Innehållsförteckning för June 2016 från Edge

We’ve heard it so many times. Some of us may have even uttered the words ourselves: “This is great, but… imagine it in VR.” Now that we’ve spent time immersed in VR with all sorts of games and other applications, and for extended periods rather than simply dabbling, the inappropriateness of the remark comes into grim focus. In compiling this issue’s Play section, for the first time in history a game caused one of our review staff to actually vomit. Videogames have long held the potential to mess with our bodies’ delicate systems. This parish’s own James Leach recalls a trip to see game designer Jeff Minter 25 years ago: “We went to his cottage in deepest Wales. We saw a variety of llama-related titles he was developing, and then…

The closures of two of the UK’s most highly regarded studios has raised new questions about the region’s ability to flourish in the ever-evolving videogame industry. If the Microsoft-owned Lionhead and Sony-owned Evolution can’t find success on these shores in 2016, what does it mean for British companies that don’t have the backing of multinational, platform-owning corporations? In Bossa Studios, creator of Surgeon Simulator and the forthcoming Worlds Adrift, we find an optimistic, albeit realistic, perspective. “It’s a great time here [in the UK], and then there are challenges,” says Henrique Olifiers, the company’s co-founder and ‘gamer-inchief’. “If you look at things like the tax breaks the UK industry received, there’s some advantages we have now that we asked for over many years, and we finally got some help there.…

Videogame-triggered outbursts on mainstream TV arguably peaked back in the ’90s with Dave Perry’s infamous GamesMaster hissy fit. But comedy duo Steve McNeil and Sam Pamphilon are determined to top his stroppy effort with Go 8-Bit, a TV version (commissioned by UK channel Dave) of their Edinburgh live show in which inebriated comedians play games against each other. The live show was originally developed in 2013 while the pair were working on a sitcom together. “We had this other idea for a show where we got comedians drunk and got them to be rude to each other while they played Mario Kart,” McNeil tells us. “We figured we could probably charge drunken Scottish people £10 to watch that, so we just did it for fun. And then it became far…

AP/Press Association Images “There was no taxpayer money involved, and I take full responsibility. I’m going to pay everything back… with interest.” AP/Press Association Images “What the fuck is Pokémon?” “I’m not a big fan of ‘Xbox Oneand-a-half’. If we’re going to move forward, I want to move forward in big numbers.” “I think it’s safe to say that we underestimated the popularity of some of the singleplayer features.”…

WEBSITE Diablo proposal www.bit.ly/diabloproposal Diablo creator David Brevik has uploaded the now coffeestained seven-page proposal he used to pitch the game back in ’94. The document was put together while Brevik was still working at Condor, the studio he founded (read more in E286’s Collected Works). Brevik envisioned the game as a turn-based Roguelike with randomly generated dungeons. While the game would eventually transform into the authored, realtime action RPG that revolutionised the genre, the proposal’s introduction reveals that the spirit of what Diablo became was there from the start. “As games today substitute gameplay with multimedia extravaganzas,” it reads, “and strive toward needless scale and complexity, we seek to reinvigorate the hack-and-slash, feel-good gaming audience.” VIDEO The Faking Of… Nintendo NX www.bit.ly/nxfake With Nintendo’s NX due this year but…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar The path from videogame sarcasticairquotes-journalism to videogame sarcastic-airquotes-PR is a well-trodden one. It is, in my experience at least, the most common next step on the career path for writers, and for good reason: the money’s better, you’ve got the contacts and the relationships, and you know how that part of the industry works inside out. I always appreciate – OK, sometimes appreciate – when a writer who jumped the fence approaches us, because they understand how we work, the sort of timescales we operate within, and what we need to get the job done. The focus is so overwhelmingly on online and video these days that plenty of PRs think two watermarked screenshots, a logo and an embargo set four days after an event is somehow going…

