Innholdsfortegnelse for #56 i Wireframe Magazine

Will the world end with a bang, or a whimper? Certainly, the gently melancholic tone of Scavengers Studio’s upcoming Season suggests the latter. There are no crowds of screaming people fleeing in panic, or vast alien battleships flying overhead, or raging lava flows; there’s just your lone protagonist, riding their bicycle, diligently taking down photos and sketches. As follow-up games go, Season couldn’t be more different from the team’s previous title, the chilly battle royale survive-‘emup, Darwin Project, though writer Kevin Sullivan says that embarking on a new creative direction wasn’t a conscious decision when work on Season began. “It was inspired by our experiences travelling,” Sullivan tells us, “ and a general sense of foreboding regarding the future.” That sense of foreboding is all over Season, even if it’s a…

01. FIFA is dead Clickbait, gotcha! No, but seriously, FIFA has announced it will be broadening its horizons in future, with the international footballing governing body breaking away from EA Sports after a partnership lasting around 28 years. On the flip side of this very coin, EA Sports announced it was to rebrand the FIFA franchise in future instalments, with the main reason claimed to be money. As in, FIFA (the institution) pretty much doubled its fees to around £724m ($1bn) for FIFA (the game series) to use its licence over a four-year period. EA said ‘nope’, announced it was rebranding, and trademarked the name EA Sports FC. Football might not be coming home, but it could be coming to more, different publishers in the near future. 02. Dreaded credits…

Chocobo GP Latching on to the karting genre’s recent revival, Square Enix brings back the long-forgotten Final Fantasy spin-off in the shape of Chocobo GP, smartly coming exclusively to Switch. It’s a surprisingly long-awaited sequel to the 1999 PSone original, so expectations might be higher than you’d expect for this one. Innchanted Brew potions, cook, and fight in your magical inn with up to four players engaging in manic destruction/service industry behaviours. It’s not unfair to say Innchanted is pretty much Overcooked but with a pub and more magic – but that’s in no way a slight on this upcoming game from developer DragonBear Studios. The proof will, of course, be in the brewing. Pull Stay Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here – Pull Stay looks janky, and has…

£10,000 OF PRIZES TO BE WON! WHAT IS RICHCAST? A completely new genre of voice-driven interactive entertainment that empowers user-generated content creators and delivers groundbreaking experiences. Want to make an interactive murder mystery? A daring heist adventure? A simple quiz? You can do all this and more with RichCast. With RichCast, you can create new, original, and diverse interactive content, enhanced with pictures, animations, videos, voice recordings, music, and more. HOW DO I MAKE RICHCASTS? Head to richcast.com, download the Early Access RichCast App on PC or Mac, and click on Create to get started. There’s no code or script language involved, loads of tutorials, and a few full example games to play. It’s fast and easy to make interactive experiences, and you can collaborate with friends remotely. RichCast contains over…

We’ve chatted about 3DO [see Wireframe issue 49, page 46 – Ed]. Now let's drop the ‘O’ and talk about 3D. Specifically, the transition from 2D to 3D. It changed everything on both sides of the video game equation. 3D made the job of creating video games a lot harder, and it made the experience of playing a lot richer. 3D added a lot more than one dimension to the industry. For developers, these differences mainly showed up as complexity. Making a 3D game is more involved than a 2D game at every level. Even the computer architecture is more complex. Handling polys, textures, and lighting requires specialised processors capable of managing all the additional calculations. This means more areas of programmer specialisation. Of course, the increased workload on programmers…

As long-time readers will be aware, I have something of an obsession with techniques which make the act of investigation in games compelling. After years of thought, analysis, and work on such games, I’ve arrived at three Pillars of Investigative Gameplay, and I share them here in the hope that you use and build on them. PILLAR 1: DEDUCTIONS MUST BE VALIDATED This requires that, after investigating, the player must be able to input their deduction. This inputting can be explicit, such as typing in an answer and having the computer evaluate it (like Her Story), or implicit, such as walking their character to a location they’ve deduced might hold treasure and seeing if treasure is present there (like Red Dead Redemption 2’s treasure maps). There’s no need to validate…

