Following yesterday's list of the most influential videogame voices on Twitter and Monday's indie game devs to follow, our attention turns to Japan.
A husband and wife from North Carolina quit their steady but unfulfilling jobs, decide to make games and go on to release a global bestseller; Apple should be collecting these romantic little tales for a big book of App Store stories. Temple Run’s triumph saw Imangi Studios take in “tens of thousands” of dollars per day at its zenith, co-creator Keith Shepherd tells us.
At first, you wonder if it'll ever come back. Even if you put hundreds of hours into the early entries in Activision's skateboarding series, your first hours with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD will frustrate, your attempts to repeat high scores of old stymied by atrophied muscle memory, by hours put into EA's Skate series and, most of all, the Xbox 360 controller.
Near the end of the presentation for his new game, Beyond: Two Souls, David Cage pauses to reflect on his place in the game industry. “When I come to E3, I feel like I live in a different world. I want to provoke and explore emotions. I believe there is an audience for what I do.”
During the heyday of the coin-operated videogame arcade, there was little better than seeing our name – well, our initials at least – in lights on a game’s high score list. And it was agonising to see it fall off the bottom, replaced by smug strings of characters representing those who had often accrued mere handfuls of points more. Friendly rivalries led us to feed coin after coin into machines such as Dig Dug, Donkey Kong and Pole Position just so that we could provide incontrovertible evidence that our skills trumped those of our friends.
Nintendo made a loss of ¥17.2 billion (£141.76m) in the financial quarter ending June 30, though the company is heading in the right direction ahead of the launch later this year of Wii U. This time last year, losses were ¥25.5 billion.
Net sales revenue for the quarter came to ¥84.8 billion (£697.7m), a drop of 9.7 per cent year on year - but an improvement on the 50 per cent decline the company was hit with last year.
Following yesterday's list of the indie game devs to follow on Twitter, our attention turns to industry icons; the people whose 140-character missives dominate turn heads, challenge consensus and create entire news cycles. Like our other lists, this will be carefully curated, refined over time as this ever-changing industry continues to shift.
Following yesterday's list of the indie game devs to follow on Twitter, our attention turns to industry icons; the people whose 140-character missives dominate turn heads, challenge consensus and create entire news cycles. Like our other lists, this will be carefully curated, refined over time as this ever-changing industry continues to shift.
Almost four million Axis troops invaded the USSR when Operation Barbarossa began in 1941. The Eastern Front was a theatre of war that claimed tens of millions of lives and constituted the largest conflict in recorded history. The total Soviet mortality rate has been calculated at one in seven.
New console rumours are, more often than not, fleeting. Such is the stranglehold of the ‘big three’ platform holders, it’s difficult to take seriously any new contender’s claim that it could join, much less supplant, the established club. But this year we’ve seen two concepts surface with credentials credible enough to threaten a disruption to that status quo: the Ouya, and Valve’s Steam console, apparently codenamed ‘Steam Box’.
In principle, Moops offers two different games in one. Sadly, neither of them really belongs together, and both are mired in their own frustrations. In the first, you’re a pest controller wandering around a bizarre world of platforms and gangways, opening chests to score loot and smacking critters about so that your dumpy partner can vacuum their bodies up and turn them into cash.
Last time we talked about nationality, with a focus on StarCraft II's top Korean players; this time we'll focus on the controversial topic of race. One of the hallmarks of modern-day competitive videogames is asymmetry; instead of giving both sides identical resources to guarantee balance, asymmetric games give players distinct units and abilities and hope to avoid imbalance with careful design and perpetual tuning.
Finding a game industry job – even with a good undergraduate or postgraduate degree – is not straightforward. But if you are looking to work in the game industry there are ways to stand out and land your dream job – or at least the job that will get you onto the ladder to your dream job.
We're often asked why our Twitter account, @edgeonline, doesn't follow anyone. There are many reasons for that, but one is that we find Twitter rather unwieldy when you're following hundreds of people. Instead, we prefer lists, and our selection of Videogame People has served us well over the years.
Six Epic Games alumni have ditched one of console gaming’s biggest franchises to start all over again, launching a new IP on new platforms with a new mobile start-up.
Risky? Hardly, says BitMonster president Lee Perry. His new mobile studio is made up of former Gears Of War veterans and he wants to bring similar production values to the mobile space with its first title, Lili.
Atomic Antelope’s Chris Stevens, who created the interactive book Alice for iPad, hopes neuroscience research can find non-violent triggers to mimic the rush of pleasure gamers feel when firing guns during play.
He's even calling on publishers to invest millions of dollars in cutting-edge magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners to better understand the impact of games on our brains. Stevens believes that by measuring physiological responses during play, developers can create compelling – and peaceful - experiences.
Ken Levine has had better nights. It’s February 2007, and the creative director and co-founder of Irrational Games is standing behind a one-way mirror in an office in downtown Boston. He’s watching a bunch of gamers play a hands-on build of his latest game, BioShock. It’s depressing.
We tend to stop writing about games when you start playing them. We cover the announcement, we write previews and reviews, but by the time you unwrap a new game we've moved on. Still Playing is our bid to address that. It'll run twice a week here on Edge Online, with staff and contributors going into detail on the games they've been playing in their spare time. We begin with our games editor, Craig Owens, who's still playing Telltale's The Walking Dead on Xbox 360.
This article contains spoilers.
Making a great licensed superhero game is tough. Not only must developers overcome all the regular hurdles of production, they also face the challenge of making players feel like the hero on the front of the box – tricky when many comic book powers are potentially game breaking. The current apotheoses of this dark art are 2009’s Batman: Arkham Asylum and 2011 follow-up Arkham City.
The big legal news this month comes from the Court of Justice of the European Union, the highest court in the EU, which passed a judgement effectively legalising second-hand software and game sales. Or has it?
In short: yes, sort of. The true position, as ever, is not quite what you might think. And, no, that's not me being the a mealy-mouthed, fence-straddling lawyer; there really are issues here to work through here.
Easy right, definitely. A driving game where sharp bends are no more threatening than coins in a Mario game? Brakes that need only ever be tapped, never slammed? Where the finish line is rarely anything more than five minutes away? There’s simplistic, and then there’s simple.
This review first appeared in E2, November 1993.
Pinball Dreams was an amazingly polished product on the Amiga, proving that this game could be the most addictive computer-translated tabletop game ever. And it was one that spawned an equally professional follow-up, in the form of Pinball Fantasies.
But the big attraction here, of course, is the game scrolling just as fast and impressively on the PC as the original did on the Amiga. It’s completely smooth on a fast machine, but you do need a fast graphics card, too.
Speedrunning is an odd pastime. If there were a gaming Olympics, it would be all of the individual track and field events combined with an extra-long marathon, and make mere decathletes look like wimps. The concept is relatively simple – to complete a game as quickly and skilfully as possible, within a competitive context – but the variations and possibilities within it have created one of gaming’s most diverse subcultures.