Innehållsförteckning för February 2016 från Edge

As a new year in videogames begins, as well as looking to the future we find ourselves looking at the past – or at least something that was born there. 2016 is the year in which fully fledged virtual reality will be reborn (last year’s mobile-based solutions were just appetisers), with dedicated technology due from Sony, Oculus and Valve/HTC, and it’s a reworking of a 2001 game that has us most excited about the forthcoming revolution. Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Rez has never been short on the ability to transport players to another dimension, but in PlayStation VR form the game ascends to new heights as it places you inside an audiovisual landscape and delivers sensations capable of changing the way you think about videogames. After a visit to Sony’s PlayStation Experience…

When the Hollywood actor Shia LaBeouf invited people to call his mobile phone for a chat as part of an art project hosted in Liverpool’s Fact gallery, the 21-year-old videogame designer William Pugh reacted with typical irreverence. Rather than attempt to speak with the actor, Pugh instead posted a seemingly innocuous tweet publicising the installation. He had, however, changed the phone number to his own, thereby diverting calls intended for LaBeouf to his own home in Halifax, West Yorkshire. During the course of the day Pugh fielded 80 or so phone calls including, amusingly, one from LaBeouf himself. The prank is typical of Pugh’s irreverent approach to life. When he took to the stage at the glitzy IGF awards in San Francisco in 2014 to collect an award for The…

Game Tekken 7: Fated Retribution Manufacturer Bandai Namco A surprise announcement at Bandai Namco’s The King Of Iron Fist Tournament 2015, Tekken 7: Fated Retribution is described as a “true follow-up” to the machine that’s been in Japanese arcades since March. Though it’s not quite a sequel, Fated Retribution is a ground-up revamp of the existing game, including improved graphics, a completely refreshed selection of character outfits, and new-look stages. More arresting than any of those changes, however, is the introduction of Street Fighter’s Akuma to the roster. Tekken 7’s trailers included a scene in which Kazumi Mishima asked a mysterious stranger to kill her husband, Heihachi, if she were unable to go through with it herself. Fated Retribution’s trailer reveals that stranger to be Akuma, suggesting he’s set to…

Issue 288 Focus testing As someone who’s grown up gaming, 2015 was equal parts spectacular and underwhelming for me. I say this because the sheer number of blockbusters has been incredible, but I haven’t seen any of them through to conclusion or stuck with them beyond the first couple of weeks. I’m not citing the hoary old ‘I’m older now and have less time to play games due to family commitments’ excuse (though that does factor into things in its own way), but rather a lack of any great reason to continue squeezing juice out of these games after I have experienced the core of what they have to offer. Just a cursory glance at the list of big releases raises the pulse. Star Wars Battlefront, Fallout 4, The Witcher…

When we speak to him at PSX, still spinning from our first experience of Rez Infinite (p38), Tetsuya Mizuguchi warns against the dangers of pursuing realism in VR. It’s a potential creative cul-de-sac he’s in no danger of striding into with his jaw-looseningly psychedelic virtual-reality rendition of the Dreamcast classic. Rez remains an idiosyncratic, refreshing creation even today, and Mizuguchi goes further by rejecting many of the rules that are gradually coalescing for VR developers. CCP’s EVE: Valkyrie (p42) is more traditional in its approach to VR game design, seating the player in a solid-feeling spacecraft and sending them out to battle as one of several combatant classes designed to complement other players’ choices. But even this more familiar setup resists the drudgery of reality for a dramatic mini space…

Developer PopCap Publisher EA Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin US Release February 20 Beneath goofy scenes of a wand-wielding rose turning opponents into goats, zombies charging around on roaring jackhammers, and an angry stick of corn spitting projectiles while wearing a soggy bowl of cereal around his neck, Plants Vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 is serious business. With this sequel, PopCap’s energetic classbased shooter grows away from the top-down iOS tower defence on which it took root and blossoms into an experience even more involved than 2014’s initial foray into thirdperson action. “The art style helps take the edge off,” senior gameplay designer Chris Fox tells us, “but from a gameplay point of view, all the designers on our team are hardcore gamers. For us, it’s important to have…

