EDGE MAGAZINE

Time Extend: Space Channel 5: Part 2

Edge Staff — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:18:33 +0000

Games are often condemned for being cases of style over substance. But as a criticism of an artistic endeavour, could this have any validity? Can style, sometimes, create substance? Such accusations are usually levelled at those games that feature a relatively basic form of player interaction plus a vivid and unique aesthetic treatment. And that’s why it’s a meaningless statement: among other things, videogames are a visual art, so the way they look is critically important in defining how their players derive interaction and meaning from them.

The Making Of: Colin Mcrae Rally

Edge Staff — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:13:10 +0000

Format: PlayStation
Release: 1998
Publisher: Codemasters
Developer: In-house

Review: Dante's Inferno

Edge Staff — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:32:28 +0000

Format: 360, PS3 (version tested), PSP
Release: Out now
Publisher: EA
Developer: Visceral Games
Screenshot gallery

What Economic Crisis?

Edge Staff — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:00:37 +0000

Despite a sluggish start to the year, 2009 bucked both the ongoing economic slump and the concerns of uneasy British retailers to deliver unexpectedly positive results. Total software sales for the year generated £1.621bn, compared to 2008’s record total of £1.905bn. The £284m drop may seem like a significant one, but it’s against the backdrop of a rapidly growing second-hand market, and increasingly aggressive price-cutting policies among supermarket chains.

Time Extend: Robotron 2084

Edge Staff — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:53:43 +0000

The history of gaming is a history of ingratiation. It’s a trend that plays out on a number of fronts. Over three decades, consoles have wheedled their way into our lives and our living rooms, but the real change has taken place in the growing desire of games to win you over.

The Making Of: Gauntlet

Edge Staff — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:23:02 +0000

Format: Arcade
Release: 1985
Publisher: Atari
Developer: In-house

Review: Mass Effect 2

Edge Staff — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:16:55 +0000

Format: 360
Release: Out now (US), January 29 (Euro)
Publisher: EA
Developer: BioWare
Screenshot gallery

Time Extend: Jet Set Radio Future

Edge Staff — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:54:50 +0000

The Skyscraper District is perhaps the highlight of all of Jet Set Radio Future’s reimagined Tokyo; the pinnacle of a game so dazzlingly vertiginous it can make your ears pop. It’s a five-minute climb to the top of its highest peak – an aeon in gaming terms, a period in which you could comfortably save the world in most other titles. But Jet Set Radio Future is not most other titles, and the lengthy climb is more than worth the time it takes.

The Making Of: Wipeout

Edge Staff — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:21:50 +0000

Format: PlayStation
Release: 1995
Publisher: Psygnosis
Developer: In-house
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Time Extend: Speedball 2 - Brutal Deluxe

Edge Staff — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 15:29:49 +0000

For Amiga gamers in 1990 the world was oval, its core a rectangle. Time existed as 90-second intervals, each announced and punctuated by an electric buzz, a pneumatic hiss and the sound of 36 fists and feet converging on a steel sphere. Zig-zagging sprints and hurdles were burned on to the eyes, the ears filled by a raucous metallic churn. Bodies were folded, flung, and sacrificed to hungry scoreboards and an insatiable crowd. ‘One day,’ promised Speedball 2, ‘all sports will be played like this.’ But somehow, come the day, none of them were.
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Performance Art

Edge Staff — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:08:03 +0000

If you’d asked us back in September whether we cared about the death of the cinematic narrative in a non-linear, interactive medium, we would have probably shrugged pensively before going back to stroking our beards in front of Slither Link. It took Uncharted 2 to remind us that we don’t actually mind games that try to be films – so long as those films are pretty good.
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Time Extend: Ratchet & Clank 3

Edge Staff — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:32:40 +0000

You’d be excused for having overlooked Ratchet & Clank 3. The franchise has been set to automatic since its inception, with a new game being pumped out once every 12 months – the kind of prolific visibility that can make a series all too easy to ignore. And, from a distance, it seems to sit happily alongside any number of other Star & Sidekick games out there, slightly in the shadow of the Jak And Daxter games or as one-third of Sony’s first-party club of cartoon mascots that was completed by Sly Raccoon.
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An Audience With: Yoichi Wada

Edge Staff — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:06:41 +0000

In many ways, Square Enix could be considered the most unashamedly ‘Japanese’ of Japanese game developers, with a long history of titles, created for the Japanese market first and foremost, which seem to have become internationally successful almost by surprise. Overseas releases have generally only come after months of slow localisation, with few changes to suit local tastes outside of bug and interface fixes.

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Review: Bayonetta

Edge Staff — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:47:53 +0000

Format: 360 (version tested), PS3
Release: Out now (Japan, US), January 8 (Europe)
Publisher: Sega
Developer: Platinum Games
Screenshot gallery

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Time Extend: Serious Sam

Edge Staff — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:35:41 +0000

Serious Sam’s plot is the stuff of early-era computer titles, generic in structure but footloose in detail. Selected by an alien race for his sheer awesomeness, ‘Serious’ Sam Stone is flung back in time to save humanity from another galactic presence, cosmic terrorist and gigalomaniac Mental, perhaps the only bad guy around with a name ridiculous enough to make him a fitting nemesis.
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Time Extend: Guardian Heroes

Edge Staff — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:27:08 +0000

Scrolling beat ‘em ups are one of gaming’s longest-serving genres – not yet in retirement but teetering on the pensionable as each blundering Final Fight: Streetwise turns up to undo the good work of an Urban Reign. One-on-one scrappers have settled down into a stable domestic relationship with gamers, but the dedicated scrolling beat ‘em up still remain marginalised. The art of one-on-many thumping has moved on: absorbed into myriad action games, it’s always the bridesmaid and never the bride.
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The Making Of: MUD

Edge Staff — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:31:23 +0000

Format: DECsystem-10
Release: 1978
Publisher: MUSE (Multi-User Entertainment Ltd)
Developer: Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle

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Crackdown 2

Edge Staff — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:14:28 +0000

This game shouldn’t exist. That’s a strange thing to write about the sequel to a critically lauded open-world shooter from the creator of Grand Theft Auto. But it’s the truth. Kind of.

Actually, the truth in this case is difficult to pin down. What’s clear is that Realtime Worlds spent over four years developing Crackdown for Microsoft. Released in 2007, two years before Infamous and Prototype, it presented a huge futuristic city in which the player – as an augmented supercop – had total freedom.
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An Audience With Shigeru Miyamoto

Edge Staff — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:50:13 +0000

In an expensively barren hotel room somewhere in one of the wealthier parts of Europe, Shigeru Miyamoto is meeting the press. Surrounded by a polite yet considerable gathering that includes translator, PR people and various product managers, he struggles graciously to navigate endless clusters of garbled, nervously phrased questions, all of which he has already heard and already answered in many of the great cities of the world; some of which he is seeing off only temporarily, knowing they’ll likely be back in some form on the next publicity tour, and probably the one after that too.
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Time Extend: R-Type Final

Edge Staff — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:21:40 +0000

Games always seem to end with three dots rather than one. A climax can be as decisive as the fall of a tyrant, or even an empire, but its last beat will suggest continuation rather than closure. The root of evil will always remain intact, poised to bring new troubles upon the world and new missions for the returning, cash-starved hero. In industry terms, it just doesn’t make sense to choke a potential revenue stream once it’s open. Yet while no one believed the PR back in 2003, Irem had that very goal in mind: to bring its flagship series to an end, full stop.

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