THE CHALLENGE OF GIVING GAMES A NEXT-GEN UPGRADE After what seemed like an age, last November saw the next generation of consoles officially land with Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series. Players were feverish. Expectations were high. Excitement was rife over what all this extra processing power and graphical fidelity would mean for triple-A games in the future. Throughout most of 2021, however, early adopters weren’t exactly showered with next-gen exclusives. Instead, most developers have taken a different approach: giving existing games an enhanced lick of paint. The process of porting a game from one platform to another is, of course, nothing new. But throughout this year, there’s been a sense that, while the industry takes its time to get used to developing for these new machines, next-gen updates…

Last month I tried the let-down that was the Aliens tie-in, Fireteam Elite – itself now on the receiving end of stories about its near-complete lack of playerbase, mere months following launch. Probably the impact of last month’s column, let’s be honest. But that licensed aspect stuck with me, and with PlayStation Plus (fairly) recently offering up Predator: Hunting Grounds as a freebie, I thought ‘Why in heckeroonie not, eh?’ First up, and most importantly, nobody had told me Arnold Schwarzenegger had reprised his role as Dutch from the original movie to record some audio diaries, giving an insight into what the big burly boy got up to in the wake of his adventure in the Val Verde meat-grinder during the late 1980s. It’s fanfic spoken by the man who…

One way Hoa differs from most platform games is that its world seems happy to have you. It’s not a hostile place, nor does it burden your actions with regrettable consequences. For the most part, it’s content to be positively lovely. OK, it briefly ponders the destructive encroachment of technology on nature, and the hope for harmony between the two. But unlike many mechanically stripped-back indies of its kind in recent years, it’s not designed to mirror the stages of grief, or dig into existential anxieties or anything like that. Hoa would rather give you a big cuddle and a relaxing foot bath, and honestly, that’s quite refreshing. Who doesn’t want that kind of treatment from time to time? You should feel its welcoming energy right from the start. Little…

The first 30 minutes of JETT are amazing. Straight away, it smashes every expectation you might have of a Space Game. For one, it starts in a yurt. For two, you’re part of a fictional space program that isn’t an unconvincingly rebadged NASA. Even the design of JETT’s titular aircraft defies convention, sporting three dorsal fins like a mutated shark, the stubby landing struts of a bull terrier, and the face of a grinning killer whale. The civilisation that built it is similarly patchworked: at once evocative of Mongolian nomads, northern European tribes, and Native Americans, it’s also shot through with mid-20th century American optimism and the oppressive touch of the Eastern Bloc. Their Earth is on the brink. Their seas are littered with the refuse of brighter days long…

If On A Winter’s Night, Four Travelers Laura Hunt / Name your own price / wfmag.cc/IoaWN Winter’s Night opens on a masquerade party in the carriage of a train hurtling through the snow, at once lavish and bare, comforting, and otherworldly. It’s an immediately arresting framing device for this point-and-click adventure, taking the seeming graphical limitations of early 1990s offerings and turning out detailed and dusky mise-en-scène. The 1920s provide a backdrop for the game’s vignettes. The player’s instinct to catalogue the interactables of a delirious countess’s bedchamber unravels a familiar space drained pale through dissociation. A chirpy love affair soon clashes against the ignorance of the age. Puzzles are brief, but the stories they punctuate are vivid and haunting. Gob Gamma Girl / Free / wfmag.cc/Gob “Every character should…

1 Disco Elysium / 94% (Issue 28) Smarter and deeper than anything else; truly an RPG in a class completely of its own. 2 Hades / 94% (Issue 44) Proving ‘roguelike’ isn’t a dirty word, learning-and- dying is a joy from start to finish. 3 Assassin’s Creed Odyssey / 93% (Issue 1) The point where Ubisoft realised over-the-top adventures were the right direction. 4 Telling Lies / 92% (Issue 24) This FMV mystery asks more of the player than most, with rewards to match. 5 If Found / 92% (Issue 44) A compelling and beautifully illustrated narrative, as moving as it is memorable. 6 Yakuza: Like a Dragon / 90% (Issue 45) A bold, brash, and joyous rebirth for the long-running gangster series. 7 Tetris Effect / 90% (Issue 4) The…

