Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2018 i Edge

Reinvention is, as the word implies, never going to be easy. And it can come in myriad different forms. In this issue’s Super Play feature, we examine the current state of emulation. It’s been thrown into something of an existential crisis by the hardware-based Super Nt console, which upgrades the SNES for the 21st century in style – and at quite a price. To lay eyes on a freshly unboxed Super Nt is to understand exactly where all your money has gone; it looks, feels and works like a dream, its maker’s labour plain to see. But around the world, game companies are reinventing themselves constantly behind the scenes, often in invisible ways. This month we head to Montreal for the Ubisoft Developer Conference, and find a publisher of videogames…

Thomas Mars is the lead singer of French dance-pop band Phoenix, best known for their Grammy Award-winning album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. We had the opportunity to speak to Mars during the band’s break from touring their sixth studio album, Ti Amo, and just had to start by asking him about their recent appearance on Geoff Keighley’s stage. Seeing you at The Game Awards was a real surprise. Were the Mario and Sega references hard to implement? Yeah, the Sega logo saying ‘Phoenix’, I wanted that because when I met Chris in the band, one of the first things he did was bring Sonic to my place. The first year we met we were either making music or we were playing Sonic. Then we expanded the idea to getting these Nintendo sounds and…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar One thing Tim Berners-Lee probably didn’t foresee in 1989 was that the worldwide web would inexorably become the biggest engine of fake news the world has ever seen. According to a YouGov poll last year, most people think they are good at distinguishing between reliable and dubious information, but only 4% of those surveyed could do so reliably. Meanwhile, the accuracy of what some people call the “mainstream media” and Donald Trump calls “the fake news” has been systematically downgraded in the mind of the general population. So it is heartening to read a study by two Cambridge researchers suggesting that videogames might be able to help. At first glance, admittedly, this sounds unlikely. Videogames themselves are a rich source of fake news about the second world war…

Whether we use the word or not, we all work to templates of some kind; knowing how something worked before makes it much easier to make it work again, after all. In games, some developers carry their templates around with them, a signature style that runs through all their work. That’s certainly the case for Jordan Thomas, a veteran of Thief: Deadly Shadows and BioShock 2, who returns this month with the dark, systems-driven horror game The Blackout Club (p42). Its tale of four teenagers facing down strange events in their suburban idyll may feel suspiciously well timed given the success of Stranger Things, but it is clearly, recognisably, a Jordan Thomas work. More commonly, though, templates are starting points; things to be mucked around with, instead of merely built…

Developer Supergonk Publisher Rising Star Games Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Origin UK Release Spring Six years ago, on the run-up to Wii U’s launch, Shigeru Miyamoto was asked why Nintendo hadn’t released an F-Zero game since 2004. “Since the first episode on SNES, many games have been made but the series has evolved very little. I thought people had grown weary of it,” he replied before asking in return, “Why F-Zero? What do you want that we haven’t done before?” With no F-Zero on the horizon still, we finally might have an answer in the form of Trailblazers. Trailblazers is a team-based racing game which rides on a strong gimmick: a painting mechanic straight from De Blob and Splatoon. You have a recharging stock of paint with which…

What makes running The End Is Nigh so stressful? Between the first time and the hundredth time you play the game, the difficulty curve manages to feel the same. There’s an impossible-to-ignore difficulty spike between the first and the second half – so if I’m on a good pace after the first half, I start getting nervous because I know that I have a 15 minute window coming up where the run can die anywhere. But if you’re speedrunning a die-and-retry platformer, you should know what you’re getting yourself into. Misery. I’d say the hardest thing to reckon with that the devs intentionally included is a sudden change in physics during the last few levels that causes Ash to move slowly in one direction and quickly in one direction. Many…

Mathijs de Jonge Game director Why did you decide to have a female lead character? Aloy was in the initial pitch, and the way she was presented was more like Sarah Connor from Terminator or Ripley from Aliens, so she was a very strong female lead. After many years of Killzone games, with stereotypical male Marine leads, we felt it was a nice change of direction. But there were doubts along the way, for sure, like Shu’s [Sony’s Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida]. We explored many directions for her; it wasn’t easy to shape her, but I’m glad we didn’t give her up. How did you learn the craft of open-world game design? We’re not only developers, but gamers, too, and we play a lot of open-world games. It was…

