Table of contents for #54 in Wireframe Magazine

For both FAR: Lone Sails and Changing Tides, Okomotive have used FMOD to help create the dynamic soundtrack – a piece of middleware that allows a relatively tiny indie studio to create music that responds to the player’s movements. “It’s super-approachable for anyone who’s worked with audio tools before because the user interface is basically built the same way,” Fabio Baumgartner explains. “But the tool allows you to establish logical structures, which can then be parameterised. And those parameters can be accessed from the game engine side. So FMOD is a really powerful tool which allows us to do these things quite easily. For example, switching between two parts of the track precisely on the beat is something that wouldn’t otherwise be possible so easily, without an audio engineer or…

ou enter into the first of four maps on a chained run to achieve an overall goal. There are four of you in your team. You acquire weapons and aid as you go, either from shops in areas of shelter or procuring them in the thick of things. And all the while, a malevolent, invisible AI ‘director’ is pulling the strings and throwing an army of parasite-infected zombies… sorry, ‘Ridden’ at you in vast, overwhelming numbers. When someone talks about Back 4 Blood, well, it’s not even like Turtle Rock is trying to hide the fact this is the spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead, the dormant series by this very development team, featuring pretty much everything just written above. And this, friends, is no bad thing – Turtle Rock…

Shooting, driving, tuxedos… just what goes into a decent 007 experience? James Bond drank his first Martini in Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale novel in 1953, while the first movie emerged nine years later. Dr. No, starring Sean Connery as the British secret agent with a licence to kill – usually in glamorous locations unreachable by a depressed post-war British population – turned the already famous literary creation into a cultural phenomenon that endures to this day. Video games were in on that action from their earliest years. Broadly speaking, there are three ‘eras’ of Bond games: Domark had the 8-bit and 16-bit decade (towards the end of Roger Moore’s incumbency on screen and all of Timothy Dalton’s); EA had the Pierce Brosnan years, and Activision had Daniel Craig. But there…

The all-powerful reign of sport has taken hold in 2021, probably no more than in years past, but in a way that feels more significant, owing to the planet teetering on the brink as it is. This year’s sport has been important and vital and everywhere – but we don’t all like sport. Some actively dislike sport. And so it is we thought to put this handy guide together, pulling in all manner of video game representations of various sports that could actually appeal to those of us who have no actual interest in sports. The idea of abstracting the concept of sports for the sake of a fun video game goes back as far as the medium itself – early on, developers couldn’t represent the specifics and technicalities of…

There was a time before the CP System, Capcom’s proprietary arcade hardware powering the company through eleven years of genre-defining, bar-raising coin-op greats. There was a time after the CP System, too, when development moved on to hardware like the Dreamcastbased NAOMI and others. But it’s the CPS, CPS2, and CPS3, from 1988 to 1996, that brought the majority of what made Capcom, Capcom. Final Fight, Street Fighter II, Strider, Marvel Super Heroes, and so many more – the CPS has a lot to answer for. So it’s probably time to take a look back over the archetypal arcade experiences that made a great developer legendary. In the years before 1988, Capcom had operated like other arcade publishers, making games on individual boards – this meaning the whole thing would…

There are two unforgivable clichés in game reviewing, and Pythonesque medieval multiplayer murderfest Chivalry 2 is both so fun and so visceral that I don’t even feel bad for just having used both of them. Go on, here’s another one: Chivalry 2 really makes you feel like a metal-plated murder machine. You’ll lose limbs, and you’ll keep on fighting long enough to kill your assailant with a thrown loaf of bread as you bleed out. You’ll charge triumphantly into the fray, honour bound and proud, and then get flattened by a coward with a catapult on the other side of the map. And you’ll laugh. You’ll laugh because Chivalry 2 feels almost godly in its success at making failure fun. There exists, theoretically, the platonic ideal of a Chivalry duel:…

Overboard! brings a question to mind: is there anything game designers fear more than malleable narratives? I’m not talking of inconsequential side quests tacked on to prolong engagement with sprawling open worlds, or the alternative cutscenes you might get to watch as an epilogue based on a couple of Big Decisions made during glaringly signposted moments along the way. No, this is about the real thing, entire plot lines that bend, twist, and shatter under the pressure of player choice, meaning that for every permutation of the story you shaped, myriad shocking twists, one-liners, and emotionally charged revelations still lie submerged. This is a medium loath to produce any substantial chunk of ‘content’ that risks being left unseen. It’s a dictum followed across the industry, but inkle has carved a…

