At PAX 2012 yesterday, Hideo Kojima showed an 11-minute realtime demo of Kojima Productions' new game, Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes, which runs on its next-generation Fox Engine and will be released on 360 and PS3.
The Japanese obsession with pachinko, pinball’s curious and seemingly ruleless cousin, seems inexplicable to most westerners. A tourist’s curiosity, these bright, clattering machines are inscrutably foreign in both form and function, sharing few of the rules, risks and rewards of traditional videogames. The same could perhaps be said of Peggle, a game that also sees its players’ success or failure resting on a curious balance of chance and design.
The Sith Lords should have been The Empire Strikes Back of Star Wars games.
Some works of art only reveal the full extent of their genius long after they first appear. Maybe initial-release expectations were wrongly managed; maybe the ‘story’ of the creator or the production process overshadowed the story embedded in the artwork itself. Only later can such a work be fairly appreciated. Take Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate: on its release, the ‘story’ was its massive budget, and it flopped; now it’s widely considered a tour de force. The same can be true of videogames.
Throughout this week, as part of our coverage of Sony's closure of Wipeout developer Sony Liverpool, we've been talking to key former members of staff about the studio's heyday when, known as Psygnosis, it put out a slew of great games, first for the Amiga and then Sony's PlayStation.
While the naval battles in Assassin's Creed III, the cover star of Edge 245, are some of the most riveting experiences we've had in the series to date, our exclusive video interview reveals that they nearly didn't make the final cut.
Flip’s Escape directly follows the climactic events of platform-puzzler The Last Rocket, with jet-powered protagonist Flip escaping a stellar shockwave of his own making. After the whip-smart platforming of Inman’s previous effort, the simplicity of this endless runner comes as a surprise, though this bracing change of pace offers several instances of similarly intelligent design.
Valve's crowd-voting service Greenlight has now launched and, at the time of writing, features over 500 titles.
Greenlight allows users to vote for the next games they want to see released on Steam and is intended as a way to expedite the task of finding the games that will find a market on the digital distribution service.
Double Fine has announced Middle Manager Of Justice, a "superhero management game" due soon for iOS, and the company's first free-to-play game.
Announced in typical style on Double Fine's website, the game casts players as a middle manager in Justice Corp, tasked with training and managing the next generation of crime-fighting superheroes and running an office.
Bethesda has admitted that Dawnguard, the first DLC expansion for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, may never make it to PlayStation 3 due to technical problems encountered in development.
Throughout this week, as part of our coverage of Sony's closure of Studio Liverpool, we're speaking to key former members of staff about the Psygnosis heyday, when it was responsible for a host of Amiga classics and was a driving force in the early success of the PlayStation.
Joonas Rikkonen wants to scare you. But he doesn't have access to the traditional tools of fear. He doesn't work for a big development studio, he can't use a top-end game engine, and he won't use liberal jump cuts and scripted frights.
The cover star of our new issue, E245, is Assassin's Creed III, and as part of our in-depth coverage of Ubisoft's biggest ever project we've put together the below making of video.
Thomas Was Alone is the puzzle-platformer redesigned as an exercise in empathy. It seems determined to make you identify with a handful of blocks of different proportions, and even to care a little bit about their personal problems.
Novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland has explored genres in his film projects ranging from zombies (28 Days Later) to interstellar sci-fi (Sunshine) to comic book fantasy (Dredd). It shouldn’t come as any surprise, then, that he’s also a lifelong gamer. Here, we talk to him about his contribution to the ill-fated Halo movie, the oversaturation of zombie games and the action-RPG that awakened his love of single-player console gaming.
Assassin's Creed III, the cover star of E245, is no mere sequel with a new setting, according to the team who've spent the past three years working on Ubisoft's biggest-ever project. Instead, it's intended as a reinvention, rather than mere iteration, of the multimillion-selling series.
Assassin’s Creed III, which features on the cover of Edge 245, is the biggest game that Ubisoft, one of the world’s biggest game publishers, has ever attempted. That alone should convey everything you need to know about the scale of its ambition. At its conclusion, the project’s development cycle will have spanned three years.
Konami has announced Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes, an-open world game running in Hideo Kojima's new Fox Engine.
In our newest issue, we feature an in-depth interview with Jesse Schell, the game designer and former Disney Imagineer, about how the 'gamepocalypse' he envisaged for a speech at DICE 2010 has actually played out.
If you want a good idea, get a lot of ideas. Linus Pauling said that – and he won a Nobel Prize. He didn’t win it for game design, though, a field in which the simplest concepts are often the most fruitful. And sure enough, for your first couple of playthroughs, Toybox – a strange cocktail that sees you controlling a side-scrolling shooter with your left thumb, and a match-three puzzler with your right – seems to have a few too many concepts in the mix.
The Creative Assembly today announced that its iOS game Total War Battles: Shogun is available for PC and Mac in revised form via Steam.
The creative producer of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance has admitted that the collaboration between Kojima Productions and Platinum Games, two studios who are used to being granted almost complete autonomy in development of their games, is at times rather problematic, telling us: "We clash all the time."