It’s been five-and-a-half years since FTL: Faster Than Light, which is just about the only evidence that developer Subset Games suffered from second-album syndrome in the making of Into The Breach (p108). Subset’s twist of genius this time is to give the player an unprecedented amount of information – including the enemy’s next moves and actions – and use that as an excuse to ratchet the difficulty up to FTL-like levels, and arguably beyond. What Subset has done is exploit a luxury available almost exclusively to small independent studios. Yes, it could no doubt have banged out an FTL sequel in a couple of years, but it didn’t need to, and instead chose to follow a new, more creatively fulfilling path. In doing so, it could avoid a question posed…

Developer/publisher Subset Games Format PC Release Out now Your squad of three mechs is always outnumbered. Its duty to defend the cities of humankind against the swarming Vek is overwhelming. Or so it seems. While the numbers are always against you, on your side is a tool that evens the odds: you always know exactly what the Vek are going to do next. This simple idea, of perfect knowledge in the face of the apocalypse, has produced a game of sublime ingenuity, one which delivers the thrill of feeling like you’ve just pulled humanity from the brink over and over again. Into The Breach is the long-awaited second release from Subset Games, the maker of break-out Roguelike space adventure FTL: Faster Than Light. The two games share a good deal…

Developer Mountains Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format Android, iOS (tested) Release Out now The extraordinary thing about Florence is just how ordinary it feels. Every beat of it is instantly recognisable: there are ups, there are downs, and all the while you’re tap, tap, tapping along in time. Developer Mountains has captured the magical, the miserable and the mundane of young love in an hour-long interactive graphic novel, and the intimate space of a phone screen makes for the perfect setting. Expressive, animated line-art wordlessly guides fingers and thumbs through scenes and frames. The odd visual hint is irksome – there’s an ease to navigating Florence in which Mountains should be more confident, partially inherited through our experiences with comic books and partially through modern technology. Our heroine’s actions feel familiar.…

WEB GAME David Lynch Teaches Typing bit.ly/lynchtyping Yes, Twin Peaks is great – but where are the practical applications? Enter David Lynch Teaches Typing, a free game from Rhino Stew that splices the surrealist genius of the filmmaker into a game that imparts the basics of touch typing. Okay, so it’s not exactly Mavis Beacon: narrated by “Lynch” himself, the experience starts by explaining your keyboard’s ‘home row’ before taking several sharp left turns involving crying babies, undulating bugs and an entirely unmerited smoke break. It’s equal parts funny and unsettling, and over all too soon. Given its parodic tone, the mention of a full version is probably a hoax – but if we do indeed have to “sit in a bathtub and make smacking noises with our hands” to…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar Four-and-a-bit years of parenting later, I can at last claim a sort of victory. It is, admittedly, all relative, like celebrating a slender 2-1 loss after a long season of 5-0 pastings. But I will take it. I know a number of Peppa Pig episodes off by heart; I know the names of all the members of the Paw Patrol, and even the backstories of many of its incidental characters. It has been miserable at times, but it has finally paid off: my son has finally got into Mario. And I mean really into. Previous trips overseas have left me with near-impossible demands for the present I must always buy him in order to assuage my absent-dad guilt (thanks again to the PR flacks who once helped me…

Developer Santa Monica Studio Publisher SIE Format PS4 Origin US Release April 20 Anger is easy. Give a Greek god two massive blades, a tragic backstory and a thirst for revenge, and the rest almost takes care of itself. The Kratos of the early 2000s would rip heads from bodies and roast people alive without a second thought. Fast-forward to 2018’s God Of War, and we find ourselves in control of a Kratos struggling to keep his brutal instincts in check for the sake of his young son. Anger is easy – exercising some restraint, it turns out, is a lot harder. And that, creative director Cory Barlog says, was the point. “Everything about this game was the hard way,” he tells us. “We were kind of hitting the same note over and over again.…