Final Fantasy VII Remake: INTERmission is the crown jewel of FFVII Remake: Intergrade, the PS5 upgrade for 2020’s best action RPG. The five-hour expansion brings back Yuffie, a fan favourite party member from the 1997 original, adding a ton of personality to the game in the process. As INTERmission begins, Yuffie arrives in Midgar, from neighbouring Wutai, in search of an especially powerful Materia – those glowing orbs you slot into your armour to equip powers. Her journey takes her through the Sector 7 Slums and up to the headquarters of Shinra, the megacorp sucking the planet dry. The journey from below the plate to above the plate will be familiar for anyone who played the base game, but Yuffie is a fun character to spend time with. She’s a…

Hear my Gear In the rapidly growing retro modding scene, new ideas and solutions are coming out all the time, and many of them are becoming increasingly userfriendly and easy to install. This month, RetroSix (retrosix.co.uk) kindly sent me its new CleanAmp mod – a replacement sound-board for the Sega Game Gear that claims to improve the handheld’s audio and clarity. Aside from the improved sound, however, there’s an extra benefit to the mod: if you have a Game Gear with quiet or no sound at all, the CleanSound is far easier to install than the traditional route, which is to replace all the capacitors on the existing board. Admittedly, the latter option isn’t too difficult if you’re handy with a soldering iron, but for those without the time, confidence,…

Notionally at least, SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE is one of the most violent games I’ve ever played. I’ve blasted a countless array of people in the face at point-blank range. I’ve run people through with swords, stabbed them in the sternum with knives and screwdrivers, and beaten them to oblivion with bottles. I have, in short, indulged my inner sociopath in a way I probably haven’t experienced since the grungy, guiltily sleazy delights of Hotline Miami, and I’m only slightly ashamed to say I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. Admittedly, there are a couple of layers of separation between the player and the harsher implications of the mayhem. First of all, SUPERHOT takes place in a glitchy, low-polygon virtual environment pitched somewhere between The Matrix and the retro-futuristic world of…

Like Shadow of the Colossus and Journey, FAR: Changing Tides’ interface is pleasingly minimal: with little in the way of visual prompts to clutter up the screen, you’re instead left to gradually figure out how the ship functions by yourself. “It comes from the idea that you have to learn the mechanics [of your ship], and it’s not just the game telling you things,” creative lead Don Schmocker tells us. “So you see that the engine’s overheating and you have to react to that. In a lot of situations, the player has to use their real-life knowledge, I would say – how things work instead of relying on game logic. It helps to make the mechanics more intuitive and makes it possible for the player to figure out how things…

Sometimes, all it takes is a slight shift in perspective to make the familiar look fresh and new. ANNO: Mutationem deals in the sort of familiar cyberpunk staples we’ve all seen plenty of in recent months: the benighted city bathed in queasy neon, the collision of high technology, and urban malaise. But what separates this outing from other cyberpunk odysseys of its ilk is its almost seamless mix of 3D polygonal world and 2D, anime-style sprites. As high-kicking mercenary Ann, you roam a high-tech city in pursuit of your missing brother, a quest that sees the tempo constantly shift from free-roaming adventure to side-scrolling brawler action. Armed with a gun, laser sword, and an array of combat moves, Ann makes for a formidable protagonist – and more than up to…

The old Epyx Summer Games titles and the others in the series. So many damaged joysticks. We used to pack ten people in my uncle’s office and take turns playing on his C64. @crushbugdf Wii Sports is good as it’s easy to pick up but hard to put down. @femtosonic Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2. The sports games that everyone played, especially if they didn’t like sports but wanted to enjoy something extremely cool! @solidkostas Behold the Kickmen. It’s a total send-up of football and its most hardcore fans, but still hides a decent game behind all the ridiculousness. @TheGamerScot Rocket League. Like football with cars, but needs no knowledge of or affection for sport whatsoever. @bazzacollins Sensible Soccer. The computer isn’t so good that you don’t stand…

GAME ANNO: Mutationem ARTIST ThinkingStars RELEASE TBA 2021 WEBSITE anno-m.com When it comes to great sprite design and generally stunning pixel art, we’ve seen so much of it in recent years that it’s easy to take for granted. The upcoming ANNO: Mutationem, on the other hand, mixes 2D and 3D to such a striking degree that it’s well worth a closer look. The game takes place in a 3D cyberpunk world, yet the characters are 2D sprites – it’s an effect that captures all the character you’d want from a conventional pixel art game, but with the immersive depth and lighting of a polygon-based environment. As ANNO: Mutationem’s lead artist Zhang Jian told us on page 14, the game’s unique look came about during early prototyping: “Starting out, we wanted…

