Edge November 2022

When Namco released Museum Vol 1 in 1995, it felt like a turning point. Bringing together some of the company’s most affectionately remembered arcade hits including Pac-Man and Galaga, this PlayStation-powered compilation arrived just a year after Sony’s console debuted, and sat on shelves next to sophisticated 3D confections such as Tekken, Wipeout and Jumping Flash. It wasn’t the first time that vintage games had been repackaged for a new audience (or, more likely, the same audience that played them the first time around), but having everything served up on a PlayStation-shaped platter moved the goalposts: the retro revival had crawled out of its hobbyist niche and become mainstream entertainment. Maybe there was something in the air at the time. The Beatles’ allencompassing Anthology retrospective also arrived in 1995, just…

Bella ‘Crimson’ Selwood is – along with the other two members of Team England – the first woman ever to win a Commonwealth gold for Rocket League. Aged 21, Selwood has been competing in various tournaments for the game since her teens, but the Commonwealth Esports Championships finals are the first time she’s played in front of a live audience. It’s enough to put her and her teammates, the clear favourites, off their game. “The nerves were definitely there,” she admits – resulting in an early stumble that allows underdog Scotland to snatch a couple of early goals. “Game one, the nerves were definitely there. I wasn’t able to do, mechanically, what I would have liked because you’re like, ‘Wow, this is huge, I am playing for a Commonwealth…

Unless governments intervene, the coming year will see a catastrophic rise in energy prices, with average UK annual gas and electricity bills forecast to more than double by January 2023. It’s a good time, then, to think about reducing your gaming energy footprint. There are more obvious, broader gambits here, such as using the energy-saving modes offered by PS5 and Xbox, or playing multiplatform titles on lower-wattage machines such as Nintendo’s Switch. But power consumption also varies hugely between individual games, and you can reap significant returns by fiddling creatively with their settings. Take vertical sync, which synchronises a game’s framerate with your monitor’s refresh rate. It’s typically treated as a graphics feature, used to avoid unsightly screen tearing, where the image appears duplicated horizontally. But it’s also an easy…

How does a lone developer get their game noticed in a saturated marketplace? For many, any offer of a leg up is welcome. Enter the Tiny Teams Steam festival, which ran for its third consecutive year in August, and provides just that. Organised by the indie publishing arm of the Yogscast streaming network, it showcases games created by individuals and micro-studios (defined here as a core team of five or fewer). And it’s becoming increasingly attractive for those who need a boost. This year, nearly 1,000 games were submitted for consideration, over four times last year’s tally, which means that selecting which titles to include has become a lot of work for Tiny Teams founder Alex Turner. “We need to figure out a way to make it more manageable from…

Plateup! Yogscast’s latest has more than a hint of multiplayer favourite Overcooked! at first glance, and certainly serves up a similar flavour of co-op chaos. Cooking is only one part of its equation, however, as you run a full restaurant experience and expand your empire between services. Dividing the cheffing, waiting and washing up between a team is most fun, of course, whereas doing the lot solo feels like, well, spinning plates. The Brew Barons One of the more expansive titles in the Tiny Teams parade, and among the most impressive thanks to sun-drenched 3D landscapes that recall Studio Ghibli’s beautiful movie Porco Rosso. Your aim is to run a bar and brewery, and while that includes the expected minutiae such as designing drinks, you’ll spend much of the time…

“We were always big fans of two things: garden gnomes and handmade 2D games,” Save Sloth Studios’ Kornél Pittmann tells us. No kidding: that’s immediately apparent from a glance at its narrative-driven action adventure, which combines the two. When strange events start to occur around his forest home, this diminutive but intrepid hero heads out to get the bottom of this mystery, armed only with his hat, which he can throw to, for example, dislodge objects from trees, or even to attack fantastical enemies. “We decided to visualise the game through paper cutout art, as it is rarely represented in videogames,” Pittmann says. While we’ve seen games use a similar approach before, papercraft often looks crisp and clean, but Save Sloth’s approach is keen to keep the little tears, creases…