From a technical standpoint, Naughty Dog is the jewel in PlayStation’s crown. Mark Cerny’s Advanced Technology Group is based in a walled-off corner of the studio floor, and the Uncharted maker was one of the first stops on Hideo Kojima’s fact-finding tech tour after he signed up with Sony. What’s the secret? “We do a lot of bruteforce management of assets,” lead game designer Ricky Cambier says. “The second we’re done with an animation, we unload it. That gives us room to focus on the environment. Take the marketplace demo. Drake has all these animations for walking and exploring, but they’re not loaded, because we need that space for more, more, more. I’d be curious to know how many other studios do it.” Not many, we suspect.…

Gears Of War 4’s post-release content strategy is largely as you’d expect. It’ll launch with ten maps, but The Coalition plans to rotate new and old maps in and out of the lineup over time based on player feedback. All will be free, though you can buy maps in order to host private matches when they’re out of rotation. The idea, says creative director Chuck Osieja, is to create the same backand-forth with the service that Riot has with League Of Legends’ free Champions. You can also buy crates with cosmetic personalisation items or earn them in-game, while multiplayer challenges grant XP rewards when completing tasks a certain way – winning a few rounds of TDM using a certain custom skin, for example.…

Developer/publisher System Era Format PC Origin US, Canada Release 2016 Survival games aren’t generally known for their sunny outlooks. Most have their moments of levity, of course, but the struggle to maintain existence in the face of fierce opposition – both natural and otherwise – is rarely a cheerful one. Astroneer, then, is something of an anomaly: it’s a game with a sense of boundless optimism that might seem unlikely in the circumstances it presents, and yet is wholly befitting of the pioneering spirit it espouses. In truth, staying alive is not your chief concern on these procedurally generated planets. You have a job to do, after all. “You’re part of a group of explorers who are looking for rare and valuable resources,” Paul Pepera, of developer System Era, tells…

While there’s much about the MOBA that’s impenetrable to newcomers, the jungle is perhaps the biggest stumbling block, and it’s telling that Epic’s graceful tutorial videos stop short of explaining what it’s for. Paragon’s map has four jungles, bridging the gap between the map’s three lanes. AI enemies spawn in camps on timers of varying lengths: the basic type reappears every two minutes and offers up experience points, while more powerful variants also award buffs when killed. These boosts last for two-and-a-half minutes, unless you die – in which case their effect will be passed to your killer. Baffling stuff at first, but you’ll pick things up quickly using our preferred tactic: finding the strongest player on the team and sticking to them like easily killed, quite annoying glue.…

MEGALOPOLIS: TOKYO CITY BATTLE Developer/publisher Sega Format Arcade Release 1994 SEGA RALLY CHAMPIONSHIP Developer AM5 Publisher Sega Format Arcade Release 1995 MANX TT SUPER BIKE Developer AM3 Publisher Sega Format Arcade Release 1995 SEGA TOURING CAR CHAMPIONSHIP Developer AM5 Publisher Sega Format Arcade Release 1996 SPACE CHANNEL 5, SPACE CHANNEL 5: PART 2 Developer UGA Publisher Sega Format Dreamcast, PS2 Release 1999, 2002 REZ Developer UGA Publisher Sega Format Dreamcast, PS2 Release 2001 LUMINES Developer Q Entertainment Publisher Ubisoft Format PSP, PS2, PC Release 2004 Growing up in Sapporo, the capital city of Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, Tetsuya Mizuguchi dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player. He spent the majority of his time outdoors, training on the field, till, in the fourth grade, he became friends with another boy whose…

Thomas Happ Design, programming, graphics, audio What kind of impact did the introduction of the glitch mechanic have on level design? Well, it made a big difference when it came to considering the width of every wall… Was it among the biggest challenges? Actually, even before you get to the glitching, the biggest [task] is making sure everything you want the player to reach can be reached. In game design terms, the way I went about that was to assign every ability a number, and on my game design map I would write down the number of the item you needed to get past each part, because it was just so complicated to have to keep track of it all. I didn’t want players to inadvertently get some later item…

