Edge February 2023

Sometimes Edge covers go through multiple iterations before we land on the one that goes to press. The original draft for this issue’s, for example, featured the PSVR2 hardware at a kind of three-quarter view. The headset looked inviting enough, as Sony’s hardware has a long-established habit of doing, but there was a problem. Its poised, pristine form was accompanied by a dangling cable, spoiling the overall appearance with a single black, somewhat random-looking line. This just wouldn’t do. A very long time ago, certain models of TV and VCR were capable of being controlled from a distance not by means of an infrared beam but a cable linking the appliance to a remote in your hand. It was certainly better than having to get off the sofa and walk…

While the threat of COVID-19 is not fully behind us, examining 2022 in retrospect it’s hard not to view it as the beginning of whatever comes next. The nature of which differs, of course, from country to country, individual to individual – and so it’s only natural that each developer to whom we speak has a different account of what their working situation looks like. Some studios have remained fully remote; others have returned to office life almost as it was; most commonly, it’s some blend of the two. It remains to be seen what effect this will have on the persistent delays that have been par for the course in recent years, generally agreed to be a result of the creative and logistical difficulties of working apart. But in…

For a while, Tarn and Zach Adams couldn’t figure out a peculiar bug: why the poets, bards and other entertainers in the new release of Dwarf Fortress would saunter into a tavern, completely naked. “It turns out that they had left their civilisation for some reason – and if you don’t have a civilisation, you don’t have clothing, you don’t have anything,” Zach explains. “And so when [the game] tried to load them and say, ‘OK, what kind of clothes are you gonna wear?’, it [decided] they’re all naked.” A rather important detail – but one that, as the Adams brothers point out, wouldn’t be noticed in the free ASCII version, where all you’d see is a blur of symbols, glyphs and fluorescent colours. These kinds of bugs have long…

Art reflects the anxieties of the era. Cold War nuclear tension inspired the creation of everything from the alien invasion flicks of the 1950s to Atari’s hit 1980 coin-op Missile Command. Now, with anxieties increasingly focused on the climate crisis, it’s only natural that game developers would respond. Bleak forecasts of catastrophic sea-level rises have inspired both Highwater, a forthcoming turn-based PC strategy adventure made by Demagog Studio in Serbia, and Vile Monarch’s Floodland, a PC city-builder launched in November that puts you in charge of scattered survivors attempting to rebuild society from whatever scraps they can find in half-submerged cities. This has gained the latter game an unlikely champion in the form of Sir Tony Robinson. Robinson is of course well known for his TV roles in Blackadder and…

Game Donut Dodo Do! Developer Pixel Games   Manufacturer Exa-Arcadia The problem with a lot of contemporary games that try to look like old ones is that they get the finer details a bit wrong, cramming in a lot more colours than would’ve been possible in the 8bit era, for example, or even (please hold on to your lunch, purists) rotating sprites rather than animating them properly. Donut Dodo Do! gets closer to an authentic vibe than most, partly thanks to the founder of developer Pixel Games having direct experience of what it was like to create games in 1982, when he started out with a 48K ZX Spectrum. The static playfields also help, as does presentation in 4:3 format and the straightforward donutgathering objective, although if we’re being picky…

“It’s clear that loot boxes give rise to many of the same emotions and experiences associated with poker machines and other traditional gambling activities.” ”All games should have a main menu item called Relearn Controls, and it’s just a twominute tutorial.” ”This study adds to our growing understanding of the associations between playing videogames and brain development.” “No one has heard of your game. The only person who cares if your game succeeds is your mom – and if she is dead, no one cares. Players want to play games, not movements.”…