Edge Xmas 2022

Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg’s particular view of the future, an awful lot of money is sloshing around the world of virtual reality at the moment, mostly because of the tech investment community’s unending appetite for anything that can be tied into whatever the Metaverse is this week. Naturally, all this makes Meta an even bigger target for opprobrium than usual, with criticisms landing on its social-centred Horizon Worlds initiative in particular. It has put some advocates in the VR community, including Rolf Illenberger, CEO of enterprise-focused software company VRdirect, into defensive mode, demanding more patience from the community at large. “We’re trying to land on the Moon,” he said recently, “and people are complaining that the coffee machine’s not working.” It’s a fair point on one hand, but the problem…

Legs are coming soon! Are you excited?” Add an emoji of a partypopper and confetti, and you’ve got the strangest announcement from this year’s Meta Connect event, during which the company announced a new headset, a partnership with Microsoft, and appendages that evolved roughly 360 million years ago. It’s a phrase that seems purpose-built to induce semantic satiation. The more you read it, the more detached it becomes from any kind of meaning, which a cynical person might say is an ideal embodiment of the Metaverse. Horizon Worlds, Meta’s infuriatingly nebulous project to meld virtual reality devices with what ultimately amounts to a more ambitious version of Second Life, is irresistibly easy to lampoon. Given the appropriate context, however, Meta’s fixation on legs isn’t quite as ridiculous as it may…

The first sight that greets you at War Games, a new exhibition at London’s Imperial War Museum that bills itself as the UK’s first to examine the relationship between videogames and real-life conflict, doesn’t have anything to do with games. Rather, it’s a quick-cut montage of war films and television: flashes of Dunkirk, of The Hurt Locker, of Dad’s Army. “We wanted to set the scene by placing videogames within our broader cultural consumption of war,” curator Chris Cooper explains. “Why does war fascinate us so much? Why do we tell stories about war?” That it starts this way is indicative of an introductory tone that runs throughout the exhibition – “we’re hoping to appeal to as wide an audience as possible,” Cooper says, which requires making the topic approachable…

At GDC 2016, two Italians somehow found themselves at a party for New Zealand game developers. The first was Marco Bancale, whose 2D strategy sidescroller Kingdom had just been hailed at the IGF Awards. “A guy asked me, ‘Are you Italian?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, I’m Italian, are you?’ ‘Yes.’ So we started talking.” This was Patrick Corrieri, developer of bridge-building game Poly Bridge. “And then the day after we met, we pitched to each other the idea for our next games – and we found out that it was basically the same game,” Bancale says. “So we were like, OK, either we do it together or we compete, and competing doesn’t make much sense.” The result of that meeting was Plasma, an ambitious engineering playground that promises to…

A puzzle game where the world can be folded like paper. A magazine printed on actual paper. The combination seemed all too perfect, so we asked the team at Newfangled Games if they had any ideas. In return, art director Frederick Hoffman produced this – atribute to Mad magazine’s classic fold-ins, concealing a secret that goes beyond these pages. We’ll note that you can find the game’s website at papertrailgame.com, and leave it there. If the game proves half as breezily inventive as its creators, we’re in for a treat. We’ll find out when Paper Trail makes its debut on PC early next year.…

Game Golden Tee PGA Tour Clubhouse Edition Manufacturer Incredible Technologies According to manufacturer Incredible Technologies, Golden Tee is “the most successful arcade game ever made”. Such an audacious claim feels more digestible when you consider that it relates not to a single release but a series – and one whose first edition was released way back in 1989, with new iterations arriving annually since the launch of Golden Tee 3D Golf in the mid-’90s. Given its enduring popularity, especially in the US, it’s surprising that it’s taken until now for Incredible to produce a cabinet for the home. Modelled on the PGA Tour coin-op unit, Clubhouse Edition is available in two options: standard ($5,299), which requires you to provide your own 4K display, and deluxe ($6,599), which ships with a…