Wizordum looks in a slightly different direction to the recent crop of retro-inspired first-person shooters. Rather than the nod coming from DOOM, Quake, or Duke Nukem 3D, this Slovenian-made indie title takes its cues from the likes of Catacomb Abyss, Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold, Heretic, and Hexen. Those familiar with (three of) those games will immediately know what to expect: a kind of magic. With fantasy, goblins, fireballs, castles, and plenty of gold to grab along the way, Wizordum is already shaping up to be another fine mix of games from the past and more modern design sensibilities. Even though you’re unable to look up or down in the game. Speaking to Primož Vovk of Emberheart Games, it soon becomes clear where the enthusiasm for the project comes from:…

One cold Christmas in 1977, Mel Croucher was at a house party somewhere in Cambridge. Wandering into the kitchen, Croucher encountered a tall man wearing large round spectacles, his bald head fringed with a thin halo of red hair. “We fell to talking about a forthcoming consumer opportunity for microcomputers,” Croucher recalls. “He told me that the purpose of home computers was to conduct personal accounts, solve mathematical problems, and make inventories.” “The ZX Spectrum changed the world for everybody at that party” At this point, Croucher had recently already set up what is widely credited as the first video games company in the UK, Automata, which made titles for the Commodore PET. That December, Croucher used a local radio station to broadcast a blast of data, which listeners could…

Traditionally, handheld gaming hardware has always been a few steps behind its home counterpart, arguably the same way home consoles used to lag behind arcade boards. The arrival of the Nintendo Switch, however, became a significant step in eroding divisions between the two. Nintendo’s hybrid is, of course, the most underpowered system of its generation, so there’s still a kind of marvel when porting houses like Panic Button and Saber Interactive deliver ‘impossible’ ports like DOOM Eternal and The Witcher 3, respectively. A cross-platform release, in fact, is becoming applicable to both home and portable platforms, as high-end smartphones mean games like Fortnite, Genshin Impact, and eFootball (formerly PES) ship with the same features, even capable of cross-play and cross-save, as their larger counterparts. Cloud gaming, on the other hand,…

Like most mortals, the Grim Reaper has a job to do: collect the souls of the dead and deliver them to their final resting places. But even the Grim Reaper’s horse is subject to the gloomier forces of nature, and so when the poor steed breathes its last one day, the Grim Reaper makes a practical decision: he gets a minibus. It’s a scenario Minnesota-based developer Ben Burnes at Tallbeard Studios came up with while stuck in traffic. “I’d daydreamed about a puzzle game where you drive from place to place collecting and delivering things,” Burnes tells us. “It was partly inspired by the old Ghostbusters game on the NES where you needed to drive around town and capture ghosts.” When the global pandemic began to take hold about a…

Nintendo ended the 1990s knowing it had a big fight on its hands. Sony’s PlayStation had vastly outsold the N64 by the end of the decade. Then, in the late nineties, Microsoft offered to buy Nintendo for $25 billion, a sum the Japanese firm turned down flat. Nintendo, therefore, resolved to make a follow-up to the N64 capable of meeting its opposition head-on: a console that was technically capable, easy to develop for, and affordable for consumers. As work began on ‘Project Dolphin’ – what would become the GameCube – Nintendo was bullish about the system’s prospects in the face of its rivals, the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. “I don’t think the Xbox will do very well in Japan,” Nintendo boss Hiroshi Yamauchi predicted. “The same old genres and development…

What a time to release a game about refugees, eh? Road 96, from Montpellier-based developer DigixArt, offers an enthralling series of stories about vulnerable people risking their lives to escape the fictional regime of Petria. Let’s get it out of the way: this could have been game of the year material. It isn’t – the horrifically real context it emerges into proves too much to confront – but that doesn’t mean this procedurally generated series of one-way road trips has nothing worthwhile to say. Certain larger French companies should take note that, yes, it’s possible to make games that are appealing, meaningful, and overtly political. After an obtuse start, Road 96’s charm is revealed through choose-your-own vignettes that form the travelogue of each young refugee. These short tales, many titled…

