Innehållsförteckning för December 2023 från Edge

Here’s a tip: when you want to summarise 30 years’ worth of work, don’t put it all on one page. Yes, the collection of nearly 400 Edge covers looks pretty fetching spread out across the poster you’ll find tucked within these pages, but equally it doesn’t feel as though one piece of (admittedly expensive) paper should be able to contain the magazine’s story to date. Looking beyond the covers, we can at least consider that, at a very rough estimate, we’ve published something like 21 million words since the first edition of Edge was distributed in 1993. Now, not all of them were worth etching into stone tablets, and we will surely never tire of counterpoints to the review scores handed out to literally thousands of games throughout the magazine’s…

My regret for entering an industry where I didn’t belong and my shame for contributing nothing were indescribable Congratulations to the team at Edge for reaching the 30th anniversary of the magazine’s publication! I also started my journey in the videogame industry at around the same time – 34 years ago, in fact, when I joined Sega’s coin-op division. What most people don’t know is that it was not my first career choice. It was a time without the Internet, so naturally it was somewhat unusual for students to aim for the videogame industry right after graduation. There were lots of questions. What is a gaming company like? What kind of people work there? What kind of work do they do? There was little information available. I studied film in…

As Square Enix demonstrated with Final Fantasy VII: Remake, revisiting a previously published work can be about a lot more than providing a faithful, refurbished retelling. It can also be a reimagining, a restructuring, or a revisioning. What, then, to make of the suggestion of a Rebirth? For those who reached the conclusion of its predecessor, the title of this second instalment in what is now confirmed to be a trilogy implies a brand-new start. Though it could just as well mean a literal reset for ex-SOLDIER member Cloud Strife and his band of eco-warriors as they leave behind the dystopian metropolis of Midgar to save the rest of the planet from the fascist Shinra Corporation and megalomaniac Sephiroth. Our hands-on, which begins with our party on the outskirts of…

Developer P-Studio Publisher Sega, Atlus Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin Release Japan November 17 Seven years on, Persona 5 is the gift that keeps on giving. Following 2020’s Persona 5: Royal, the extended version of the already sprawling main game, came Strikers, a sequel of sorts featuring Warriorsstyle combat. If that represented a series first, Tactica is more of a stroll down memory lane for Atlus: according to series producer Kazuhisa Wada, the Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor games have inspired P-Studio to give the tactics genre another go. Atlus’s desire to return to this particular well once more is reason enough to be sceptical. Though while it appears to be a little on the easy side – there probably won’t be any need for…

Founded 1982 Employees 2 Key staff Jeff Minter (head director), Ivan Zorzin (technical director) URL minotaurproject.co.uk Selected softography Gridrunner, Revenge Of The Mutant Camels, Sheep In Space, Llamatron, Tempest 2000, Space Giraffe, Polybius, Akka Arrh Current projects Soon-to-be-announced Atari coin-op remake All studios have their own daily routine, a particular approach to the demands of game development, but not all have animal husbandry as an integral part of it. “Most days are pretty much the same,” explains Jeff Minter, who began Llamasoft in 1982 at the family home in Tadley, Hampshire, before relocating to Wales in 1987. “Get up, have a cup of tea, go out and give the sheep their morning biscuits and cuddles. They need cuddles every morning. Then back in here, I’m on my machine, Giles…

For all the appeal of an open world – the freedom you feel when gazing across the horizon – sometimes there is nothing more exciting in a videogame than playing a small character standing in front of a giant door, wondering what’s behind it. Ideally, that moment of suspense should be drawn out for several seconds, preferably by an elaborate animation that nudges your anticipation still higher. Geometric Interactive’s puzzle adventure recognises this, and duly supplies your insectoid protagonist with a variety of barriers: some mechanical, some organic, all taking a good few moments to part or unfurl before you can head through. Crucially, though, it understands that such grandeur means little if what lies beyond doesn’t reward both your curiosity and the lengths to which you’ve gone to unlock…

Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Ivory Tower) Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series (tested) Release Out now Three games in, it still feels as if The Crew has yet to find a distinct identity of its own. With Motorfest, Ivory Tower attempts to resolve that by trying on several at once. Having given us two games set within a scaled-down version of America’s 48 contiguous states, it travels to one of the remaining two, situating itself on the Hawaiian island of O’ahu, where the first two Test Drive Unlimited games were set (there is, admittedly, some crossover between the development teams). Its brash festival vibe and whistle-stop opening that teases various event types obviously owes a debt to Forza Horizon. Its attempts to celebrate car culture and playlists themed around specific…

CONSOLE WARS In our analysis of the most popular formats, we only took into consideration the earliest release of each game – one of a few factors that gives PC the lead, especially with more recent and smaller titles, where console versions often come after a short delay. Sony’s machines aren’t far behind, though, leading both in total games (48, as seen in the chart on the facing page) and exclusives (20). While Nintendo is far behind in the overall numbers, its ratio is much closer, with 19 of its 22 games being exclusive to its own hardware. Should you want to cause anguish in the videogame industry, you need only ask a bunch of its representatives for a definitive list of their favourite games. This is just one of…

Slipped the Net In a recent article in Cahiers Du Cinéma, David Lynch says “it’s all in the damn history books” regarding the death of cinema. He cites subscription services as the primary cause, although other factors are at play. E386’s ‘Net Gains’ feature gave me a similar sentiment regarding videogames. For Netflix to move into subscription games as a service leaves me with a bittersweet feeling; I can only see it as detrimental to the preservation and ownership of games. Firstly, on a cheerful note, disregarding most of the corporate spiel, VP Leanne Loombe seems to have a clear vision of how Netflix can succeed in the game market, with developers getting exposure they wouldn’t otherwise receive and being able to focus solely on creativity. The fact we got…

When you’ve been around for 30 years, you see plenty of comebacks. Which is why, in hindsight, you should never say never. In E389’s Time Extend, we declared that Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door was ‘a hilariously dark joke that Nintendo will never tell again’. Mere days later… well, you know the rest. Or maybe we managed to reverse manifest it. In which case, perhaps it’s time we revisited Half-Life 2 and explained why Valve is absolutely, definitely, 100 per cent done with Gordon Freeman. This issue’s Hype selection is all about surprise revivals. The existence of Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth is no great shock, of course, though when Square Enix announced it was remaking its seminal PS1 RPG, few expected it would become a fully fledged trilogy. We certainly…

Developer/ publisher Sega (RGG Studio) Format Origin PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Japan Release November 8 Perhaps, like his death at the end of Yakuza 6, Kazuma Kiryu’s retirement was just a ruse. Maybe disappointing sales figures for a Like A Dragon in Japan, the first series entry under a new protagonist, along with more players discovering Kiryu’s adventures overseas, encouraged Sega to bring him back. We may never know. Either way, the quiet life is not for Kiryu: in this grandiosely titled spin-off, he’s trying his hand at being a spy. Set between Yakuza: Like A Dragon and the forthcoming Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth (he’s due to appear in the latter), Kiryu’s new adventure sees him working for the Daidoji Faction. The Daidoji provided a pivotal…

Developer Creative Assembly Publisher Sega Format Origin PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series UK Release TBA Ushered through the prefab airlock system of Hyenas’ Gamescom booth, we’re presented with a video of the game’s tutorial that whizzes by at unhelpful speed, failing to compete with the volume of the show floor so that we have to rely on the subtitles. Which are, of course, in German. This is not the ideal way to meet any game, let alone one that stacks together as many ideas as Hyenas. Yet we can’t help but assume an advantage over the dozen rival thieves crammed into this briefing pen: after all, we saw the game at Creative Assembly’s HQ ahead of the previous Gamescom. This, surely, is tantamount to a 12-month head start.…

STILL PLAYING Super Hexagon iOS Terry Cavanagh’s new game, Mr Platformer (see p20), is encouragement enough to reinstall this twitch classic – agame we’re troubled to discover celebrated its tenth anniversary last year. We’re equally alarmed when it transpires we’ve not actually finished Hexagonest and Hyper Hexagoner modes on the mobile version, which we’re eventually able to put right, though Hyper Hexagonest remains beyond our waning reflexes. Its brilliance is easy to forget: like a top-down take on Hole In The Wall played on a waltzer operated by a maniac, it deviously wrongfoots you with its shifting patterns, demanding intense concentration as you try to pilot your tiny triangular craft through gaps between barriers that spin toward you at increasing speed. That Chipzel-penned soundtrack, too, remains one of the all-time…

