Entirely the work of Eskil Steenberg, Love exhibits an uncompromising painterly art style. Its thick daubs of pixels trade clarity for effect, favouring emotional over intellectual responses. This untextured look has helped condemn the game to the outermost indie fringe, its servers visited only by a dedicated few who appreciate its beauty and the purity of its co-op.
Love, Eskil Steenberg's beautiful, ideological co-op game, is now free to download.
The game, which Steenberg has been working on alone, without funding, for five years, has been made free because its creator, simply put, wants as many people as possible to experience it.
Square Enix’s Final Fantasy franchise has gone through three distinct phases since it debuted on the NES in 1987. The first six entries helped to ingrain the conventions of JRPGs for western gamers, and introduced the mythology and mechanics – from chocobos and moogles to summoning and airship travel – that bind all of the discrete stories together.
If you worked at Ubisoft on the Splinter Cell or Rainbow Six franchises in the autumn of 2000, sooner or later you’d have a heavy weapon shoved into your hands. As the company expanded its Tom Clancy connection, after acquiring the bestselling author’s multimedia outfit Red Storm Entertainment that August, the Montreal offices were frequently invaded by men carrying scary armaments.
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. Every Monday and Friday, staff and contributors go into detail on the games they've been playing in their spare time.
If the pulsing spin cycle and morphing neon palette of Super Hexagon is communicating something via hypnotic suggestion, it’s nothing particularly reassuring. Don’t look for tenderness here. There’s only one-more-go fiendishness on offer. And an infectious chiptune soundtrack by Chipzel to keep you from chafing too raw against the hockey-stick-shaped learning curve.
Influenza, by Robert Shenton, looks a bit like Taito’s classic platformer Elevator Action at first. It offers side-on views of complex buildings with stacked floors and plenty of doorways, and it’s almost impossible to glance at the screen without trying to pick a path from the bottom of the building to the top.
Klei Entertainment is getting increasingly adept at transplanting 3D action game mechanics into 2D sidescrollers. First came the Shank games, which took the combo-building, foe-juggling systems of Devil May Cry and flattened them into a tableau of cartoony ultraviolence. Mark Of The Ninja does something similar, but its inspiration is the deliberate hunting found in Batman: Arkham Asylum and Metal Gear Solid.
Former TV editor Nathan Vella established Toronto studio Capybara Games – Capy ?for short – with some friends in 2003, and by his own assessment neither he nor his co-founders “had a fucking clue what we were doing”.
With Sound Shapes' slender campaign completed, our attention turns to the Community section, to see what players of Queasy Games' delightful musical platformer have created with the game's powerful level editor. Thankfully, a recent update has greatly improved discoverability, with the single-screen Mario and Sonic theme remakes booted off the front page, allowing the cream to rise to the top.
Toying with the dynamics of the competitive, team-based shooter is an unexpected move for the developer of Scribblenauts, a game defined by its lack of prescribed solutions. Doubly so when you consider this is an experience in which you cannot even run freely, instead flitting from cover to cover using your jetpack. There is little room for emergent gameplay here, although 5th Cell’s predilection for confounding expectations is clearly found in the broader canvas of the game.
Dead Space has been orbiting The Thing for two games now, so it’s little surprise that its third instalment sees the series finally touching down. Isaac Clarke has crash-landed on Tau Volantis, an ice planet whose frozen wastelands will seem familiar to fans of John Carpenter’s splatterhouse classic.
How To Make A Game continues with a look at iOS and the App Store. Is Apple's marketplace a good fit for your first videogame?
Broken Sword: The Serpent's Curse, the fifth game in Revolution Software's beloved series of point and click adventures, has met its $400,000 funding goal on Kickstarter with 16 days to spare.
Billy is six years old and watching the world burn. “I set the ground on fire!” he giggles as flames engulf everything. His glee is a little worrying for his parents, perhaps. But it’s very encouraging for the people behind what he’s playing: MinecraftEdu.
From 8-bit upstart through to '90s superpower, from blundering hardware giant to revived software publisher, Sega's history is dramatic and diverse. Recent news that it would be restructuring its business around core franchises like Sonic, Aliens, Football Manager and Total War was only part of Sega's latest metamorphosis.
PlayStation Vita could be the new home for middle-tier games that are struggling on console and PC, Eufloria developer Rudolf Kremers tells us.
Much has been made of late about the middle tier being squeezed out of the game industry, with only big-budget games succeeding on consoles and the likes of iOS playing host to simpler games from smaller teams. Our latest issue, Edge 245, features an in-depth look at the problem.
Mojang has announced Block By Block, a joint project with the UN which aims to involve youth in local urban planning.
Based on Mina Kvarter (My Blocks), a similar project focused on Sweden, Block By Block allows those who get involved to show urban planners and decision makers their own ideas for the future of the cities they live in.
Total War Battles: Shogun lead designer Renaud Charpentier has slammed the lack of design focus in today's developers, telling us that 70 per cent of games simply do not pass muster as a result.
Renaud's comments followed an impassioned session at Unite 2012 last month in which he and fellow The Creative Assembly colleagues Nick Farley and Mattijs Van Delden stressed the value of prototyping early on in a project.