Anyone can be an artist. This is the message that welcomes you as you load into the warm world of Chicory: A Colorful Tale. And over the course of this special little game, you’ll hopefully wrestle with and embrace the truth in that statement. You see, the world of Chicory is utterly devoid of colour, and it’s up to a plucky pup with a paintbrush to rejuvenate the people and places within it. The problem is that the protagonist doesn’t really know how to do that – but then, neither do you. It’s quite the burden to put on one person’s shoulders, even if you think you’re the next Picasso. Thankfully, the way this works from a gameplay perspective is accessible, encouraging, and extremely neat. On the PlayStation 5, I…

The left trigger has many uses – hitting the brakes in a racer, aiming in a shooter – but you don’t usually pull it back for a killer move. So there’s something novel and gratifying when, after hacking and slashing enemies until their shield has shattered, a prompt urges you to hit the trigger for a spectacular finish. It’s like setting off fireworks each time, and never gets old. In this ‘brainpunk’ future, humans have psionic powers, not least psychokinetic protagonists Yuito Sumeragi and Kasane Randall. Special attacks build up a psionic gauge that can be spent on flinging objects at your foes, making the flow of melee and psychic combat akin to Control. And unlike the Hiss in Remedy’s game, the Others you face here have some wildly distinctive…

There’s something magical about walking around in Cris Tales, like exploring scenes in a pop-up book. It’s in the way the camera dollies and trucks to follow protagonist Crisbell into the layers of delicate dioramas. It’s in the fairy tale colours and ink lines and impeccable paper characters. But also in some actual magic, as Crisbell is a time mage who sees the past, present, and future all at once. Within cities, the current reality lies in the centre of a split display, with its before and after states to the left and right. A cart becomes a tractor as it passes into the end window; a tough-looking guard seems less intimidating when you scroll him to the margins and see him as a child. It’s mesmerising, tempting you to…

The games for… BIG ADVENTURES Assassin’s Creed Odyssey / Ubisoft / 93% (Issue 1) Yakuza: Like a Dragon / Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio / 90% (Issue 45) Amnesia: Rebirth / Frictional Games / 87% (Issue 46) The Last Campfire / Hello Games / 86% (Issue 47) Resident Evil 2 / Capcom / 86% (Issue 7) Far Cry New Dawn / Ubisoft / 85% (Issue 9) Journey to the Savage Planet / Typhoon Studios / 84% (Issue 33) The Outer Worlds / Obsidian Entertainment / 84% (Issue 28) Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom / Game Atelier / 84% (Issue 6) Nioh 2 / Koei Tecmo Games / 80% (Issue 38) The games for… REPEATED PLAY Hades / Supergiant Games / 94% (Issue 44) 📷 They Are Billions / Numantian Games…

MiSTical Have you seen these hot new hip and cool retrotastic devices known as MiSTer? Bag yourself a DE10-Nano FPGA board and some other nuggets of joy (“accessories and peripherals”), install the MiSTer system using the simple and straightforward Mr. Fusion app, and that’s about it. What you have in your hands, or likely on your table, is an impressively versatile emulation machine – able to play your SNES, Mega Drive, Amiga, DOS, PCE, Speccy, and plenty of arcade and other games in nigh-on perfect fashion. And, one of the most recent big additions, the CPS-2 system. Yes, that one in the System Profile a few pages ago, as well as the original CPS and CPS Dash. Now all of these things have been emulated before, sure, but what helps…

Well, that was unexpected. In no way am I going to toot the flute for Terminator: Resistance as a game of true quality, and I’d struggle to defend it against many of the issues raised by its (many) detractors, but the fact of the matter is: I just played through the whole game, start to finish, and the additional Infiltrator mode, got a platinum trophy for my efforts and – most importantly of all – enjoyed it. It’s the most 6/10 game ever made, of course. Resistance is a lesson in how to do things absolutely adequately without actually stepping out of any comfort zones. If the game’s file name in Unreal Engine was ‘FPS template’ I wouldn’t be surprised. If it had tried to surprise me at all in…