Boyfriend Dungeon places its feet in two genres: dungeon crawler and dating sim. It’s thoughtful in its approach to combining the two, but the melding isn’t perfect. Players take on the role of a silent protagonist who visits the fictional town of Verona Beach for the summer. You can choose to be a male, female, or non-binary character, and with the protagonist’s cousin acting as matchmaker, you’re encouraged to date more than one of the seven characters at once. Boyfriend Dungeon’s most unique element is that each of the datable characters becomes a literal weapon that can be equipped for use in dungeons. These dives into the dark aren’t going to sate the thirst of hardcore delvers – the combat’s functional, boiling down to dodges, light and heavy attacks, and…

What’s your favourite game? It’s a difficult question for me – there are so many games that define me as a gamer, so many moments I get lost in, but if I had to narrow it down, then there are two games that define me. The original Final Fantasy VII on PlayStation (yes I’m old, but I still look good!) and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on N64. These games are the reason why I call myself a gamer, the reason why I work in the industry, and the reason why I love gaming. And why is that? What is it about those particular games that resonates so much with you? My favourite part of gaming is stories. I love a great story; I love to get lost…

Utter filth I generally try to take a ‘first, do no harm’ approach to old hardware – which is to say, I’ll leave a console as close to its original state as I can unless it’s properly falling to bits. Which brings me to my latest project: a DMG-01 Game Boy I recently bought from eBay, which was falling to bits. “The housing of the console may be slightly discoloured and have some marks to it,” read the seller’s description – and they weren’t kidding. When the handheld arrived a few days later in a jiffy bag, I sat marvelling at just what a hard life the poor old thing must have had. Its once creamy-grey shell had degraded over the 30-or-so years to a queasy brown, like tobacco-stained fingers.…

In the eleven years since I last played Alan Wake, I’d forgotten what a complete plonker the titular novelist is. Right near the beginning, Alan’s thoroughly rude to an elderly fan who politely asks if he’d like to appear on his local radio show. He’s horrible to a waitress in the small-town diner near his holiday home (“What an airhead”). And when Alan’s long-suffering partner Alice unveils a typewriter, in a well-meaning attempt to cure Alan’s writer’s block, he screams in her face and looks, for one horrible second, like he might even hit the poor woman. Yes, I’ve been playing Alan Wake Remastered, which is the same action-horror game from 2010 but with a high-def lick of paint. But while the game now supports 4K tellies and has fancy…

“I’ve always been fascinated by everything that flies,” explains Felipe Falanghe, creator of Balsa Model Flight Simulator and founder of Floating Origin Interactive. A fairly generic statement to make when talking about the game you’re making and how it involves a realistic model of (model) flight. But factor in Falanghe’s history in gaming and it feels like a vast understatement, with his past work on the now-legendary Kerbal Space Program not just having an impact on video games, but stretching into the wider world of actual space flight. The man’s not lying when he says he has a fascination with flight. And it’s from there the idea for Balsa Model Flight Simulator came – bringing together the handcrafted, customised nature of Kerbal and introducing it to the suborbital flying devices…

Sir Clive Sinclair’s passing on 16 September marked another ending in the saga of the Great British Inventor – those who pounded away in their sheds and changed the world, the John Logie Bairds and Trevor Baylises and what have you. The idea of the ‘Great Inventor’ is as much an image as it is a reality, of course – this is certainly true in the case of Sir Clive. For all the marketing there was of the Uncle Clive persona in the early 1980s, Sir Clive was more the boss of a skilled research team than he was a solitary man in a shed – but the products that Sinclair made were undoubtedly a product of his own vision and his character, for better or worse. Everything from the…

I wouldn’t dare call myself a connoisseur of battle royale games, but both pen and paper RPG Vampire: The Masquerade and the city of Prague hold a certain, almost unavoidable allure. I simply had to try VtM: Bloodhunt by Sharkmob, then, for it is indeed a battle royale game set in Prague, and one that also lets players run around and kill each other using interesting weapons and supernatural, vampiric powers. All in the middle of stunning re-creations of the city’s landmarks and cobblestone streets Admittedly, I found myself thoroughly entertained by the actual game, and often impressed by the urban environment Sharkmob has crafted. Also, I had questions. Here, then, is Craig Hubbard, Game Director of Bloodhunt, to answer them, and tell us more about the urban and level…