Developer/publisher CD Projekt Format PC, PS5 (tested), Xbox Series Release Out now Nearly three years on, CD Projekt has patched a lot of holes in Cyberpunk 2077, but the twopronged addition of its 2.0 update and Phantom Liberty DLC suggests it still isn’t quite at one with itself. Indeed, while the free booster aims at increasing your ability to express yourself in its open world, conversely, the paid-for episode is compact, intimate and concerned with events behind closed doors. Yet because it’s a standalone product, with no requirement to fit around the full game’s lofty plein-air ambitions, Phantom Liberty gains genuine freedom. Piggybacking on the groundwork of fiction already in place, it focuses on delivering a pulsating plotline, and hits its mark. Billed as a spy thriller, Phantom Liberty yanks…

Developer NetherRealm Studios Publisher Warner Bros Games Format PC, PS5 (tested), Switch, Xbox Series Release Out now Decapitation via uppercut. Gravel-voiced ninjas reciting B-movie catchphrases. Johnny Cage striking his opponents where it really hurts. NetherRealm may be touting this as a new era for its long-running fighting series, but Mortal Kombat 1 is business as usual for the veteran studio, smoothing out the rough edges of its predecessor rather than tampering with the established formula. The result is a slick, satisfying fighting game that surpasses recent instalments, even as it fails to provide a suitable on-ramp for those seeking to discover its delights. Some of the most notable changes come from what isn’t here. The series’ trademark finishing moves return in all their cartoonish, grisly glory, as well as the…

BELONGING IN A MUSEUM It’s striking how gamelike The Making Of Karateka feels: you are free to ignore the timeline chronology to skip to the parts that most interest you, while a chime sounds when you’ve viewed a timeline node, a familiar type of interactive reward. “You have to have that control in your hands,” Kohler nods. “Like a museum wouldn’t put you on a moving walkway and have you stuck there. If something catches your eye, nobody’s stopping you from just walking right up to it. What we have to do, like a museum, is make sure you get some takeaway, whether you rush through or read the label on every [exhibit].” Jordan Mechner wasn’t even 21 when his debut game launched on Apple II in December 1984. By…

“I’m hoping gaming will be the first industry where we disrupt ourselves. Where it doesn’t take a Google or an Amazon to completely flip the table.” “So many junior devs I encounter now have a foundation of pseudo knowledge from YouTubers that have never shipped a game.” ”I’ve never been so embarrassed to use a piece of software and I have an Adobe CC licence, for God’s sake.” “The approval thresholds were too low when we shipped. That’s why they were so horny in the beginning. It wasn’t supposed to be that way.”…

Twitter itself is a game, or a metagame: the oncebullied schoolboy could now “own the playground” One of the more surprising things about the much-hyped recent biography of Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson is to learn just how often, in the midst of corporate crisis and other stresses, the shitposting overlord of Tesla Motors and SpaceX would simply stay up all night playing videogames. Teenage boys the world over now have an excellent retort to concerned parents. When Edge began publishing 30 years ago, Musk was known for epic binges of Civilization while an undergraduate at the University Of Pennsylvania. He had grown up playing early arcade games, and aged 13 coded his own simplistic vertical shooter, Blastar; later, he enjoyed office binges of Street Fighter II and Quake III…

What do you do when you’ve built a universe that is too large to be contained in a single game? For the publishers of most series, the answer is simple: a sequel. Not for CCP, however, which has been sustaining its debut game, the interstellar MMORPG sandbox Eve Online, for two decades now. Instead, the Icelandic studio wants to create games nested within its larger, persistent universe like matryoshkas, zooming in from the intergalactic sagas to tell stories on a much, much tighter scale. And so we find ourselves down on a planet’s surface, approaching the carcass of a ship, of the kind that would be controlled by a single player in Eve Online. And, indeed, could be – lead product manager Scott Davis says that eventually this entire map…

