. Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate (p108) is the latest in a series that once seemed to delight in making you wait. Now, you’re part of a travelling caravan, moving about the map to cut travel times, while new pets speed up the resource-gathering grind. It can still take half an…

“You’re right, it is a bit grindy at the start. And I think there are things that we can do, and are doing, that will improve that” Frontier Developments founder and Elite co-creator David Braben is a happy man when we sit down to chat about Dangerous’s launch. His relief at the successful rebirth of the defining space trading series is clear, but it’s matched by his obvious enthusiasm for what is to come, too. Those 400 billion explorable star systems are, after all, just the beginning. Though the game is out, it’s far from finished. Are you viewing Dangerous differently now, or does it simply feel like an ongoing project? You’re right, there has been a change, but what’s really important is that the release game is a great,…

“I think it’s like everyday racism – it doesn’t sound like it’s the worst sexist remark they could make, but it’s there” Jean-Maxime Moris worked in production roles at Ubi so fit in Shanghai and Paris before going on to co-found fiercely independent Parisian studio Dontnod Entertainment and direct Remember Me. Now the studio’s creative director, Moris is currently overseeing several projects, including the ongoing development of Life Is Strange. Moris has a considered, confident air about him when we meet at Square Enix’s London headquarters, but one that’s offset with modesty and candour. Telltale Games currently dominates the adventure genre. What made you want to enter the fray? Telltale defined what I see as the modern adventure game, favouring character and story development, and choice, over puzzles. They’re a…

Publisher Nintendo Developer Capcom Format 3DS Release Out now (JP), February 13 (EU/NA) Monster Hunter has always been a decidedly Japanese take on the videogame power fantasy. It’s a series that gives you the ability to fell giant beasts, yes, but you’ll need a strong work ethic before you can conquer these forces of super nature. You’ll need to spend time mining ores and crystals, catching bugs and fish, plucking mushrooms and herbs, and carving up slain creatures for the materials to craft gear good enough to compete against the largest wyverns in the field. It’s an approach that hasn’t always sat well with western audiences accustomed to more immediate gratification, so perhaps Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate’s finest achievement is that it streamlines the process without compromising its formidable core.…

In addition to the simple tuning slider that allows you to set the balance between speed and acceleration on each craft, F-Zero GX presents deeper options. As well as the multitude of craft designed by the developers, each of which is unlocked when you unlock its driver (and each of which favours grip, boost or durability), you are free to build your own vessel from parts and schematics purchased in the garage shop. Here, you are able to design and build a craft to your own playstyle and specifications, piecing together the body, cockpit and boosters before saving the result and using it across the game. There’s even an emblem editor, which offers a raft of options that puts Call Of Duty’s more modern example to shame.…

As the ships ease slowly in and out of the harbour outside, discussion within Neogames’ HQ is focused on a more energetically spirited industry, and not only Finland’s place within it but how it is driving it forward. Joining us today are PlayRaven CEO Lasse Seppänen, director of Neogames Finland KooPee Hiltunen, Shark Punch COO Harri Manninen, Fingersoft VP of publishing Jaakko Kylmäoja, Neogames Finland coordinator Suvi Latva, Next Games head of studio Jay Ranki, Small Giant Games CEO Timo Soininen, Mindfield Games CEO Ville Kivistö, Traplight Games CEO Riku Rakkola, and Touko Tahkokallio, Boom Beach designer at Supercell. Finland has been producing hit games, such as Stardust, since the mid-’90s, but does it feel like the industry here has such a long history? Lasse Seppänen I got my first…

Founded 2013 Employees 10 URL www.smallgiantgames.com Current project Oddwings Escape STUDIO INSIGHT Timo Soininen CEO Having worked at Habbo Hotel during its boom years, Timo Soininen knows his way around a successful brand. Today, he’s heading up a new studio looking to build hits of its own, starting with Oddwings Escape. How did Small Giant get started? The company was founded in early 2013 by a bunch of Habbo Hotel veterans, including Otto Nieminen and Markus Halttunen. After leaving Habbo, Otto started to put a new rock band together, and we were really lucky to get two of the best animators and graphic designers in this country, Tommi Vallisto and Ilkka Juopperi, to join the team. Our first prototype was built in the summer of 2013, we got the first…

Founded 2014 Employees 7 URL sharkpunch.com Selected softography The Masterplan Current projects Playfield STUDIO INSIGHT Jiri Kupiainen CEO Formed by four ex-Disney Interactive employees, Shark Punch is modest in size, with only seven employees, but serious in its ambition. Its debut game, The Masterplan, has a laser-like focus on ’70s heist movies, but its next production, game discovery platform Playfield, has as broad a reach as could be imagined. CEO Jiri Kupiainen explains more. What are the goals of your first game? The Masterplan started out as a conversation about classic ’90s games we loved, and how those games might play if they’d been developed today. At some point the conversation shifted to classic movies, and after a few beers there was a strong consensus that something like “XCOM meets [Robert…