Dark Souls III PC Getting our grasping paws on a game far ahead of release is often a curse, as well as a privilege. Our weeks-early romp through a 60fps Lothric went sour when, in one late-game area, the framerate plunged to the low double digits, and armour began to float in the air a few feet behind its wearer. A driver update sorted the latter issue, and FromSoftware soon patched the former, but for a while there the toughest game of the year risked becoming an impossible task. Dark Souls III PS4 While the supposed nerfs to sorcery and miracles are being a little overstated – staffs and chimes have poise-boosting weapon skills for a reason, kids – pure casting builds certainly struggle with Dark Souls III’s aggressive enemies.…

Remedy adopts a ‘ready when it’s ready’ approach to game development, focusing its energy on fewer projects and taking its time with its creations. Creative director Sam Lake may exude the same kind of thoughtful confidence, but his frenetic energy is a surprising contrast to the methodical Finnish studio’s outward appearance. Here, we discuss the groundbreaking aspects of Quantum Break and the steep learning curve they created. How have you enjoyed working with live action? We’ve been doing little tests with live action as a component [in previous games] and we wanted to take a bigger leap in that direction. It was challenging and there was a lot of learning along the way. Creating a big game like this is an iterative process. Not every idea you have will work,…

Developer PlatinumGames, Nintendo EPD Publisher Nintendo Format Wii U Release Out now The cultural phenomenon of the second screen is one with which we’ve all grown uneasily familiar. Who hasn’t been so absorbed in the small device in their hands that they’ve missed a crucial line of dialogue, a twist, a goal? By the same token, we’ve been distracted by 1080p HD displays long enough to lose a life, to have time run out, to experience the frustration of being beaten by seconds to a zinger whose retweet tally is ticking upwards by the second. Wii U was conceived with the notion of relieving this tension somewhat, and yet its most fascinating games are those that choose instead to embrace it. After a turbulent start, you can add Star Fox…

Developer Insomniac Games Publisher SIE Format PS4 Release Out now Depressingly, it’s been 14 years – a long time in a medium that moves at such a pace. The gap between Donkey Kong and Super Mario 64 is only a year wider; likewise, Pole Position and Gran Turismo. In a similar span of time, we went from Asteroids to Doom. And now Ratchet & Clank to Ratchet & Clank. If at first it suggests we need to accept that change now comes in much smaller increments, it’s also a sign of how far we’ve come. Where the original was likened in critical circles to a Pixar production, this tie-in to a new animated feature makes it clear we’re still some way short of Lasseter and company. Clips from the film…

Developer Playful Corp Publisher Oculus Studios Format Rift Release Out now What’s in a name? Not much, really: Lucky’s Tale is a 3D platformer starring a fox called Lucky who hits things with his tail. It’s hardly the most imaginative conceit, or the most modern, though as with many Rift launch games it’s lent a special air by the technology that powers it. It may be a game idea borrowed from ’95, running on hardware with origins in the late ’80s, but as a moving platform takes you through a tunnel in which you instinctively duck out of the way of tangles of vines, before you pop out above in a colourful village whose denizens, obstacles and traps stretch off towards the horizon, the sensation is thoroughly 2016. Still, at…

Publisher/developer Ska Studios Format PS4 (tested), Vita Release Out now (PS4), TBA (Vita) Well, this is just inconsiderate. Were it not so loving an homage, Salt & Sanctuary would be a brazen clone of the Souls series. It borrows shamelessly from nearly every aspect of FromSoftware’s remarkable formula – except the button layout. Your light and strong attacks are mapped to face buttons. Item usage and evasive manoeuvres are performed with the shoulders and triggers. In the heat of the moment, we’ve attacked when we wanted to heal; we’ve rolled straight into an enemy when we wanted to slice their heads off. If you’re going to make what amounts to a 2D cover of a Souls game, you might as well go the whole hog and give us the controller…

Keeping a studio small in size can make it much easier to be flexible, and it’s given people such as Aj Grand-Scrutton (above) the opportunity to take a view of the challenges facing today’s developers. As CEO of Dlala, he’s already worked in a variety of environments, on contrasting projects, while the company thrives as it approaches its fourth birthday. Dlala partnered with Team17 to release party game Overruled; before then, it had gone it alone, and experimented for a time operating within Microsoft’s Lift London. Subsequently the team has worked on government-training game projects, and it continues to work on its own titles. “I think the single biggest mistake anyone running a studio makes is basing the company’s future on projections,” Grand-Scrutton says. In three to five years, he…