We may not quite remember it as the year the current console generation’s gloves came off – there were, once again, too many delays and troubled launches for that. But 2015 was certainly a year of barriers coming down. Indie studios were becoming ever more ambitious, spending the year taking on the big boys in terms of visuals and scope – and, inevitably, incurring a few delays of their own. 2014’s green shoots of recovery in Japan blossomed in 2015, with its studios behind some of the year’s very best work, and an announcement slate that suggests the nation’s shift to mobile and handhelds was not as permanent as many believed. Moribund genres sparked back into life, with space sims, rhythm action and even the humble FMV game raking in…

Things can get hairy pretty quickly in Avalanche Studios’ Just Cause games, but the player always has enough tools at their disposal to improvise a solution – or, if all else fails, an escape route. And the developer certainly has plenty of experience when it comes to winging it. When Just Cause – then known as Terror In The Tropics – was conceived, the newly formed studio set up a meeting with Eidos, despite having nothing more to show than a short design document. As a matter of fact, it didn’t even have an office. Co-founders Christofer Sundberg and Linus Blomberg hurriedly put a plan into action, calling up old colleagues and temporarily borrowing office space from a friend in a media company. “We basically staged an office with computers…

Rainbow Six Siege’s levels are elaborate, sprawling creations. Among them there’s a neon-lit, grimylooking strip club. A grand embassy complete with marble staircase and super-cooled server room. A family home with an expensive-looking basement gym and a maritime-themed kid’s bedroom. And a luxuriously outfitted take on Air Force One. It’s a selection that makes for a broad range of atmospheres as you move between gunning down terrorists in a luggage hold to attempting the delicate extraction of a hostage from a family home, but the one thing that ties these disparate environments together is that they are – to varying extents – rather fragile. Even today, being able to shoot through walls at your targets feels liberating. While there have been plenty of experiments with similar tech in the past,…

Developer/publisher Vlambeer Format PC, PS4 (version tested), Vita Release Out now Soon, we won’t be able to move for Roguelikes – or, for that matter, Roguelike-likes. Things are already getting a little crowded, in fact, ever since Derek Yu’s Spelunky apparently caused the industry to collectively catch on to the notion of the structure being inherently compulsive, and to the presence of an audience hungering after flintier challenges. The likes of Rogue Legacy prove these games don’t necessarily have to do anything particularly interesting mechanically so long as they have a half-decent hook. Nuclear Throne’s hook is disarmingly simple but blisteringly effective. In short, it gets a move on. Speed isn’t everything in Nuclear Throne, but compared to its contemporaries this is a short, sharp shock, a defibrillator paddle to…

Developer CCP Games Shanghai Publisher CCP Games Format Gear VR Release Out now Surprisingly, it’s not the eyes that complain the loudest, despite being asked to gaze into a stereoscopic display inches away from our corneas. Nor is it the neck, which is bearing the weight of the Gear VR headset while the head jerks back and forth to line up enemy targets in our sight. No, the discomfort is in the right shoulder, the result of an extended play session tapping our right index finger to our temples. On the right side of the Gear VR hardware is a small touchpad. When pressed, it fires our guns; a backward swipe reloads, and a forward one deploys special weapon pickups. At first, we feel like Marvel’s Cyclops. A few hours…

Developer Sony San Diego Publisher SCE Format PS4 Release Out now Dave! Come back! The platoon is making a carefully planned assault on an enemy base; yes, you’re the cannon fodder, a meat shield for our primary damage-dealer with the grenade launcher, but war is sacrifice. And wandering off on your own, directly into the path of that sniper tower, is only going to send you to your maker all the sooner. You’re supposed to stay with your comrades, not split off from the group on the whim of a dice roll. War is hell, sure, but no one ever said anything about it being this random. Sony San Diego clearly has a bit of a thing for RNG. It’s what drags Dave needlessly off course to his doom and…

The Moscone Center is not normally quite so hyperactive. We know this venue best as the home of the Game Developers Conference. For a few days every March this San Francisco convention centre is filled with the great and good of the dev scene, a relaxed, cool, restrained game of Business Card Swapsies and Count The Fedora, attendees saving the raucousness for the next night of parties. Yet the 2,000 PlayStation fans who got to the Moscone early enough to see Sony’s keynote session are making one hell of a racket. It begins well before the show has even started when Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail gets up from his seat to head outside and is spotted by fans and cheered loudly. That Rami Ismail is lauded for simply being Rami Ismail…