Developer/publisher Kurtrussellfanclub Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Australia Release 2019 As if the giant worms outside weren’t enough, poor old Axel, who simply wanted to sit down with a cup of joe in his favourite diner, now has a machete-wielding psycho to worry about. The psycho in question, by the way, is us: our planned backdoor escape from the Tremors-like monsters out front goes horribly wrong when we swing our blade at the chain-link fence in our way and connect with Axel instead. He sprints around the side, evidently happier to take his chances with the worms. Mike Blackney pitches his Roguelike road trip as Grand Theft Cthulhu, a pithy summary that might be misleading depending on what you expect from a GTA game. It’s like Rockstar’s series in…

What makes Celeste such a great speedgame? Celeste has very simple controls, zero RNG, and an extremely high skill cap. A new runner can complete a run without any of the advanced movement techniques, and then learn new tricks and add slightly faster nuances to movement at their own pace. Once you get to a high level, it doesn’t get stale to keep trying for a better time, because you know there is always room to improve, and no dependency on RNG. What’s the most difficult part of speedrunning it? I think it’s the same case with any speedgame – you can get punished for trying to play too fast. And it’s really easy to get into the habit of doing that. To me, the most difficult part of running Celeste specifically…

An impulsive gift-shop purchase was the unlikely spark behind Welsh micro-studio Dakko Dakko’s 2011 debut. Founder Rhodri Broadbent had just finished a four-year spell at Tokyo’s Q-Games when he and studio manager Kieren Griffiths took a trip to Osaka Aquarium, where a cute octopus toy caught his eye. Before the two left Japan and moved back to Cardiff, they sat down to discuss ideas for what would be Dakko Dakko’s first game – and quickly realised they had their tentacled protagonist. Broadbent had already been struck by the thought of making a game based around a rotating object after enjoying Link’s spinner in Zelda: Twilight Princess, and put the two together. “I told a friend I was leaving Japan to make a game that could basically be summed up as…

Developer Level-5 Publisher Bandai Namco Entertainment Format PC (tested), PS4 Release Out now For a brief moment, we wondered if we’d been sent the wrong review code by mistake. But no, Ni No Kuni II really does open with a scene where a presidential motorcade, speeding towards a city, is beaten to its destination by a ballistic missile. As it streaks by, the grey-templed leader gulps in horror. The shockwave from the explosion that follows reaches the convoy, leaving him sprawled and grievously wounded on the ground – at which point he’s suddenly whisked off to the fantasy kingdom of Ding Dong Dell. It took a family tragedy for young Oliver to get there in the original; without the guiding hand of Studio Ghibli, you may wonder if Level-5 is…

Holly Gramazio is the director of Now Play This, a festival of experimental game design, which exhibits both physical and digital games, playable on screens, as room-sized installations, and even outdoors. Beginning as a prototype festival in September 2015, it officially launched the following year as part of the inaugural London Games Festival. It continues this year at Somerset House, from April 6 to 8; for tickets, visit nowplaythis.net. How did you get your start in game design, and what led you to setting up Now Play This? About ten years ago I moved to London from Adelaide in Australia. I was only going to stay for six months or so, but I ended up playing this enormous chase game across the city. It was just really extraordinary and changed…

Issue 317 Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a year’s subscription to PlayStation Plus, courtesy of Sony Interactive Entertainment Off switch I own a Switch. I was sold from day one. Even if they had a Wii U-style misfire again, I would’ve enjoyed my time with the Switch. I’m happy with its success and I’m glad this console is getting more games with much more enthusiasm for the platform than Nintendo’s ever had with past consoles. That said, even with all its success: I don’t want everything coming to the platform. Neither Nintendo consoles nor the player base are properly served with highly compromised ports. Saturating the platform with two-year-old games and flooding the eShop with tons of…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar Reading the cover of E315 and its proclamation of an industry in crisis reminded me of the time in the mid-’90s when Amiga Power asked the Sensible Software crew whether anyone should buy a CD32, and the response came back that you should save your money and buy a falafel instead. As an industry, we are in a perpetual state of changing the world, or suddenly failing and being less interesting than a late-night snack. Maybe that’s because, while the industry in 2018 has more players, makes more money, is available on more platforms and is more present in daily life than at any other stage in its existence, it doesn’t mean that you personally, and your game or game company, are not currently completely screwed. And the…