McNeil and Pamphilon also host a spinoff stage show called Wi-Fi Wars in which entire audiences compete against each other, and the tech behind it will feature in Go 8-Bit. Pamphilon explains: “Everything took a bit of a turn when someone we knew for a while – a guy called Rob Sedgebeer, whose other half was actually one of the few fans of our double act…” “The fan, you might say,” McNeil interjects. “Hello, Carol!” Pamphilon: “Rob came to us with this idea for some technology that could beam the games into your phone, so that you can play them on the big screen with us. That lifted the show to a different level.”…

Game The War Of Currents: Tesla Vs Edison Manufacturer Real Art While certain poorly maintained old cabinets in the dark corners of seaside arcades might give you pause before you lay hands on them, some machines are deliberately out to electrocute you. The latest example is a 2D beat ’em up from Ohio-based creative outfit Real Art. Unveiled at SXSW, the one-off machine sees digitised representations of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison go at it over electrical standards. The War Of Currents offers a scant four stages and the titular pair of characters with which to do battle. Land enough hits and you’ll build up a charge of energy that can be released as a special move which zaps your onscreen opponent and causes massive damage, while also sending a…

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a New Nintendo 3DS XL, supplied by the Nintendo UK store Coin dungeon Whenever I think about virtual reality I get a deep feeling about its scale that overwhelms me. We used to see VR just as a new fancy and curious gadget, but it has much more to offer besides funny moments. It’s offering us a whole new world of possibilities to explore. It’s not a just a different videogame experience, but a whole new medium which is going to make an impact on entertainment, science, tourism, cinema, TV… Virtual reality developers now have the ability to immerse the player completely; they can almost literally transport us to other worlds, because…

Fuss in the music world, as Deep Purple are inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame without legendary lead guitarist Ritchie Blackmore. Deep Purple were formed in 1968 and are still touring – as you read this, they’re in Japan. But only one of the original lineup is with the group. You might think it odd to draw parallels between sexagenarian rock aristocracy and the cutting edge of interactive entertainment, but here we all are. Just weeks ahead of release, we finally have our first play of the singleplayer component of Uncharted 4 (p36). It is, its name implies, the fourth game in Naughty Dog’s Nathan Drake series. But what does that mean, when series creators Amy Hennig and Richard Lemarchand have skipped off to EA and academia…

Naughty Dog is one of gaming’s better storytellers. Among the small group of studios that work with budgets in the tens of millions, it’s almost without equal. But pacing is not simply a narrative concern, Cambier explains – it affects the design teams too. “Uncharted’s about variety,” he says. “We have these great, tense sniper fights. We have these narrow hallways with shotgunners closing in on you. Then we have setpiece moments, very specific fights. Just like the story arc, our combat arc has this pacing, these beats we have to hit, these transitions that we have to think about.” Cambier’s confident that Naughty Dog’s design team has pulled it off. We’ll find out for certain soon enough.…

System Era is still finetuning one final layer of motivation, the ultimate aim that drives each Astroneer. Players will be able to share their discoveries with Earth, though the developer has yet to work out exactly how to present that concept. “They’re sent out there because there’s a gold rush going on in space,” Bromell says. “And one Astroneer is going to be better than another in terms of the value of the resources they’ve collected, but in terms of that overall idea we haven’t nailed it down 100 per cent.” Meanwhile, Pepera says the studio is prepared to respond to player feedback: “If there’s an appetite for a more hardcore version of the game, that’s something we could update the game with.”…

