Innehållsförteckning för September 2024 från Edge

Poor Marie Kondo. Not so long ago, you couldn’t move for excitable buzz around her no-nonsense approach to realigning your mojo. Eventually and inevitably, though, she was stuffed into the cupboard to go along with all those other things that were so life-changingly important for that six-month period that time. This month, however, she was back on our minds as we started work on our 400th edition. To celebrate the occasion, we asked a simple question: what are the things about videogames that spark joy? Given how long games have been around, and how many we’ve played, we could’ve listed thousands of examples, but 400 felt good for starters. It was tempting to build the collection as a big warm bath of nostalgia, and there is certainly no shortage of…

WEB GAME Pile-Up Poker bit.ly/pileuppoker After a few months in the grip of a Balatro habit (that Steam play time number can’t be right, surely?), here’s a nice soft comedown. The latest Puzzmo addition is similarly poker-themed, presenting you with a 36-card deck – six through to Ace, no Jokers – and a four-by-four grid on which to play them. You’re dealt five cards at a time, of which one is discarded; the rest can be played down in any open spot, gradually building to the usual poker hands along each row and column, plus the grid’s corner spots and even your discard pile. The scoring system is overly byzantine, with daily sidequests and multipliers, and we rather suspect the first round is blind guesswork. But sometimes just drawing out…

The first properly bright day of summer, and I’m agreeing to be locked inside a shipping container. It’s one of three in this Docklands storage yard-cum-rave venue where Darkfield, proprietor of ‘immersive 360-degree audio experiences’, preps them to tour festivals and arts centres across the country. Each container’s corrugated side is marked with an all-caps name: ‘FLIGHT’, ‘SÉANCE’. This one, a hard-edged bitmap font informs me, is ‘ARCADE’. And sure enough, inside – pressed in back-to-back, in neat rows – are two dozen arcade cabinets. I shuffle over to my machine and find its screen is not only blank but hollowed out, a void behind the glass. Through headphones, I’m instructed to familiarise myself with the cab’s components: a single button on the control panel, a coin slot off to…

Developer/publisher GSC Game World Format PC, Xbox Series Origin Ukraine, Czechia Release September 5 The Zone has been stable for years. At least, that’s the official line of SIRCAA, the scientific organisation that has taken up residence here since our last visit to STALKER’s otherworldly Chornobyl. That, remarkably, was back in 2009, in Call Of Pripyat – and GSC Gameworld has being trying to make a sequel ever since, the original STALKER 2 originally slated for 2012. Obviously, things have changed an awful lot since then, for videogames and for the Ukrainian developer, which was forced to flee its homeland after the Russian invasion in 2022 (in the process losing access to the actual Exclusion Zone, we’re told, where GSC had been sourcing photogrammetry for the game). Development was put on…

Ken Levine’s work is defined by a wariness of the human animal and its capacity for cruelty. Yet he sees himself as “deep down, a real optimist”. Were it not for a stubborn, self-deceptive streak of hope, he would have given up on Irrational Games a decade before making BioShock. “Maybe Irrational and Ghost Story are the one world where it worked,” he says of the studios he’s co-founded. “But I always had my eye on that world. And to some degree, you have to lie to yourself and kid yourself.” By the time Levine joined the videogame industry, he had already lived the highs and lows of a career screenwriter. “I was getting flown out to Hollywood when I was 19 years old from college, and I was like,…

Unexpectedly, we have rogue AI SHODAN to thank for the brightest luminary in the game industry’s remake and remaster space. If founder and CEO Stephen Kick hadn’t felt the urge to play System Shock 2 on his netbook while travelling through Central and South America and discovered it was nigh-impossible to buy and run the game on modern systems, there would be no Nightdive Studios. “After I couldn’t get the game to install myself using the usual tricks, trying to brute-force 64bit functionality, or find fan patches – there weren’t any – I went to GOG, because I just assumed a game like System Shock 2 would be on there,” Kick remembers. “And what I discovered was, it wasn’t on there, but it was the most requested title on site.”…

“We’d be in a better world if we could get down to one standard home console technology… and get this platform war thing out of the way.” Now that he doesn’t take a PlayStation-branded lunchbox to work, former Worldwide Studios boss Shawn Layden can propose a one-console-standard future. What do you say, Trip ‘3DO’ Hawkins? “Turning down difficulty would strip the game of that joy, which in my eyes would break the game itself.” Yeah, Hidetaka Miyazaki isn’t changing his tune at this point ”Hearing from people playing the final version of Redfall is such a burst of energy. I’m looking forward to talking about what I’ll be doing next.” FAO Harvey Smith and co: our door is always open “To hear the ones who were supposed to support us…

