Innehållsförteckning för January 2019 från Edge

You might not have noticed, but the outside world isn’t a great place to be at the moment – and not just because of the short days and too-early mornings we expect at this time of year. Games and winters have long gone hand in hand, but with so much bile and disorder out there, there’s never been a better reason to stop indoors with the curtains closed. Games aren’t just about escapism, however. They are also about healing, and there’s a positive, restorative air to our latest issue. It’s perhaps most obvious in Tetris Effect, which we belatedly review this month. Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s latest is a relaxing, cleansing experience that makes you feel a little more positive about the world and your place within it. We also catch up…

Before he founded Onion Games in 2012, Yoshiro Kimura felt lost, a man “without a cause”. He’d left Grasshopper Manufacture, after producing Suda 51’s No More Heroes and its sequel and directing the wonderful Little King’s Story. And with the Tohoku earthquake still fresh in his mind, Kimura found himself thinking about his career. “Games didn’t seem to play a part in helping humanity, in helping Japan rebuild,” he says. Meanwhile, the industry he loved seemed to be increasingly focused on social games, and that just wasn’t Kimura at all. He wasn’t sure where to go or what to do. The turning point came during a trip to San Francisco to attend 2012’s Independent Games Festival. Kimura looked up at a huge screen, showcasing a whole host of indie games,…

Game Chaos Jump Manufacturer Minority Media This is quite the volte face from Minority Media, the Montreal developer behind 2012 PSN game Papo & Yo. After discovering that puzzle adventure games about alcoholic parents are only ever going to be a niche proposition, the studio turned its attention to virtual reality. Its first release, Time Machine VR, was one of the very few early Rift games to clear $1 million in revenue. Its follow-up, The Other Room, tanked. Rather than follow that graph to its logical conclusion, the studio is pivoting again, this time to the arcade. Chaos Jump itself isn’t too exciting: it’s a fourplayer action game in which you fight robots across 18 levels which are randomly generated each time. But Chaos Jump is notable for how it…

Beyond redemption I was waiting with bated breath for the Edge review of Red Dead Redemption 2, especially as it came out after I had already bought the game. I knew it would score well, I’m sure most of my fellow readers thought the same. But as I played it, I had a nagging voice in my head that said, ‘This isn’t an Edge 10’. And then your review came out, and it was, and I was puzzled. I always saw the ‘10’ as something revolutionary. Something that truly made you play in a new way. This was HD, 4k, hyper-real Red Dead, but it was still Red Dead. Another downbeat story doesn’t change that. It was why I was utterly unsurprised when Breath Of The Wild got one. And…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar Do you remember Bam Entertainment? It was a short-lived publisher of shovelware that raised a bunch of money by pitching that it could get cheap movie licences and turn them into even cheaper games, then burnt all the cash and went out of business almost immediately. (Not to be confused with Brash Entertainment, which had the same pitch and did the same exact thing.) Anyway, in 2002 I had pitched a PS2 launch game to them called Ice 9 for an impossibly small amount of money that was originally based on the Colin Farrell star vehicle The Recruit. It died quickly and painfully, but before that we crunched hard. Like, ‘sleep at your desk’ hard. ‘Break up with your partner and then drive to the airport at eight…

Developer/publisher Big Robot Format PC Origin UK Release 2019 The light might well keep you safe, but after the blue-sky sci-fi of The Signal From Tölva, Big Robot’s latest is a return to much darker territory. And we’re not just talking about the colour palette – while Sir, You Are Being Hunted offered a more playful brand of scare, this is the studio adopting the tone and tenor of serious horror. Set in a desolate, procedurally generated world patrolled by twitchy machines – instructively, the first area you visit (and the game’s original working title) is Bleak Road – it all but demands to be played with the lights down and the volume up. “We do atmospheric stuff pretty well,” creative lead Jim Rossignol says. No kidding. For all its…

Less is rarely more in videogames, where a sequel is only judged to be as good as the number of new bullet points on its announcement press release. Good design, however, is often about what you take out, not what you put in. It’s another example of the awkward spot in which games find themselves: art, yet technology; playthings, but products. Still, we doubt Bethesda was purposely going for a minimalist design while it was making Fallout 76 (p110). After all, the game represents the publisher’s first foray into the game-as-service arena – a sort-of-genre in which the early, and quite obvious, consensus appears to be that you need to make a massive world and fill it to bursting with things to do in order to keep people playing. Yet…