Developer Saber Interactive Publisher Format Focus Entertainment PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin Release US 2024 Could there be a more archetypal videogame image than that of a space marine standing firm as alien bodies crash against their armour, a lone bulwark holding back the swarm? It might equally describe Gears Of War or StarCraft or any number of titles holding the actual Aliens licence; even Space Invaders, when you strip away the specifics of the presentation. Because what really matters here isn’t the thematic dressing: the horde could equally be composed of giant ants or velociraptors or zombies or, arguably, the dirt that awaits a good powerwashing. Stripped back to its essential elements, it is simply an enemy that poses no real threat individually, and possesses no apparent cunning, but…

Format Xbox Developer Bungie Publisher Microsoft Game Studios Origin US Release 2001 Steve Jobs is on stage, promising “one of the coolest [games] I’ve ever seen”. He introduces Bungie co-founder Jason Jones, and his new game. “We’re gonna see, for the first time, Halo.” Perhaps you’ve seen this 1999 Macworld demo. If so, you know that it looks (and sounds) an awful lot like the Halo that would launch nearly two and a half years later. There’s a soldier in green armour, and a jeep ride with a marine on the turret, all accompanied by the monkish chants of Martin O’Donnell’s score. OK, the character designs aren’t quite there yet, the planet they’re on is a little too bare – but there are two rather more important distinctions to note.…

Gene Roddenberry’s final frontier was videogames’ first. Since 1962 and Steve Russell’s Spacewar!, the medium has been unable to resist gazing up at the firmament, regularly situating itself amid the stars. At times when playing Bethesda’s longgestating RPG, it’s hard not to marvel at how far we’ve come in 61 years. From a single-screen shootout set within a planet’s Hill’s sphere to an entire explorable universe in which you can define your own place – whether it’s as a buccaneer or a botanist, a hunter of bounty, beasts or bugs (of which there are rather fewer than you’d expect from this particular developer). The pitch is alluring; the potential enormous. But, as is customary for a Bethesda RPG, it begins in more humble surroundings. Working for a mining corporation named…

Developer Round8 Studio Publisher Neowiz Games Format PC, PS4, PS5 (tested), Xbox One, Xbox Series Release Out now Supposing you didn’t know better, you could almost mistake it for the real thing. Like a newly discovered, apparently unknown painting by an old master, Lies Of P is such a fine forgery it could convince scholars for a time, before they identified it as the work of a gifted student. The old master in this case, of course, is FromSoftware. This might slot comfortably among the works of its prolific 2010s period, most of all like a lost alternative to Bloodborne. Until, that is, you examine the brushwork up close. Indeed, the term ‘Soulslike’ is barely adequate to describe what Round8 has created here. All the basic units of From’s economies…

Developer Rundisc Publisher Focus Entertainment Format PC, PS4, Switch (tested), Xbox One Release Out now Mastering a videogame is not unlike becoming proficient in a new language – particularly for those less versed in the abstruse vocabulary of the medium. As such, and given the rise of interactive language learning via the likes of Duolingo, it’s surprising more developers haven’t attempted to gamify the process. Rooted in Babelian myth, Rundisc’s puzzler invites you to unite five clans occupying the strata of a tower: as a nameless hooded figure, your ultimate goal is to become their interlocutor. First, however, you need to identify the glyphs that comprise their distinctive tongues, using contextual clues to propose hypotheses before confirming their definition in your illustrated journal. Combining the linguistic focus of Heaven’s Vault…

Developer/publisher Seabaa  Format iOS Release Out now LOCKS BLOCKING BEATS If taking your time is crucial in Classic mode, that’s not an option in Tempo, which tasks you with making matches quickly to gain hearts as a music track is steadily layered in, à la Lumines. A line passing down across the field reduces the number of each tile, increasing in speed as the song progresses. Each completed heart, meanwhile, effectively serves as an extra life, used automatically to reset the grid when you’re out of moves. As the title suggests, this methodical matchthree puzzler its characterised by its limits; the end, indeed, comes alarmingly quickly if you approach Finity in the manner of most of its kind. Eschewing the usual dopamine-spiking cascades and fireworks, this exacting, austere variation makes…