In a harsh, post-apocalyptic world, your only true friend is a ramshackle craft that clunks and heaves across the desolate landscape. In FAR: Lone Sails, that craft took the form of the Okomotive: a wheeled vehicle that had to be fuelled, guided, and repaired as it carried you towards your uncertain destination. In its sequel, FAR: Changing Tides, you take to the seas in a bulbous vessel once again powered by wind and fuel; you can hoist a sail to catch the breeze, or start up a furnace and use the craft’s engine to barrel your way through the waves. As you variously jump on bellows to fan flames, adjust the angle of your sails to match the direction of the wind, or occasionally dive out of a hatch to…

You’ll find a careful balance of busyness and calm in Changing Tides, whether you’re operating the sail, stoking the engine, carrying out repairs, or simply watching the waves swell and the landscape drift by. On occasions, the hazy sky will darken, clouds will gather, and you’ll find yourself in the midst of a roiling storm. It’s all wonderfully poetic. For the occasions where wind-power won’t cut it, we headed below decks to fire up the ship’s engine. Again, there’s a mix of intricacy and simplicity: hopping on one switch gets the engine running, while hitting another feeds fuel into the furnace. Fuel takes the form of flotsam you’ll find outside the ship, and needs to be stowed on hooks in the belly of your craft. You’ll have to nip down…

01. Dotty Dotemu, the retro specialist behind the likes of Streets of Rage 4 and Windjammers 2, has been bought by Focus Home Interactive for £32.8m, it has been announced. The acquisition of the French studio also includes publishing label The Arcade Crew and could see an additional £12.8m paid out if revenue targets are met in the next two years. “This new collaboration will allow Dotemu to benefit from the incontestable expertise of Focus Home Interactive’s teams for the production of AA titles, and thus launch the production of future remakes or sequels on licences of first-generation 3D consoles,” said Dotemu CEO Cyrille Imbert. 02. Slippy What do you get when you mix Portal and Halo? Broken servers, apparently. At least that’s what 1047 Games, developer of Splitgate, found…

The Outer Worlds 2 Nothing to see here yet, as the gleefully honest first trailer for The Outer Worlds 2 revealed not too long ago. Still, we’re keen – the original game was a hoot, and with foundational aspects established, it’s going to be exciting to see where Obsidian takes things with, you would expect, slightly looser reins. Farming Simulator 22 Are we at the point where we can get into this without the thinly veiled derision? Because the Giants’ sim games have been solid timesinks for a number of years now, and Farming Simulator 22 is sure to be no different. The headline addition this year is seasonal cycles, which forces you to mix things up and not just rely on endless, everlasting wheat fields. It’s not going to…

Despite the funny little cars and fussy trousers, golf is often depicted with deathly seriousness in video games. Cautiously weighing up the green, needing absolute silence before you take a swing… the simple act of whacking a ball in a hole in as few strokes as possible can be enjoyable if done well, true, but it’s still commonly portrayed as a rather tense and stressful affair. Every so often, though, a golf game comes along with more arcadelike sensibilities and a willingness to poke fun at the sport; it’s a concept the indie scene has grown especially fond of in the past few years, as more and more studios have tried to fuse golf with comedy – to often wonderful effect. As outlandish as its title implies, 100ft Robot Golf…

“Human life is mostly wiped out. Earth is now a golf course for the ultra-rich.” It’s a solid setup for a stark, haunting game of the world’s best way to ruin a good walk. Golf Club: Wasteland mixes satire with beauty to good effect, as Nikola Stepkovi?, creative director at Demagog Studio, explains: “Our main task was to bring the wasteland to life in a way that showed the melancholy of our main character, the emptiness of the future world in which the game is set, and create a polygon to reflect our present social and cultural moment. “At the same time, we wanted to be funny and draw out the humorous premise and make it apparent at all times. So it was important that world-building and the visual style…

It’s Christmas Eve, and you’re all alone in your cosy Manhattan apartment. A pot of sausages and vegetables bubbles comfortingly on the stove, the sound mingling with the rush of traffic outside. So begins Hot Pot For One, a disarmingly personal interactive tale by Rachel Li and Qin Yin. The design duo’s game is rich with the kinds of details that could only come from lived experience: the photos and odd bits of ephemera stuck to the fridge; the knick-knacks crowded onto shelves; the desk incongruously placed next to a kitchen unit, meaning the drawer can only be opened by a few millimetres. “It is indeed a personal game,” agrees Li, who co-developed Hot Pot For One as her game design thesis project at New York University. “It’s heavily inspired…