Brian Limond, better known as Limmy, was a web developer before gaining notoriety through his website, www.limmy.com, and podcast. Following appearances in the videogame-focused online TV show Consolevania and then BBC Scotland’s follow-up, Videogaiden, he went on to create Limmy’s Show. Here, he talks about the urge to create, GTAV crew woes, and the previously unheard-of Commodore Connoisseur. In 2008, you uploaded a spectacular Guitar Hero III Through The Fire And Flames performance on expert. Have you played World Tour? No, I haven’t. There’s no point. It would be like playing my five-year-old son at chess – I would demolish the opposition. There’s no challenge. It’s like when Alexander the Great cried when there were no more worlds to conquer. Do you play with your son often? Aye, we play.…

Illustration marshdavies.com There’s a brilliantly videogamey moment in the moody drug-war thriller Sicario, when Benicio del Toro, infiltrating a drug lord’s compound, is seen as a tiny white humanoid figure through aerial thermal vision from an overwatching drone. There are other tiny white humanoid figures (enemies) and a red targeting reticle over the main house. Once del Toro gets to the front door a radio-support guy announces, through atmospheric static: “Six remain.” (He means people who are still alive in the compound.) Then the support guy says, “Going blind,” because del Toro has slipped into the house and is no longer visible. This is an example in which videogames deserve the credit for expanding the cinematic lexicon, while cinema deserves credit for understanding the different dramatic possibilities of its aesthetic…

Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Montreal) Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Canada Release February 23 Warning! The owl is returning and will arrive in 35 seconds.” As ominous threats go, this is up there with Darius’s “A huge boss is approaching fast.” In Primal it’s no reason to panic, heralding instead the return of a feathery ally you deploy to scout out camps or rain down wasp nests on rival tribes. It is, in many ways, a more colourful take on Far Cry’s tactical camera; an evolution triggered by a de-evolution – the decision to relocate the series to 10,000BC. The owl is Takkar’s, a tribesman separated from his hunting party and forced to eke out a new life in Oros, a vast glacial valley. The setting is such a, well, far…

Designed by Magic: The Gathering’s Richard Garfield and considered to be one of his greatest designs, Netrunner was, until late 2012, a largely forgotten collectible card game. Re-released by Fantasy Flight Games – the publisher of well-received board and card games such as X-Wing Miniatures Game and A Game Of Thrones – as Android: Netrunner, the game has since picked up legions of fans, among them videogame designers and game academics. At the 2015 Android: Netrunner World Championships – part of Fantasy Flight Games’ five-day Organized Play World Championships at the company’s own Game Center in an industrial park in Roseville, Minnesota – we watch over 250 players from across the world compete, and try to identify what makes Netrunner the modern game designer’s game. Constructed asymmetrically, Netrunner sees players…

Star Wars Battlefront PS4 The Battle Of Jakku DLC adds two new maps and a fresh mode, Turning Point, in which Rebels must take one of three available points to push the Empire back to the next set, before eventually going all in on a final area. Although it’s only a minor twist on Walker Assault, the option to split up or consolidate your efforts makes for a fraught and urgent-feeling encounter – and adds welcome variety to map rotation. Destiny PS4 It may not have been the chunky content drop we really wanted for Christmas, but Bungie’s Sparrow Racing League makes for a pleasant change of pace, and provides another path to endgame gear. In regular Crucible, a balance update has shifted the meta, though not as substantially as…

Developer/publisher Harmonix Music Systems Format PS4 Release Out now Were a videogame’s success measured by how effectively it transports you to another place, great rhythm-action games must be among the most triumphant. Sunk into the state of pure concentration and flow that difficult music games demand, it’s easy to forget who, or where, you are. The signals travelling from your ears and eyes to your brain translate seamlessly into the movements of your hands, without intervention from your conscious self. Playing Amplitude on Expert feels like a mind-meld between human, music and videogame. It’s simultaneously blissfully relaxing and incomparably energising. It’s not unusual to come away from a properly finger-bending song with shaking hands and wide, staring eyes. Experienced Freqs, as players of Harmonix’s early twitch games style themselves, will…