Developer/publisher Lucas Pope Format PC Origin Japan Release TBA Lucas Pope’s obsession with antiaspirational vocations continues with Return Of The Obra Dinn, a game in which you play as a 19th-century insurance loss adjuster. Unlike the designer’s previous game, Papers, Please, which placed you in the musty environs of a fictional yet grimly recognisable Eastern European border checkpoint in the 1980s, here the location is somewhat more exotic, even if the work itself is just as monotonously gruelling. The Obra Dinn is an East Indian merchant ship which was lost at sea, somewhere around the Cape of Good Hope, while en route to the Orient. One October morning in 1808, the forsaken vessel drifts into port. The return is marked, not with rejoicing, but with red tape. As a trusty…

Bringing the game to Vita as originally planned has proven particularly troublesome. It's taken so long that Happ has been accused of laziness and losing interest in the process, but with the portable unable to support the game’s engine, there was little he could do until recently. Sickhead Games’ Tom Spilman has since brought the MonoGame framework to Vita, though it took almost a year to happen. “It’s such a difficult thing to describe,” Happ explains. “It’s almost like they had to write a Microsoft Word document, but first they had to program Microsoft Word on Vita in order to make the document they needed. They had to make this whole other application that in itself is a bigger task than just making a game.” Adelman has been more heavily…

So, it’s finally here. This time five years ago, Palmer Luckey was knocking together a VR prototype in his parents’ garage. Now the VR revival is complete, with Oculus Rift and HTC Vive in homes and offices the world over (widely documented delivery issues notwithstanding), and both HMDs promising to bring about the biggest shift in videogames in 20 years. The pages that follow appear to tell a different story. It’s true that neither the Oculus/Facebook partnership, nor the Valve/HTC one, has yielded an instant classic to justify the purchase of this tremendously costly new hardware. But it doesn’t really need one: VR’s USP is VR itself. Games’ shortcomings can be offset by the experience of playing them from this astonishing new perspective. In the almost four years since Luckey’s…

Developer Three One Zero Publisher 505 Games Format PC, Rift (tested) Release Out now Given the grandeur of its setting, Adrift is a surprisingly intimate game. Opening in the aftermath of a catastrophic event on board the Hardiman Aerospace Northstar IV research space station, you find yourself in the space boots of mission commander Alex Oshima as she tries to piece together what caused the event and find a way home. But while the majestic wreckage of HAN-IV floats around you in the deadly vacuum of space, you’ll witness events from within a space helmet with nothing but your own thoughts and an ever-decreasing oxygen meter. This contrast of epic scale and introspective human tragedy is Adrift’s most powerful trick, making for a disarmingly moving journey through the sterile remains…

Developer/publisher CCP Format PSVR, Rift (version tested) Release Out now (Rift), October (PSVR) While other high-profile developers have backed the first wave of headsets, CCP’s EVE: Valkyrie has become the poster child for VR. That’s partly down to it having been associated with Rift for so long now (of the launch hardware pack-ins, it’s certainly the most coveted), but also because of what it represents: a comparatively bigbudget, competitive online shooter that promises to set the bar for VR’s multiplayer potential. If nothing else, it looks the part. Among a first wave of pioneering games whose graphical quality varies wildly, Valkyrie’s visual presentation feels luxurious: enormous shipyards, space stations and hulks hang imposingly amid indigo, cobalt and ruby nebulas; extraterrestrial worlds loom just beyond the battlefield; and a tangle of…

Developer/publisher Heart Machine Format Ouya, PC (tested), PS4, Vita, Wii U, Xbox One Release Out now (PC), TBA (Ouya, PS4, Vita, Wii U, Xbox One) The Drifter’s respawn animation takes seconds. At times, it feels like an age. You’ll likely find yourself irritatedly thumbing the face buttons, but he won’t rise any quicker. In a world where death comes swiftly and often, this is a bold choice, but a necessary one. It’s a reminder not to rush back into the fray; that there’s only so much punishment you can take. More crucially, it says much about the Drifter himself. Even without foreknowledge of the game’s semi-autobiographical elements, there’s something moving in the way he slowly hoists himself to his feet. His body may be weakened by debilitating illness – and,…