Developer/publisher Question Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin US Release 2019 Shortly after Thief: Deadly Shadows was released in 2004, its lead designer, Jordan Thomas, interviewed for a job at Valve. He and ex-Edge columnist Randy Smith had created Deadly Shadows’ standout level, Robbing The Cradle, a study in dread-inspiring horror game design set in an abandoned orphanage. “So this guy in the interview said, ‘Ah, your level was tight, but I had to quit playing. It was too scary.’ And I was like, ‘Oh. Well, shit.’ That was not the intended effect! I wanted to bring people to the point of a new fear threshold, not to cause them to walk away.” The Blackout Club is, in part, his attempt at a do-over, a modulation of the horror game for players who aren’t…

Developer ThroughLine Games Publisher Square Enix Format PC Origin Denmark Release 2018 Given how regularly it likes to revisit its glory days, it’s little wonder Square Enix is keen on games that deal with the subject of memory. Recently, it’s been focused on things left behind – though we’re not talking about the Secret Of Mana and Chrono Trigger remakes (and really, the less said about those the better). It’s only a few short months since Lost Sphear suggested that neglected towns and villages could simply vanish to nothing, physically blotted out of existence as people’s memories of them fade. This 2D adventure from Copenhagen-based ThroughLine Games has a gentler alternative: mislaid items blink out of sight and reappear in a different world, gaining sentience and taking jobs among a…

What aspects of Bound are most helpful for speedrunners? The speedrun mode has the best built-in timer I’ve ever seen in a game. It pauses on loading times, has individual level splits, and can be hidden at any point. Records are often determined by ‘real time attack’, but this can lead to improper comparisons of runs due to different gaming hardware. Having an accurate in-game timer not only makes comparisons between runners easier, but also takes away from the distraction of using a separate timing program and manually hitting your splits. Does seeing a game that’s clearly ‘built for speed’ ever take some of the fun, or extra challenge, out of speedrunning it? Whether a game is built for speed or not, the mechanics are what make or break it.…

HORIZON ZERO DAWN Developer Guerrilla Games Publisher SIE Format PS4 Origin Netherlands Release 2017 Guerrilla Games knew it was taking a risk. Here was a studio that had focused entirely on Killzone for the best part of a decade, yet now it was embarking on a project which, by its very design, would naturally render obsolete a great deal of its craft. Guerrilla knew how to make linear, firstperson, sci-fi shooters. It hadn’t made an open-world game before. And so it was only natural that it got cold feet. Horizon Zero Dawn was born in response to an internal call for pitches Guerrilla made in 2009, near the end of development of Killzone 3. It was time, management believed, for the studio to stretch its wings and try something new,…

REVIEWS. PERSPECTIVES. INTERVIEWS. AND SOME NUMBERS STILL PLAYING Skyrim Xbox One X With much of the UK hit by an unseasonably heavy dumping of snow, thoughts naturally turned to Bethesda’s immaculately wintry RPG. Yet one thing held us back: the thought of playing through that blessed opening section with the dragon for the 50th time. Praise Dibella, then, for mod support on consoles, and specifically Live Another Life. After answering a few simple questions we begin the game as a wealthy – and well-levelled – Solitude landowner. Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle Switch Our sole point of frustration with Ubisoft’s charming spin on XCOM is the restrictions the developer places on team building. Branding should never intrude upon a game’s design, but the insistence that Mario always be team leader,…

We love a good JRPG here at Edge – not for nothing do we have one on the cover this month. With Dragon Quest XI, Square Enix is seeking western success by sticking to the script in a metaphorical sense while changing it in a literal one. Its localisation is set to follow the lead of the eighth instalment, with a broad range of regional accents – understandably so, since that remains the series’ most popular entry overseas. Yes, it’s a steadfastly traditional example of the form, but in Japan that’s exactly what sells. So why go to the bother of changing a winning formula? It’s easy to detect a hint of desperation in the ways Revenant Kingdom tries to compete with its overseas peers Plenty of other games have…