Never mind the Moloch I often hear criticism of games along the lines of ‘if it were half the length, it would be twice the game’. I tend to agree. Game makers seem to be falling further into a play-time Moloch Trap. Or could they be actively sustaining it? Moloch is the name of the force of bad incentive, where core values are sacrificed to gain an advantage. This compels the competition to do the same to keep up, while everyone ends up worse off than before. That may sound abstract or overly philosophical, but Moloch is happening all around us. An everyday version is the idea that bad news sells. Bad news stories attract the most views, comments and discussion, often because of the toxic conversation around them. News…

So I played a game today that opened with a paragraph of prose roughly as long as the observable universe. When it started, I had a sense that it might be about to describe something – and by the end of it, I think it had, but quite what and why I couldn’t say. Somewhere around the Oort Cloud I evolved into a six-legged newt-like being incapable of reading, and only the black hole of the closing period brought me back from the brink. Perhaps I’m old and grumpy but I just don’t have the concentration for flowery writing any more. It’s not that I can’t reedgud; it’s more like I’ve read most sentences at least once now so I only want a reminder of which one this one is.…

Developer/publisher Bokeh Game Studio Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series Origin Japan Release November 8 When we first looked at Slitterhead in E368, we glimpsed the terrifying monsters that burst from the heads of human hosts. Shocking it may have been, but this kind of body horror hardly marked a change in modus operandi for Bokeh founder Keiichiro Toyama, writer-director of the original Silent Hill and the Siren games, whose zombie-like shibito were all the more disturbing for retaining a semblance of human function. Still, we remained in the dark as to how this fresh brand of horror would play out, other than that it would adopt a more action-oriented approach. And certainly, as far as comparable experiences go, we didn’t have Stray and The Nomad Soul on our bingo card. The…

Developer/publisher Capcom Format PC, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin Japan Release 2025 As much as it delivers on its core conceit, there’s always more to Monster Hunter than the hunts alone. Perhaps that’s why Capcom elects to introduce the series’ next instalment to us in a hands-off demonstration, lest any unsuspecting or impatient journos rush into battle without the necessary preparation. Which isn’t to say that we get into the nitty-gritty of Monster Hunter: Wilds’ gear prep, although the ritual of getting ready in base camp before embarking on a hunt remains, and we watch the hunter pass various vendors, including already-popular new smithy Gemma. The atmosphere is livelier than we remember at past camps. The settlers of the Windward Plains aren’t standing idle but busy plying their trades,…

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STILL PLAYING/NEAR MISSES Braid: Anniversary Edition PC Appreciating Jonathan Blow’s puzzle platformer in 2024 is sometimes made harder by this remaster’s commentary, which often means spending five minutes at a time with the developer’s pontifications, which apparently haven’t taken into consideration the size of the levels they accompany. We often find ourselves playing with the visual toggle feature, switching between David Hellman’s original and repainted art, just to pass the time. Yet it is worth sticking around for the occasional nugget of game design insight, while replaying the puzzles themselves – their time manipulation still able to knot our brains into pretzels – reminds us why we were interested in what Blow and co had to say in the first place. Street Fighter 6 PS5 OK, so it’s hardly news…

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Given the huge cultural impact Japan has had on videogames since the 1970s, it is a surprise to learn that there have been no government initiatives to support the industry in the same way as, say, Canada’s tax incentives or Games London’s accelerator programmes. “There are subsidies through the Agency For Cultural Affairs that can be used by game companies, but it’s not a subsidy made especially for them,” explains Sho Sato, co-founder of Japan’s first Indie Game Incubator (IGI). One theory here is that the government doesn’t feel the game industry needs help, and would rather “support the industries that are facing difficulties”. IGI already has successes under its belt. Nao Shibata developed Ninja Or Die as part of the programme The tide, however, is turning. Earlier this year,…