Founded 2010 Employees 150 URL supercell.com Selected softography Hay Day, Clash Of Clans, Boom Beach Current projects TBA STUDIO INSIGHT Jonas Collaros Senior server developer, Clash Of Clans The free-to-play mobile strategy game market is hardly short of options, but few match up to the biggest hitters in the genre, which Supercell has the handy knack of supplying. Clash Of Clans man Jonas Collaros tells us how the company keeps its games at the top of the charts. Clash Of Clans has been an incredible success, and spawned lots of imitators. What do you think is its secret sauce? Well, I think when people are trying to figure out what’s the secret recipe, it’s quite often that they look in the wrong places. They look very much at the values that…

Nothing in popular culture ages as fast as games. They date with greater rapidity than Russell Brand As Maximus out of Gladiator once said, “Brothers, what we do in life… echoes in eternity.” This is true of people doing boring stuff like science and war and medicine, but it’s also of true of the real pioneers: the heroes who make videogames. Nothing in popular culture ages as fast as games. They date with greater rapidity than Russell Brand. Of course, most of this is down to the advance of technology. Games are, after all, not just games, but showcases of computing prowess. What this means is that we can watch a movie from the ’70s and while we’re likely to be shocked (or inspired) by the fashions, we’re quickly going…

More than a decade after its sale to Microsoft, little tangible evidence now remains of the ’90s golden age of Twycross veteran Rare. With most of its IP shelved in favour of Kinect games, the former creator of charismatic shooters and platformers is almost unrecognisable from the days when GoldenEye 007 ruled the multiplayer scene. One ensemble of Rare old guard has pledged to reclaim what was lost in that $375 million acquisition. The six fulltime employees of Derby-based startup Playtonic spent a combined 120 years at the studio, and now boast ambitions to create the type of games they might have made had the keys not been handed over to Marc Whitten in 2002. “Imagine there’s an alternative timeline where Rare became independent instead of being bought by Microsoft.…

Not every game Bodman wanted to include made it into the exhibition. One he particularly wished to track down was Computer Space. Created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in 1971, Computer Space is acknowledged as the first ever commercially sold arcade game. It is a simple multidirectional shooter in which the player controls a rocket ship and needs to navigate a dense asteroid field while fighting a pair of flying saucers. But it sold modestly, and its place in history has been eclipsed by the far more popular Pong. “It would have been great to get a copy of it,” Bodman says, “but they’re becoming very expensive.”…

Game Time Crisis 5 Manufacturer Bandai Namco Time Crisis 5 made its western debut at January’s European Amusement And Gaming Expo, some nine years after the previous entry in the series and after a spate of Japanese location tests. The enormous deluxe cabinet features twin 55-inch displays to accommodate its co-op campaign, and new takes on the series’ famous handgun controllers. Each delivers a thumping kickback every time you fire thanks to an improved recoil mechanism, while a small orange button just above the trigger allows you to toggle which weapon you’re using. The cover system has been freshened up, too, with a double foot pedal setup replacing TC4’s single, larger plate. Stepping on either will shift you to the left or right of your target, while releasing both whips you…

WEBSITE Oscilloscope Quake www.bit.ly/oscilquake Most Quake modders focus their efforts on keeping the game running, and looking its best, on modern hardware. Finnish programmer Pekka Väänänen has other ambitions, which is why he decided to port the fast-moving, strafehappy and extremely brown shooter to a Hitachi V-422 oscilloscope. It’s certainly brightened up the game. On his blog, Väänänen offers a post-mortem of the process, from his testing phase and creation of an XY-oscilloscope simulator to a list of possible improvements for anyone who wishes to take the project further. It’s a technical read, but never dry, and if talk of geometry extraction phases and phosphorus decay simulation proves too much, you can always skip to the video demonstration of Episode One, Map One in fizzing green wireframe. VIDEO Devs Play…

Illustration marshdavies.com Wii was revolutionary in that lots of people wanted to play it because it was a videogame system, not in spite of that fact Before its 2006 release, Nintendo’s Wii bore the codename ‘Revolution’, a fact that’s easy to forget. As a name, however, it’s a hard sell today. Over eight years old now, Wii’s been superseded and largely forgotten. Boxed and closeted. The Wii U system that’s replaced it has had its share of challenges, but perhaps the most surprising, given the system it inherits its name from, is the new device’s failure to realise the promise that made the original so purportedly revolutionary. It wasn’t the physical games such as Wii Sports, nor even the intuitive, remote-style controller that filled out the uniform of Wii’s revolution.…