Perhaps, in hindsight, Brendan Iribe was always meant to leave Oculus. The co-founder and one-time CEO of the company that sparked virtual reality’s return has enjoyed a successful career, sure – but it’s one that’s been spent building up companies into perfect acquisition material, then walking once the deal’s done. He was a co-founder of Scaleform, the game UI middleware bought by Autodesk in 2011. From there he went to Gaikai, the cloud-streaming game technology Sony snapped up to lay the foundations for PlayStation Now. Iribe left Oculus in November, having been around since its inception in 2012. The cynic might wonder why he stuck it out for so long: Facebook’s $2.3 billion acquisition of Oculus completed in the summer of 2014. But it was not a big cheque that…

Who says the reaper has to be grim? A puzzle game in which you orchestrate fatal accidents by manipulating shadows and moving blocks, Felix The Reaper is about facing life’s greatest inevitability with a spring in your step. “Death is a rather depressing motive,” art director Mikkel Maltesen says, “but I ended up with a design that made Felix friendly, unthreatening, and round. Our historian, Søren Hein, found a medieval text describing death as an office clerk, so we went with a combination of a grey and boring office clerk and a dancing death. Working as an agent of death is a conformal, stiff thing, so dancing is Felix’s way to add colour to his trivial work.” Get ready to shimmy your way through a morbid nine-to-five when Felix The…

Yuri Lowenthal is an actor best known for his voice work in videogames. His career has included work in theatre, film and TV, and roles such as the Prince of Persia in The Sands Of Time and Yosuke in Persona 4 – but these days, he’s perhaps best known for voicing the web-slinging star of Marvel’s Spider-Man. Here, Lowenthal discusses a dream role, an industry in flux and his ever-worsening skills with a controller. What have you seen change in the game industry over the years as an actor? There’s been an increase in the amount of motion capture that is done with the actors who are also performing the voice roles. That’s been exciting, because I come from a theatre background originally, and it’s sort of like a return…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar The joy of videogames is that they let us live out cathartic fantasies, whether that be swinging through Manhattan as Spider-Man, defeating hordes of monsters as a bald space marine, or pushing levers as a ponytailed burglar of ancient treasures. But what if your fantasy is to beat up and kill feminists? Not to worry: that too is now possible, thanks to Red Dead Redemption 2. Rockstar’s cowboy epic is not, of course, primarily designed as a feminist-abusing simulator, but it can certainly be played that way, as a YouTuber known as Shirrako has monomanically demonstrated on YouTube. One video, entitled Annoying Feminist Fed To Alligator, does just what it says on the tin. In another, Shirrako stands in front of a suffragette on the street while she…

Sometimes you just need to get away from it all – to put life on pause for a few hours, and happily get lost in a fantasy world. Indeed, videogames are such a powerful form of escapism that there are those who would (and frequently, irritatingly do) argue that’s all they’re good for. This is not true, of course, but neither is the idea of videogames solely as didacticism or social commentary. As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Set in the series’ alternate universe of Strangereal, combat flight sim Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown (p38) is less about pure fidelity than you might expect. The aircraft might be real-life replicas, Unreal Engine 4 visuals polished to a high shine, but for series brand director Kazutoki Kono, Ace…

Developer/publisher Housemarque Format PC Origin Finland Release 2019 Arcade or no arcade, there is still the occasional glimmer of the old Housemarque in Stormdivers. Yes, it’s a thirdperson battle-royale shooter in the same mould as Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, as we drop into the map and methodically work our way through buildings looking for weapons and supplies. But soon, we begin to notice the telltale signs of the well-respected Finnish studio: Alpha’s brilliant short-range teleport, for instance. The ability is at once offensive and defensive, catapulting Alpha about 20 feet across the map. One moment, we’re using it to evade fire: the next, we whip past another player in a helix of particle effects and pump a shot into the back of their head. “That teleport is sort of the closest thing…

Developer/publisher PhiGames Format PC Origin UK Release TBA The dash hits us like a ton of bricks. Our enemy doesn’t get off lightly either. Plucked from a fizzling orb atop a staircase of shattered cubes, the ability allows us to barrel directly into a laser-eyed sentry turret, smashing it apart. But for us, the real impact is in the animation, not its result. Pressing the dash button results in a precious few frames of windup – anticipation and pressure crackling like electricity – before the movement unleashes itself, searing across the screen. There’s something about that tiny delay that makes the power we’ve just acquired feel even more significant, the precocious little rocket punch raring to go every single time. It makes a lot of sense: Recompile is a Metroidvania…

According to Nintendo Treehouse’s Nate Bihldorff, Masahiro Sakurai approaches each new Smash Bros “as if it’s the last”. That’s patently obvious from the games, which practically groan under the weight of the new elements that are added each time, but also from the stories about Sakurai himself. While overseeing the orchestral recording for the soundtrack of Super Smash Bros Melee, he collapsed from fatigue, and was briefly hospitalised. More recently, during the development of the 3DS and Wii U entries, Sakurai ended up injuring his right arm through overwork, leaving him unable to personally engage in the rigorous testing he insists his games undergo. Happily, it seems Sakurai is managing his workload rather better these days, though the creator of Kirby and Super Smash Bros doesn’t look like a man…