Game Mega Shot Manufacturer Jet Games Corporation Is it possible to have too much screen? The Florida-based Jet Games certainly doesn’t think so: its latest lightgun shooter uses two 85” panels mounted next to each other vertically to create an overall display size in the region of 44 square feet. Essentially an upgrade to Big Shot – itself an update of Quick Shot – the logically named Mega Shot differs from its predecessors by using an assault rifle rather than a pistol. Though the key principle obviously remains the same – shoot as many targets as possible against the clock – the weapon design makes a good fist of competing with the display size in grabbing the attention. Constructed of aluminium and featuring hefty recoil along with a functioning scope,…

Four years before the very first issue of this magazine (happy 20-squared birthday, Edge!), a game was released that arguably represented the original seed of videogames’ turn to the ‘cinematic’. The remarkably fluid and lifelike animation of Jordan Mechner’s Prince Of Persia (1989) promised a humanist future of videogames that in some ways has still not arrived. In a brilliant and complex new graphic novel-slash-memoir, Replay: Memoir Of An Uprooted Family (St Martin’s Press), Mechner draws and explains in detail how he brought the prince to life: filming his brother jumping and climbing, and then photographing every third frame of that VHS tape with a 35mm stills camera, hand-tracing over those photographs with a pen and Tipp-Ex, and then digitising every image one by one. This process resulted in, for…

Fin de siècle As you might expect, we’ve spent a lot of time lately reflecting on the closure of game studios. It’s easy to get caught up in recent examples, but two of this month’s previews have us looking back further: specifically to early 2021, when Sony announced the closure of Japan Studio. At the time it felt like a damning indicator of the way the wind was blowing within PlayStation. But with three years’ distance, we can at least trace where some of that DNA ended up. Keiichiro Toyama’s Team Gravity formed the foundation of Bokeh Studios, on which we’ve kept an eye. And having got our hands on its debut, Slitterhead, we can confirm it’s as unpredictable as the studio’s reputation would suggest. Frankly, it’s impossible to imagine…

Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Massive Entertainment) Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin Sweden Release August 30 Transitions have always been a key part of Star Wars. George Lucas’ liberal use of screen wipes was not just a nod to his twin influences of Flash Gordon serials and Akira Kurosawa but retained a continuity of motion between shots of Luke climbing into his speeder and zooming across the desert, and story momentum in scenes taking place on far sides of the galaxy. As the series makes its way into the hands of the publisher that defined the modern notion of open-world design, it’s only natural that Star Wars: Outlaws would lean into such smooth transitions. The standout of our hour-long demo is an unbroken run that carries us from the interior of a…

Developer Guerrilla Games, Studio Gobo Publisher SIE Format PC, PS5, Switch Origin Netherlands, UK Release Q4 An apocalyptic tale of environmental catastrophe, humanity’s technological overreach, and the bloody consequences of tribalism. It’s not the most obvious contender for a child-friendly toy tie-in, is it? But Guerrilla Games narrative director James Windeler insists this isn’t such an unlikely match: “The themes of our games, although sometimes they do touch on heavier stuff, there’s always an underlying optimism and sense of hope.” Though we do suspect this was a secondary concern, behind how good Horizon’s robotic creatures look in brick form. That much has been clear since the Lego Tallneck set was released in 2022, but the connection stretches back further than that. “The very first machine designs from Horizon Zero Dawn were…

There are millions of reasons to love videogames. From the indulgent pleasures of Neo Geo cartridges to the simple joy of Monkey Target, stopping off along the way to salute lightguns, Rez’s dazzling Area X and Goombas on ice skates, join us as we select just a few hundred favourites. The health bar An invention seemingly so obvious as to have become invisible, and yet this visual representation of a character’s hit points into a bar chart – formative exponents including Henk Rogers’ 1984 RPG The Black Onyx – is how most games across most genres still communicate the scale of threat to your digital being, 40 years later. Finding out your ‘brain age’ Crank or mensch: we didn’t much care. Dr Kawashima, a bewildered Japanese neuroscientist thrust onto the world stage…

It’s rare that companion characters from an RPG are embraced by the public as Lae’zel and Shadowheart have been. Did you have a sense that they would matter to people? Yes, but not this many people. I remember reading Shadowheart’s dialogue after she meets her parents, and I had to leave the room and take a walk because I was choking up. One of the things that binds these characters together is that they’re born of trauma. And I think that people seeing survivors, who’ve fought hard against shitty and impossible odds, who are somehow still trying to do the right thing, that’s fucking powerful. You won’t be working on the next Baldur’s Gate – you’ll be watching someone else play with your characters. How does that feel? We did…