Developer/publisher Phaser Lock Interactive Format PSVR, Rift, Vive (tested) Release Out now (Vive), TBA (PSVR, Rift) Tell you what: how about you put out your own damn fire? We’re air traffic control, not the fire department. Or so we thought. So frequently are our skies clogged with passenger jumbos, military jets and light aircraft with engines aflame that we spend as much time in Final Approach’s first level on the ground, aiming a hose at a propeller, as we do up in the sky. Which is a crushing shame, because that’s where Final Approach, as the name implies, is at its best. The pre-release demo was one of the highlights of our early days with Vive (see E292). The core mechanic, of using the controller to point at a plane…

Due for release later this year, the Touch hardware essentially merges the function and form of motion controllers and a traditional pad, breaking the latter in two so that each half can be used independently. Its constellation tracking reads hand movements with striking precision, using the same sensor that tracks the Rift user’s head position. Traditional fascia buttons, thumbsticks and triggers, meanwhile, let players grab, press and select. “I don’t think the question is about if there are going to be a lot more hand controller games and tools for VR,” says Colin Northway. “It’s about if there’s going to be any non-hand-controlled games and tools.”…

As the organisations that monitor the health of UK game development have changed over the past ten years, so has the shape of the data they produce. It makes consistent comparison of the UK scene over time testing for even the most devoted analysts, but there’s enough to go on to get a sense of the direction in which the region is moving. In 2005, nowdefunct trade body ELSPA reported that 22,190 people worked in games within the UK, some 6,000 of those at studios. At the time that represented a year-onyear climb overall, but a fall in numbers actually making games. Some ten years later, the trade body had become UKIE, which, working with innovation charity NESTA, found 1,902 game companies in the UK in 2014 – an increase…

Award-winning Canadian musician Jim Guthrie is a prolific solo artist and has recorded as a member of Islands, Human Highway and Royal City. He has also created or contributed to the soundtracks of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, Planet Coaster and Indie Game: The Movie, and is scoring Xbox One title Below. His game career, though, had its beginnings on PlayStation kit… Before Sword & Sworcery’s dark electronica, you were a rock/folk artist. How did you make that leap? A friend gave me a PS1, but I was so broke I used to play a lot of demos from Official PlayStation Magazine cover discs. One of them had MTV Music Generator on it. I still have a PSOne with a folding screen that I use to compose music on from…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar Anyone can become a game developer these days. Take former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. As you’ll recall, she made up the notorious 5-4 majority who stopped the Florida recount and so gave the presidency to George W Bush in 2000. So who better to teach the children of America how their electoral system really works? In 2009 O’Connor founded a nonprofit education company called iCivics, which has produced an educational game called Win The White House, newly updated for the 2016 campaign season. So how accurate a guide is it to the facts of American democracy? Alas, reality has already overtaken the cartoonishly sober simulation. You may not be surprised to learn that I immediately named my candidate ‘Donald Trump’ and chose as the slogan for…

Developer The Coalition Publisher Microsoft Studios Format Xbox One Origin Canada Release Autumn To think that Gears Of War was once an exciting series is an odd thing. The original may not have invented cover combat, but its methodical pace and horror inflections were a radical departure for Epic following its twitchy Unreal shooters. While the impact of the game’s engine on the rise of HDTV has been exaggerated, it made a fearsome case for the Xbox 360 hardware at a critical point in the war of perceptions with PS3. The multiplayer, meanwhile, became the scene of a trilogy-length clash with fans who preferred to exploit the hallowed Gnasher shotgun rather than fighting at mid-range as the designers had intended. By contrast, The Coalition’s Gears Of War 4 seems elegantly…

Super Hypercube’s sound effects and dynamic soundtrack contribute a great deal to the game’s sense of nostalgic futurism. Created by Kokoromi member Damien Di Fede, the music is yoked to your interactions within 3D space. Each of the cubes ‘sings’ a note, and as you gather more cubes to your cluster, you add to the building chorus. It’s an ingenious design which, like Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Rez, causes the soundtrack to match the natural ebb and flow of the onscreen interactions. The higher the stakes, the more intense the chorus, while a lost life will bring everything to a quietening halt. Other sounds are tied to specific environments, allowing for the designers to introduce a natural progression to the soundtrack apart from the player’s performance.…