Developer/publisher Codemasters Format PC Release Out now Amomentary lapse in concentration is all it takes for our Stratos to end up facing the wrong way, rump buried in the shovelled snow at the side of the stage. It wasn’t a big impact, and certainly the most significant dent is to our pride, but for this to have happened in the fourth split is disastrous – there’s no rewind function to undo our mistake, only the choice of restarting the stage entirely or soldiering on in the hope that we can claw back the lost time during the next stage. Rally driving is a brutal sport, and Dirt Rally goes out of its way to make sure you know it. After nearly eight months in Early Access, Codemasters’ latest Dirt entry…

Developer/publisher Image & Form Format 3DS Release Out now Like a practised pilferer, SteamWorld Heist has mastered the art of the theft. It knows what to steal and where to steal from, and how best to use those spoils to its advantage. It understands, too, when fresh thinking is needed, using inventive new ways to rework old ideas. The result is a side-scrolling strategy game with a clarity of design and a strong sense of purpose. You begin by raiding a series of procedurally generated enemy ships, steadily amassing a motley band of space thieves. Yes, your group of corsairs and crooks want money – or rather water, the SteamWorld’s most valuable commodity – but they’re a likeable bunch, every bit as motivated by the adventure, the camaraderie, and the…

For years now, attendees to America’s principal two annual videogame events, E3 and GDC, will have encountered Joe Santulli and Sean Kelley’s singular historical game collection. The exhibit contains not only rare and unreleased games, arcade cabinets signed by their creators, and swathes of fabulous merchandise (Nintendo badges, Atari patches and so on) but also extraordinarily rare artifacts such as a Sega Neptune prototype and an Atari Mindlink controller. Now the collection, which has taken 25 years to assemble, is being made public in the form of America’s first museum to codify and celebrate the ever-shifting medium. As the National Videogame Museum opens its doors, they tell us why they’re so committed to recording gaming’s rich history. How would you describe what you’re doing with the project? Joe Santulli It’s…

“I don’t believe there’s any real meaning… Perhaps Mr Iwata had meant to tell me and then never got the chance.” Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima tugs at the heartstrings in discussing how the company’s new console, NX, was named “Unfortunately he was informed by a lawyer representing Konami that he would not be allowed to accept any awards.” Geoff Keighley addresses Hideo Kojima’s absence from The Game Awards, where MGSV nabbed two gongs “However you think about this, this is a negative for business… Going out of your way to make enemies with the world has no meaning.” Former Square Enix president Yoichi Wada continues the assault on Konami “It’s great that a luxury car brand like Mercedes-Benz recognises the ability to create fun courses and share them with others.”…

WEBSITE Nintendo controller teardown www.bit.ly/controllerteardown Nintendo’s latest patent, which details an oval gamepad whose facia is a touchsensitive display, has sparked plenty of conjecture over what the company’s next console’s controller might look like. But hacker and engineer Dave Evans is more interested in Nintendo’s existing designs. In his two-part teardown, he dismantles the lot (well, nearly – the Virtual Boy pad, Power Glove and Super Scope are omitted), starting with the NES controller and finishing with the Wii U GamePad. There are some fascinating discoveries. Did you know, for example, that the colours of the SNES controller’s buttons are noted in relief on the inside of the facia moulding? Or that the early case moulds were created extra thick to resist kids’ rough handling? VIDEO The Color Of The…

The day before a long flight, I go through a certain pointless ritual. I load up every game-playing device I own with new games, ensure each is fully charged, and mentally plan out the entire flight time. This time I’ll finally finish Persona 4 Golden. I’ll finally get into Monster Hunter 4. And I’ll check out all those flavour-of-the-month iOS games I’ve never played because none of them are called Puzzle & Dragons (which I’d happily play all the way to Australia, if only it had an offline mode). Then I get on the plane, drink too much, and spend half an hour fluffing combos in the Vita version of Ultimate Marvel Vs Capcom 3 before slowly passing out in front of a terrible film. I was on a long-haul…

