Those expecting Beyond: Two Souls to be a departure from Quantic Dream's previous games like Heavy Rain should think again: David Cage says his focus in development of his upcoming PS3 exclusive is "creating an emotional journey," adding: "I'm not interest in giving [players] 'fun'."
Koichi Hayashida, Super Mario 3D Land’s director, led a team with crazy ideas of what a Mario game could be. Early in the development cycle, its members covered reams of notes with outlandish concepts: a Mario so big that he stretched past the 3DS’s screen, a pro skater Mario, a Princess Peach whose face could be replaced with a photograph of a real girl.
Swooping around in the clouds is great, and it’s always nice to walk on the ceiling, but I don’t think Gravity Rush truly gets going until you fall down your first flight of stairs.
We've all played a game at one point and asked ourselves, “What were the developers thinking? What's meant to be enjoyable about this?" Often, a game just isn't for you, but sometimes, it simply isn't for anyone, and ideas which sounded fine to the developer during production just don’t resonate with the game's target audience.
The consumer has spoken on free-to-play, and developers and publishers must embrace this new business model or risk being left behind, according to Japanese mobile gaming company Gree.
Speaking at a UKIE-backed event last week, David McCarthy from Gree UK’s EMEA developer relations team also praised the greater degree of control developers can get from operating in the social mobile space.
Head to toe, LocoRoco will make you sing. It will make your eyes sing, as its world’s flat slices of light hum with colour. It will make your body sing, as it sways in time with the to-and-fro tilts needed to tip your wobbling blob from one end of the level to the other. It will make your brain sing, as it adjusts to the slingshots and switchbacks of the 2D physics. And it will make your mouth sing, unable to resist joining in with the shrill gibberish of the bubblegum-sweet soundtrack. Put simply, LocoRoco is a nursery rhyme you can play.
If Edge was God, and it’s a rare day when it doesn’t wish it were, these would be its commandments. This isn’t game theory. These are rules that Edge believes are universally and inarguably applicable to all and any games. That some of the laws listed here may seem mundane doesn’t diminish their potential to make a great game good and a bad game unplayable.
If the last great FPS novelty was bullet-time, the creators of the Burnout series have just proposed another: leisure-time – a gluttonous new action dynamic in which your primary purpose is to gorge on mayhem. At least, that’s the impression on Black playthrough number one. Its eastern Europe is a focused sandbox of gas and gunpowder in which natural law has been supplanted by action movie lore.
The one thing that everyone agrees on is that they didn’t make Grand Theft Auto, but that’s not strictly fair: the other thing that everyone agrees on is that everybody made Grand Theft Auto. Talking to those that worked for DMA Design back in the late ’90s it’s difficult to get anyone to claim significant credit for themselves, although they’re generous with praise for others.
Issue 244 of Edge features on its cover a beleaguered, resigned Jodie Holmes, the lead character of Quantic Dream's upcoming Beyond: Two Souls. Along with our in-depth preview of the game and art showcase, we speak to its writer-director David Cage about what Ellen Page brings to the game in her role as Holmes.
Edge reviews are no strangers to controversy. Ever since our first issue hit stands in 1993 we've often found ourselves disagreeing with the eventual consensus; not only have our low scores proven divisive, but also, on occasion, the higher ones.
There’s something poetic about the idea of Derek Yu updating his PC shareware cult hit Spelunky for its recent release on XBLA. After all, in terms of its roguelike design framework, this is a game that has been doing nothing but cheerily updating itself since its release in 2008. Every time players start a new game, Spelunky’s algorithmic wormhole sucks players into yet another alternate universe.
What were you doing the other day, when Zynga’s share-price took a tumble? Through sheer coincidence, I was playing a Zynga game: Ruby Blast, a new Facebook spin on Match Three in which you click on groups of gems to dig downwards through dense layers of rock.
Mass Effect's Commander Shepard is many things: hero, flirt, compassionate friend, callous pragmatist and more. But while BioWare offers a host of opportunities to steer your character’s moral temperament and actions, humanity’s first Spectre has constants, too. For instance, Shepard is always a ship’s captain.
Not too long ago, I was thinking about Mass Effect 3. In fact, it seems we were all thinking about Mass Effect 3, not least in terms of how we wanted to string it up by its eyes and feed it to half-starved crocodiles because of its ending.
Not too long ago, I was thinking about Mass Effect 3. In fact, it seems we were all thinking about Mass Effect 3, not least in terms of how we wanted to string it up by its eyes and feed it to half-starved crocodiles because of its ending.
Throughout this week, we've been creating lists of the most important people in videogames you can follow on Twitter.
Misfortune favours the brave in sparsevector’s indie curio, which imagines The Oregon Trail as produced by Eugene Jarvis on an Atari 2600. The action flits restlessly between side-scrolling dodge- and-shoot sequences and rudimentary twin-stick interludes with the occasional choice of route to take in between. Regardless of which option is picked, A Spelunky-esque dash of randomisation ensures no two journeys will ever be the same.
Here you'll find every cover in Edge magazine's history, from the promotional issue 0 we released in 1993 right up to our current issue, E243. Well, almost every cover. Select issues had more than one, including E184's Ryu and Ken; the ten designs to mark our tenth anniversary in E128; and the 200 covers to mark our 200th issue.
There’s a hidden flip side to Supergiant Games’ name: the independent studio is staffed by a super-tiny team. “In total, there are eight of us,” says Greg Kasavin, the studio’s creative director and the writer behind its 2011 hit debut, Bastion. “But Darren [Korb, audio director] and Logan [Cunningham, voice artist] are based in New York, and then Andrew [Wang, systems engineer] spends part of his time in LA.
Gameplay vs story. Mechanics vs narrative. Red vs blue. Reconciling these has been a basic tenet of critical game thinking for as long as I can remember. They represent a two-tone spectrum, much like the left-right spectrum that we use in politics. Each seems to stand for an ultimate form of something and so becomes the basis of a very easy argument. Are you for gameplay or for narrative? Industry or academia? Puzzle or plot?