Developer/publisher Epic Games Format PC, PS4 Origin US Release 2016 At last, some honesty. The MOBA’s march from PC to console has been an odd one, with most developers almost embarrassed by the term. The imminent Overwatch and Battleborn borrow from the MOBA style guide, but are wrapped in a familiar FPS framework to make them more appealing to a wider, console-owning audience. Paragon is, purely and unashamedly, a MOBA, its only concession to the console crowd being a shift in perspective from the top-down genre standard to an over-theshoulder thirdperson view. That means Paragon comes with baggage – and a crucial task on its hands. Unlike Blizzard and Gearbox, Epic Games must sell an entire genre, rather than an accessible twist on it, to an audience who may only…

One unlikely issue that Pope has encountered while attempt to mimic vintage Mac titles with Return Of The Obra Dinn relates to the way in which indie games travel in 2016. On Twitch and YouTube, those crucial channels for carrying a game beyond the realm of the cognoscenti, video is compressed. This technique blurs the lines of the precise dither art style, and can make images illegible. To lessen the impact of the problem, Pope has introduced a random element to environmental dithering patterns. Compression, according to the author, has the most devastating effect when dithering uses a regular pattern to create shades and textures. Randomness doesn’t fix the issue, but it does improve the situation, ensuring the game holds up much better in video form.…

Christofer Emgård (left) is a writer who started out in theatre and movies, and also spent time reviewing games in Sweden, before joining Ubisoft Massive (then Massive Entertainment) ten years ago. He spent seven years with the studio, working on titles such as World Of Conflict, before joining the Mirror’s Edge Catalyst project three years ago. Did you have any concerns about taking the project on in light of the first game’s criticisms? We had a pretty clear idea of what those criticisms were, and how to improve on them. I was brought on board after the project was greenlit, and they [DICE] knew that they wanted to know more about Faith, who she is, and why she does the things that she does. And also that she should be…

Format PC, PS4, Vita, Wii U, Xbox One Developer/publisher Thomas Happ Games Origin US Release 2015 Thomas Happ had been busy making Axiom Verge for the best part of three years when he noticed something had changed. As a coder at RTS developer Petroglyph Games, Happ found his workday more frequently interrupted by his colleagues, who would enthusiastically express their desire to assist him with the project he’d been developing in his spare time. He was pleasantly baffled by the influx of offers. “I just thought, ‘Why would I want to have someone else do my hobby for me? That makes no sense’,” Happ tells us. “Like, some people collect stamps. It doesn’t just suddenly occur to them that they should get a team of stamp collectors to help them…

The words ‘Final Boss’ are written on Oskar Guilbert’s office door. Inside, rather than an intimidating showdown with a challenging figure covered in glowing red bits, we find Dontnod’s friendly CEO. His spacious workplace features a slanted glass wall offering a grand view of Paris’ Sacré-Coeur Basilica sitting on Montmartre, which is bathed in an orange early-evening glow. Guilbert, a self-proclaimed ‘tech guy’ with a PHD in computer graphics and programming, worked on Criterion Software’s RenderWare engine for a number of years before becoming a producer at Ubisoft, and started Dontnod in June 2008. “We were only five people at the beginning – we’ve grown from five to 100,” he explains. “It’s really impressive when I look back to see how it moved, how it changed.” The studio’s first office…

Developer Remedy Publisher Microsoft Format Xbox One Release Out now The pre-release concern over Quantum Break’s resolution was, as with so many endeavours that focus on numbers without context, entirely misplaced. Remedy’s output has never wanted for visual quality, but in Quantum Break’s time-fracturing aesthetic the Finnish studio behind Max Payne has conjured up its most striking-looking game to date. Playing out in the hours leading up to the end of time (a catastrophic dimensional collapse brought about by a physics experiment gone awry), the game’s setting provides the scaffolding for a series of memorable setpieces in which time stops, starts, stutters and rewinds around you. The results are consistently stunning. A dizzying, shifting platform gauntlet suspended in midair as a freighter smashes through a bridge. The frozen spiral of…