Developer/publisher CCP Games Format PC, PS4 Origin Iceland Release 2016 The countdown begins as our ship adjusts itself on glittering red lanes before locking into place. Three… Two… One. Suddenly we’re propelled forward at such force we almost fall out of our chair, the speed and the roar rapidly increasing until there’s nothing but silence. We’ve gone from a warm clone bath to cold space in ten seconds and, aside from a pounding heartbeat, it’s an almost tranquil experience. Until the lasers start firing, that is. CCP’s firstperson space shooter, which occupies the same universe as sci-fi MMO EVE Online, could be virtual reality’s most pivotal title. There’s a reason Oculus has chosen to include a copy with each headset that launches later this year. It’s the first experience many…

Developer/publisher Sega (Yakuza Studio) Format PS4 Origin Japan Release 2016 Ten minutes in, we finally get to press a button, and it’s to skip a line of dialogue. Soon afterward, we’re strolling through the streets of ’80s Kamurocho, with red no-entry signs forbidding us from exploring any side alleys. As we push through a group of pedestrians, one glides sideways out of Kazuma Kiryu’s path. Moments later, we retire to a bar for some whisky and all-night karaoke. Venturing out into the Tokyo sun, half-cut, we walk towards a pink objective marker and another cutscene lasting several minutes. If you were expecting Yakuza 0 to shed two generations of baggage, you’re in for a disappointment. Not that those who petitioned hard for a belated PS3 localisation for Yakuza 5 –…

Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Montreal) Format PC, PS4 (version tested), Xbox One Release Out now Soon after a match starts, Rainbow Six Siege’s levels are reduced to a mess of debris and punctured walls, exposing the naked building framework beneath. It makes for a spectacular backdrop against which to fight, but also serves as an unfortunately accurate analogy for how quickly Siege’s flimsy cladding gives way to an unappealing core. Even so, the game’s headline promise of being able to create your own breach points and sight lines through levels is undeniably exhilarating and, for the most part, delivered. Ubisoft’s Real Blast tech offers a broad spread of possible strategic choices as you attempt to extract hostages, defuse bombs and kill terrorists. But while there’s genuine tension in planning your entry to…

Ryan Lesser, creative lead on Amplitude, has been at Harmonix for 16 years, and has been a part of every game it’s ever made. He was lead artist and art director on Frequency and the original Amplitude. Has an Amplitude remake been something that Harmonix was thinking about doing since 2003, or has it only recently become realistic? Pretty much every year, some subset of us would talk about it being a game we could bring back, but for a lot of reasons it was never the right time for it. But then over the past couple of years, as we started thinking about building games in different ways and utilising some of the new platforms, it started looking like a good fit. We wanted to try out crowdfunding, and…

Oops. There goes another building. Our apologies to the family of the allied grunt who just took our misplaced RPG round to the noggin. And cripes, this is awkward, but when that other fellow was stuck in a giant spider’s web and we tried to save him by shooting it down, we instead blew his leg off and sent him cartwheeling toward the horizon. We should send some flowers. Earth Defense Force has never been a good game for an Englishman. Were the screen not constantly teeming with countless aggressive, fast-moving enemies, we’d spend more time apologising to those we’ve accidentally wronged than saving those who are still alive. Earth Defense Force 4.1 is a remixed and expanded version of Earth Defense Force 2025, which was in turn a remixed…

Developer/publisher Shin’en Multimedia Format Wii U Release Out now Three years ago, Shin’en greeted Wii U’s launch with the technically excellent but generic and soulless twin-stick shooter Nano Assault Neo, and we wondered whether the German studio might one day make a game that played as good as it looked. Now, with the console heading into its twilight, Shin’en is back with a technically excellent but generic and soulless futuristic racing game, and we’re still left wondering. At least this time it’s working in a genre that hasn’t reached saturation point – though the series’ return probably has less to do with Shin’en having a strong new idea, so much as a desire to capitalise on the continued absence of F-Zero. Certainly, there are some who’ll embrace this as if…

Everyone is out for themselves in the world of games. It’s the survival of the fittest. Whatever you have to do, whoever you need to trample on, you just hang in the until the next level, when things, briefly, get a little easier. Then you reload and start again. That’s what developing games is like, as we all know, but it’s the same when you play them. What people now call, without irony, a doggie dog world. And it leads to something people are calling, also without any irony, narrative dissonance. This is the when the characters get created, fleshed out and realised to such a degree that they overtake anything you’d see in a film or TV show. In the dozens of hours you’ll devote to a game, the…