And so I wave goodbye to PES, swallowed whole by the monster that is eFootball; the worst name of anything in the history of gaming – and this in an industry where things were called ‘Dreamcast’ and ‘GameCube’ and ‘Vectrex’. But yes, PES is dead, so I had to send it out with a bang. Inevitably, it was a whimper. Regular readers of these pages will know I’m not one for competitive online games, not for the most part. It’s for many reasons, but a big one is that I get flustered, and angry, and end up playing even worse as a result – especially if the game’s fast-paced, involves moment-to-moment action, and where fortunes can change in the blink of an eye. All of those really just mean: games…

Minute of Islands feels like gaming’s interpretation of the old aphorism that music is the silence between the notes. It’s more quiet than noise, a walking sim disguised as a platform-puzzler which rarely wrangles its pieces into anything taxing. But it makes something from the long gawping pauses required to fully drink in its scenery, its gentle narration, and the satisfaction of stoic routine. In between inputs, it unfurls an experience of isolation, misguided obligation, and stubborn attachment to parts of a life that’s already gone. The bedrock of these meditations is Minute of Islands’ visual magnetism. Each of its isles is a giant ligne claire comic panel – a little Moebius, a little Hergé – zoomed in tight to let us gorge on its detail and colour, centred on…

Ender Lilies is shy and reluctant to show itself. It’s a Metroidvania, it tells you, mostly ‘Vania, with a little Hollow Knight in its semi-open design, a little Ori in its lush background tapestries. Nothing special, it mumbles, staring at its shoes, just a good one of those. Its protagonist only adds to the feeling, a silent, almost ghostly girl, along with a soundtrack that whispers with melancholy. But once you get to know it better, Ender Lilies straightens its gaze and steps from others’ shadows into its own light. Beneath that bashful exterior is a quiet mastery of classic design and surprising depth. All Metroidvanias are limiting early on, of course – it’s in the DNA – but it’s pronounced here. The girl is a kind of priestess, immune…

Backbone feels like two separate games stitched together, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that. It’s certainly interesting when a game makes a big shift halfway through, and it’s a risk that not enough games take. Whether it works here is another question. Set in a dystopian version of Vancouver populated by anthropomorphic animals, you play as a raccoon detective named Howard Lotor. The game starts as a million detective stories have before it: Howard takes what seems like a simple case and inadvertently stumbles onto a mystery far more complex and dangerous, with ties to murder in the criminal underworld, as well as the interests of those at the top of a heavily stratified, class-based social structure. As you begin plodding the beautifully drawn and richly…

You wake up in the bowels of a secret, underground research facility. Around you are defeated robot guards. You don’t know how you got here, but you know this: you’re wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a Magnum P.I.-style moustache, and you need to escape. The visuals are the first thing you notice about The Chameleon, a stylish experiment in retro stealth by Mexican solo developer Antonio Freyre. Its prodigious polygons hark back to the 3D graphics of the 1990s. They’re washed over with vibrant lighting which casts foreboding shadows across the bunker’s chunky textures. The effect is unnerving. The Chameleon prefers to keep you guessing about its backstory. Like all great 1970s private investigators, you’re resourceful. You’ll learn from tape recordings, notes, and other materials that it’s 1975. A maverick…

1 Disco Elysium / 94% (Issue 28) Smarter and deeper than anything else; truly an RPG in a class completely of its own. 2 Hades / 94% (Issue 44) Proving ‘roguelike’ isn’t a dirty word, learningand-dying is a joy from start to finish. 3 Assassin’s Creed Odyssey / 93% (Issue 1) The point where Ubisoft realised over-the-top adventures were the right direction. 4 Telling Lies / 92% (Issue 24) This FMV mystery asks more of the player than most, with rewards to match. 5 If Found / 92% (Issue 44) A compelling and beautifully illustrated narrative, as moving as it is memorable. 6 Yakuza: Like a Dragon / 90% (Issue 45) A bold, brash, and joyous rebirth for the long-running gangster series. 7 Tetris Effect / 90% (Issue 4) The question…

NINTENDO / 1984 / NES Arecent column from our own Steve McNeil raised an interesting question: when did it begin? When was the first time a triple-tap system was implemented in a golf game? When was it that someone designing a game where you start your swing, peak your swing, and connect with your swing realised that could be boiled down to three button presses? Would you believe it – it was a game involving both the late, great Satoru Iwata and the great, great Shigeru Miyamoto: Golf, for the NES, first released in 1984. Systems on a similar line did appear earlier in titles like PGA Golf for Intellivision and 3D Golf Simulation on MSX, from 1980 and 1983, respectively, but it was Nintendo’s first foray into the world…