Three One Zero creative director and game designer Adam Orth has a striking CV, having held positions at LucasArts, Electronic Arts, Sony Computer Entertainment, PopCap and, most recently, Microsoft. Here, the Adrift creator discusses the process of bringing a very personal project to life, and why he doesn’t mind comparisons to Gravity. Adrift was designed for monitors and VR – was it a challenge to create both versions simultaneously? We’re a team who’ve basically made console games our whole careers, so we approached Adrift like we would a console game. There are a lot of animations in the non-VR version where you get up close to a door and you open it with your hands, or you go into a repair station and it turns you around. We experimented with…

Developer/publisher Gunfire Games Format Rift Release Out now Playing this Oculus Rift exclusive takes us back to the days when we first grasped a pad in our hands. Not because it’s a 2D retro throwback; it’s a hardedged 3D action RPG. And not because it has buckets of warm charm; it’s a grim fantasy fairytale which perhaps takes itself a little too seriously. It’s Chronos’s innovative utilisation of VR tech that inspires a kind of giddy, almost childlike, rapture. This is primarily down to the game’s world, and its delivery directly into your eyeballs. You view Chronos’s protagonist, an unnamed hero/heroine sent out into an ambiguous post-apocalypse fantasyscape, in thirdperson. But rather than have you also control the camera (and potentially cause untold havoc with your stomach lining), you view…

Developer/publisher Robot Invader Format GearVR, Rift (tested), PS3, PS4 Release Out now Though playable on flat screens, Robot Invader’s curious murder mystery has, according to the developer’s website, been designed as a virtual reality experience. Indeed, given the heightened sense of vulnerability you’ll feel as you investigate a murder scene and a series of increasingly more disturbing supernatural events, it would be a shame to play the game in anything other than its intended form. Cast as up-and-coming journalist Patricia Gable, you embark on a firstperson puzzle adventure looking into the recent death of Harris Bullard – a man with enough enemies to suggest foul play. It takes place entirely within the grounds of a moderately sized farm house and its outbuildings, and while you’ll initially be funnelled by awkwardly…

Developer/publisher Owlchemy Labs Format PSVR, Rift, Vive (version tested) Release Out now (Vive), TBA (PSVR, Rift) For so long a signal of a dry-as-a-bone genre, with enormously detailed adherence to a complex realworld pastime, these days the word ‘simulator’ has been well and truly appropriated by many a wag. Now the term is as likely to mean a comedy goat-physics game as it is an impenetrable military flight sim. Job Simulator’s boxy, low-poly aesthetic suggests it falls in the former camp, but in fact it sits somewhere between the two. It is a game of comedy, certainly, but it is grounded in reality: you are not wrestling with a comical physics model, but using Vive’s flawless head and hand tracking to carry out a series of menial tasks. The action,…

Developer Nadeo Publisher Ubisoft Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now That the Trackmania series has taken so long to find its way onto console feels like a small tragedy when you see what Nadeo can do with the brief. Trackmania Turbo retains the fundamentals of its PC forebears, offering up 200 dizzying, predominantly point-to-point obstacle courses on which to compete for the best time possible. It’s still tough, too, echoing Trials’ school of lulling players with a gentle breaking-in period before shifting gears to something altogether more daunting. And there’s a powerful track editor for you to build your own stomach-churning creations. But the earlier games’ barebones structure and ugly UI have been replaced with a user-friendly, brightly coloured treatment that channels the sunny aesthetics and solidity…

Illustration box-kite-curve.com I’ve just realised I carry around a permanent, if low-level sense of annoyance that games are still not universally perceived as part of our culture. Of course, you know that, and are mature enough to not be irritated by it, but have you ever considered why, after 30 years of astonishing game evolution, there is still an overpowering them-and-us element? I just have, and I reckon it’s partly this: there’s the age thing. Few people over 55 regularly play anything more than the odd phone app. That’s OK. I don’t read Victorian fiction. But I know something about it in a way that if you don’t play games, you can’t. If someone calls something Dickensian, I have a great idea of what they mean, even though, possibly to…