Colour is a common tool in game design. Were you ever tempted to add it? That's something we discussed at the beginning of making the game. My art style was black and white. I wasn't comfortable with adding colour. I like to work with colours, but I find it really difficult – I don't have as much experience with it as drawing in black and white, so I'm a bit reticent about it. If we had added colour, it would have maybe felt too much like Where's Waldo – even though it's now a really obvious reference! I think if there was colour, there would be a huge change in the art style but also in the how the game would play. What did you learn from the process of…

Developer Sora Ltd, Bandai Namco Studios Publisher Nintendo Format Switch Release December 7 Masahiro Sakurai doesn’t work at Nintendo. It’s easy to forget that, with Super Smash Bros having grown from a secretive side project to become one of the company’s flagship series. Yet there remains a degree of separation; Sakurai is an outsider looking in. Bear that in mind and you can understand why, despite starring so many Nintendo favourites, Smash has never quite felt the same as those other big firstparty games. It has always been an anomaly: faster, weirder, more chaotic, less elegant than its labelmates. Nintendo has historically talked about design by subtraction, creativity prospering through self-imposed limitation. Sakurai, by contrast, has always favoured the kitchen-sink approach. If in doubt, just add more, and then keep…

Fortnite may be the biggest game on the planet right now, but surely there were better ways to open an Xbox livestream than with a montage piece of various people in freefall. Optics are everything, after all, and this was, we assume quite unintentionally, a bit on the nose. Still, Microsoft will feel like it left this event having stuck the landing. Insofar as the company has ever had a coherent set of goals for Xbox One, it at least had a core message here, and it drummed it in relentlessly. You could sum it up in two words, were it not repeated so often. Game Pass, Game Pass, Game Pass. Notionally the first event of its kind, XO18 was in fact a rebadging of the Xbox Fanfest in Mexico…

DIY Mini Controller Wheel bit.ly/3Dprintwheel While we appreciate that a large portion of our readership aren’t trendy twentysomething San Franciscans with 3D printers next to their pasta machines, this controller-mounted, thumb-steered mini driving wheel is of note even if you don’t have the facilities to fashion your own. If you do, however, pixel2’s free download seems well worth a tinker. With the help of a skateboard bearing, a bit of superglue and a paper clip, you can rig the cleverly designed rack-and-pinion mechanism to your controller’s sticks and steer your favourite Forza Horizon 4 vehicles with finer control. It’s not without its flaws – it’ll block your D-pad, and scratch your paint job over time unless cushioned correctly. But it’s a slick little piece of kit, and available ready-printed for…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar For the first time this week I ran down my Switch battery without leaving the house. Until now my Switch has only ever been used at home while connected to the TV, barring the occasional rainy afternoon Labo session with my eldest. It is in the dock, or in my bag. And then Diablo III came along. It’s a game I’ve only ever dabbled in, in spite of – or perhaps because of – the fact that its core loop, of hitting things to get new toys that make you hit things harder, is essentially my catnip. I tried it on PC, and bounced off it. I played it on PS4, and enjoyed the ten or so hours I spent with it, but drifted off after getting distracted…

ZA/UM. As a studio name, it’s awfully bold and affected. A little awkward and intractable, too; it doesn’t look right when not in all-caps. But for co-founder Robert Kurvitz, “It just looks hella cool, that slash there. It looks like the technical name of something that definitely exists and weighs eight tonnes.” And then there’s its Russian meaning, which is ‘from the mind’ or ‘for the mind’. “Just calling something that, it looks cultural. Like it’s not laughable.” Then again, it did come out of a drunken Tallinn evening in 2005. “We were just hanging around in total squalor and poverty,” says Kurvitz, who was the singer in a rock band called Ultramelanhool at the time. “We realised we needed to do something about it, and we put on DJ…

There’s a little-known Japanese adventure game from 1999, released by Pax Softnica (the studio which helped out on Mother and EarthBound) when the SNES was in its twilight days, that goes by the name of Famicom Bunko: Hajimari no Mori. It begins with a young city boy starting his summer holiday in the country, when he falls down a hill and briefly encounters an enigmatic young woman. And yes, believe it or not, she shows up in Super Smash Bros Ultimate’s Spirits mode, as ‘Girl from Hajimari no Mori’, played by the female villager from Animal Crossing. It’s at this moment – not when we clapped eyes on the final fighter-select screen, nor when we first realised the full enormity of the Spirits mode map – that we found ourselves…