Into The Stars PC With a flotilla of dogfighting games inbound for 2015, Into The Stars is more interested in your Janeway fantasies than your Starbuck ones. You’ll shepherd a rookie crew back home, scavenging supplies and trading Technicolor volleys with aliens, all to a score by Jack Wall. Puzzle & Dragons Z 3DS As we might have mentioned before, the mechanics in the smartphone version of P&D are an unremitting joy, but it’s not without its problems. Most are linked, inevitably, to monetisation, so the IAP-free 3DS version is an intriguing prospect, and the bundled Mario-themed game still further incentive to make the switch. Rise Of The Tomb Raider Xbox One Your move, Lara. For all that her previous outing did well, it was in Uncharted’s thrall. With Naughty…

Publisher Hinterland Developer In-house Format PC Origin Canada Release Out now (Early Access) Fiery watercolour skies and shimmering auroras are how Hinterland chooses to showcase its take on the end of the world, but even the most atmospheric screenshots can’t convey the sound of Canada’s deep north – the thunderous wind that scorns clothing and shakes window panes, or the thoughtful silence that follows fresh snowfall. Abstracting heavily, this Vancouver Islandbased team of 13 is creating an escapist’s game, and it’s one that achieves an even better sense of place than DayZ’s hyper-real countryside of Chernarus. Currently in Early Access, The Long Dark has you take on the troubles of a plane crash survivor in the wake of an as-yet-unspecified ‘geomagnetic event’. Alone in the mountains, you forage, craft and…

Slightly Mad is abandoning the traditional racing game progression in favour of offering everything from the off. Events, vehicles and tracks don’t need to be unlocked, and you can choose to tackle the events in any order, even specialising in a single discipline if that’s your preference. After so many restarts over the years, driving game fans should find the approach liberating, especially given the number of tracks and cars available. It’s a relaxed standpoint that demonstrates confidence in players, both in terms of their skill and ability to set their own pace, and one echoed in-game by features such as the ability to jump the starter lights if you’re too eager with the accelerator.…

Publisher/developer Vostok Games Format PC Origin Ukraine Release Out now (Early Access to arena multiplayer only) Survarium’s PvP arena could be seen as a sop. Most of its players, after all, are keenly awaiting the game’s PvE survival component and, by extension, a spiritual successor to Stalker. But while the scale of Survarium isn’t yet close to the Stalker games, Vostok has already created an online shooter which has the heart of that revered series and also throws in plenty of new ideas of its own. Vostok counts former GSC Game World staff among its number, so it’s no surprise that Survarium’s weapons gravitate towards hand-cocked arms with punch. Go into the field with a sniper rifle and you’ll need to move cautiously and stay low; no-scope headshots, meanwhile, are…

It’s not just enemy forces that you can manipulate – the very environment can become your tool. When shot, magma flows spit out globs of lava that can turn the nearby patch of space into a minefield, and spiked plants try to skewer any incautious enough to pass close by. There are also spined globes that explode on contact like lethal dandelions. And that’s just in the asteroid fields of our hands-on – we’ve seen glimpses of metal bases, too. The only downside to these regularly used tricks is that the game’s procedural spaces can start to feel like reshuffled variations on a theme, and the final version will need a bit more variety in surprises or settings to retain the otherwise strong sense of place.…

Derek Watts Art director, BioWare John Sweeney Concept artist, Naughty Dog Nick Gindraux Concept artist, Naughty Dog Mike Lester Systems engineer, Thatgamecompany Tim Laning Curator of New Horizons During the past few years, museums across the western world, such as Washington DC’s Smithsonian and London’s V&A, have begun to examine videogames in a new kind of cultural context. Typically these exhibits have chosen to chart the medium’s evolution from its initial tentative emergence from the bellies of American tech universities into the bars and arcades of the 1970s, then through to the vivid complexity and variety of today. But the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden, The Netherlands, has used a different kind of lens for its examination of games in its New Horizons exhibition. Its curators, Tim Laning and Maarten Brands,…

Whenever Simogo attends a game conference, Simon Flesser will give his job title as “a little bit of everything”, while Magnus ‘Gordon’ Gardebäck is referred to as “Strongman”. It’s a typically unorthodox response for a two-man studio that wilfully defies pigeonholing, its output so far taking in whimsical action games and text-based thrillers, rhythmic heists and wintry horrors. The ability to wrongfoot an audience is clearly one of the secrets of its success. “It’s always about wanting to make things that feel exciting for us to make – things that will surprise people as well as ourselves,” Flesser says. In a risk-averse market, this desire to buck convention is a rare quality indeed. Based in Malmö, Sweden, this odd-couple pairing first met at now-defunct studio Southend Interactive, the first game-related…