Zero-sum gameplay and loss aversion are seemingly unrelated topics that can work together to create tension and make a game more appealing to competitive, thrill-seeking players. Let’s look at each area separately and then explore how they can be used together. ZERO-SUM GAMEPLAY A game is considered to be zero-sum when one player can only gain something by causing another player to lose an equal amount. This contrasts with non-zero-sum, win-win gameplay, where both players can gain ‘stuff ’ irrespective of what the other is doing. For example, football and rugby are not zero-sum sports because one team scoring a goal/try has no bearing on the other team’s score. Therefore, both teams try to score as many points as they can and the team with the most when time runs…

how many of us have an attic full of plastic instruments? Rhythm games reached a peak in the mid-noughts with the Guitar Hero and Rock Band series, games that presented the fantasy of music-making with a few well-timed button presses. These were quintessential rhythm games – the pinnacle of beat-matching. But while those games were purely about music, indie developers have since experimented further by adding rhythm elements to other genres. Beyond simply beat-matching, these unique experiences integrate rhythm and traditional gameplay to put an interesting spin on established genres. Further, they allow developers to think differently about player inputs and musical outputs. But how did these genre remixes come about? And what unique challenges did development present? We spoke to three developers using rhythm to varying extents in their…

I’ve been asked a few times recently about Fortnite by fellow parents and, to my shame, as ‘Mr. Games’, I’d never really played it. If you’re like them, fear ye not, as I’ve now fallen down the hole so that you don’t have to. The core game is simple. You get plopped on an island with 99 other people, and the goal is to not be dead. To the casual observer, that might seem like it would soon get repetitive but, every day, a ‘Punchcard’ containing three new quests is delivered to you. Successful completion of these grants you a pile of XP, which allows you to level up, granting you ‘Battle Stars’ which you can spend on cosmetics like emojis and graffiti to personalise your experience. Occasionally you can…

Fury is being beaten to the finish line by a truck fashioned in the style of a triceratops. That is what Hot Wheels Unleashed has taught me. It’s also taught me just how much of a difference witnessing toy cars race from a rear view, rather than isometric or top-down (as has historically been the case), has in selling you on the concept. Said approach adds a heightened sense of scale as you put your pedal to the metal in a selection of die-cast vehicles. The result is a near photorealistic joyride that plays and handles just as well as any other beloved arcade racer. Only this one has a turbo boost’s worth of childhood nostalgia built in. This technically being a licensed game, it’s easy to be initially sceptical.…

It’s been a long time since the last No More Heroes game, at least if you don’t count the 2019 spin-off – and most disappointed fans probably wouldn’t – which should make foul-mouthed anti-hero Travis Touchdown something of a relic in modern games that demand more depth from their protagonists. But with beam katana in hands, leaving enemies in his bloody wake, you have to admit that on a primal level, Travis still has it. The stakes have risen greatly since the last ranked assassin battle, as this time Travis is pitted against a group of elite alien ‘superheroes’ who seemingly have the power to decimate all human life as fast as Thanos’ snap. But to give Earth a fighting chance, their bloodthirsty and hot-headed leader FU goes along with…

Shoot them up Old consoles had lightguns. The PS2 and before, basically. Most had a plastic gun-shaped thing you could point at a screen and shoot baddies/ducks/targets with. Lightgun games were fantastic fun, but then suddenly died; a victim of the steamrollering that is technological progress, as modern flat-panel displays were suddenly incompatible with the old guns. Your options for playing lightgun games on original hardware have been severely limited for the past 20 or so years, with the choice being either to use a CRT television or… to just not be able to play anything lightgunny. Well, friends, that’s all over now. At least on PlayStation and PS2. The incredible Sinden Lightgun – a modern lightgun made mainly for use with PCs (both for PC games and emulators), but…

Literally the first game I downloaded on my Switch: Golf Story, from Australian dev Sidebar Games. Readers of Wireframe #54 will have picked up on a certain fondness for golf games – especially those of the three-tap variety – and writers of Wireframe #54 will have been influenced to pick up a thread they dropped what seems like forever ago. That being: to actually power through and finish Golf Story, four years after first starting it. Well, dear reader (not writer) – I only went and ruddy well did it, didn’t I? No idea why I stopped, to be honest. Golf Story is a wonderful little package – a mix of cracking, straightforward video game golf, a light RPG with levelling and side quests, an overarching storyline to wade through,…