Publisher/developer Frontier Developments Format PC Release Out now We’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Anacondas on fire off the shoulder of Eranin. We’ve watched beam lasers glitter in the dark near Kremainn Three. And we’ve spent an inordinate amount of time repeatedly seeking docking permission at busy outpost stations. Time to try again. While you’ll encounter plenty of spectacular sights as you travel around whichever cluster you gravitate towards in Frontier’s disorienting and remarkable 400-billion-system virtual Milky Way, most of your time in Elite: Dangerous will be spent engaged in rather more prosaic activities, not mirroring the nonstop action suggested by the game’s frenetic launch trailer. Queuing is certainly high up on the list. Or rather, wishing that you could queue. Dangerous’s adherence to the imagined realities of galactic…

Publisher Deep Silver Developer High Voltage Software, Volition Format 360, PC, PS3, PS4 (version tested), Xbox One Release Out now We never thought the phrase ‘ugly as sin’ was meant to be taken literally, but High Voltage Software – contractor on this standalone Saints Row IV expansion and best known for another hellish excursion, The Conduit – has other ideas. Gat Out Of Hell is a disgusting-looking game in many more ways than are tonally appropriate, with blocky character models, muddy environments, miserably low-detail vehicles, and a skybox and lava textures seemingly borrowed from an N64 title. Any notion that detail has been sacrificed at the altar of performance evaporates when the first big battle causes the frame rate to tank, and while there’s a commendable sense of speed when…

Fighting Climax was built for Sega’s Ring Edge 2 arcade system, and the publisher has lent much to the game. Virtua Fighter’s Akira is the arcade mode’s boss, with assist support from Pai Chan. There are Sega backgrounds, too, but they sit rather oddly within the game as a whole. Seeing modern anime fighters flinging vending machines at each other in front of Valkyria Chronicles tanks – or, worse, in Green Hill Zone – proves too jarring a disconnect. At least Sonic isn’t playable.…

Our return to Finland brings meetings with both established studios and fledgling startups, and with creators of both free-to-play mobile titles and PC games. It’s a reflection of the diversity of a region that has powered its way to prominence in recent years and now faces up to what happens next, as discussed in our roundtable interview 1 (p124). Our profiles section opens with a visit to Mindfield Games 2 (p128), a new company staking its future on the promise of virtual reality, before moving on to Kempele’s Finger soft 3 (p130), the self-styled punk outfit with mobile sensation Hill Climb Racing on its roster. At Small Giant Games 4 (p132), we discover how a group of Habbo Hotel veterans are embarking on mobile action titles, before a visit to…

Founded 2013 Employees 9 URL www.mindfieldgames.com Current project Pollen STUDIO INSIGHT Ville Kivistö CEO and co-founder Olli Sinerma Co-founder Unlike most Finnish game startups, Mindfield isn’t focused on free-toplay entertainment. Instead, it’s pinning its future on virtual reality games, leading with the intriguing Pollen, which is billed as a firstperson exploration game and features tremendously atmospheric environments. Co-founders Ville Kivistö and Olli Sinerma tell us more. Why did you choose to specialise in VR game development, with Oculus Rift? Ville Kivistö Well, it’s just such a big leap, compared to any other device. It’s like going from… Olli Sinerma …board games to digital games. That’s the sort of step it is. When you first experience modern VR, it makes quite an impression. Is it difficult to keep that momentum going, to…

Founded 2013 Employees 16 URL www.playraven.com Selected softography Spymaster Current projects Convoy Commander, Nano STUDIO INSIGHT Lasse Seppänen CEO and co-founder Once the head of the Alan Wake team at Remedy, and with experience dating back to 1998, Lasse Seppänen is a relatively old hand on the Finnish development scene, with countless projects under his belt. Having shipped Spymaster in 2013, his ambitions for PlayRaven are gathering steam. When we previously visited, you were about to launch your first game, Spymaster. How did it pan out? We were very worried about discovery. Everybody says it’s so hard to be discovered – to get downloads you have to buy them; you have to have a million dollars in the bank just for buying users. But we didn’t spend one cent on getting…

Founded 2013 Employees 45 URL www.nextgames.com Current projects Compass Point: West, The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land STUDIO INSIGHT Joakim Achrén Co-founder and CPO Jay Ranki Head of studio When we previously visited Next Games, the team shared one office at the company’s HQ, but today it’s spread over multiple floors, with a freshly installed in-house sauna facility. As they prepare to launch their debut title, Joakim Achrén and Jay Ranki explain the company’s progress in more detail. What was the inspiration behind Next Games’ first release? Joakim Achrén Compass Point: West started as an idea I had about destroying oil derricks in the wild west, with these old ’49ers throwing dynamite at them, making them explode, and then creating an interesting gameplay element with player-versus-player and player-versusenvironment. In terms of…