Edge

In the old days, when videogame consoles were styled to look as though they were made partly out of wood, we didn’t worry about framerates too much. We didn’t have to. The most popular console of the era, 1977’s Atari VCS, generated its visuals in such a way that they sort of had to run at 60fps, and the entire gaming community benefited by not being distracted by tedious arguments over which version of the newest game managed to fit in two or three more frames per second than the other. In the arcades, the original Star Wars coin-op of 1983 even managed to display full-blown 3D fluidly – in colour, no less. Back then, we didn’t consider a future when games weren’t presented smoothly. They could only improve from…

Cast your mind back to 2020. As Sony and Microsoft promote their forthcoming consoles, which in some respects seem to represent the smallest graphical leap yet between generations, one feature stands out among all the talk of SSD storage and ray-traced reflections: a move to 60fps. Some games will even run in 120fps on these new machines, we’re told, a feat beyond even many gaming PCs when it comes to running contemporary blockbusters. With such assurances in place, it was easy to imagine that this smooth, fluid gameplay would characterise the next generation. In 2023, then, there was a certain dissonance to the news that Redfall would launch in its Xbox Series incarnation with only a 30fps ‘quality’ mode, its 60fps ‘performance’ mode arriving at some point down the line.…

Mi crosoft’s plan to open up its console ecosystem to a wider pool of game developers emerged just two years after the original Xbox launched. And it began with a disc in the post. When the Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) service launched in 2004, interested players had to request the software from Microsoft. That approach would blossom considerably further, of course, in the Xbox 360 era – something with which Chris Charla was all too familiar. At the time, he was working as a producer at Backbone Entertainment, bringing arcade classics such as Joust, Defender and Robotron: 2084 to XBLA. He soon found himself on the other side of the table, however, joining Microsoft as XBLA portfolio director in 2010, where he quickly realised the company could be doing more…

Back when Fellow Traveller was still known as Surprise Attack, the Australian publisher exhibited at a lot of game shows, from PAX East to Gamescom. “We were out at these events three or four times a year, as well as doing stuff here in Australia,” says founder Chris Wright. “So a large part of our marketing spend was doing these events.” Each trip, Wright says, would cost around $20,000, including travel and hiring a booth. “Increasingly, we were just saying: ‘Is this really where we should be spending our money?’” It’s a question that is particularly pertinent in 2023, in the wake of the cancellation of E3 – once the firmest fixture in the videogame calendar – as many of the major publishers move instead towards online showcases. But for…

We’ve seen game-inspired needlecraft before, but never anything quite as striking as French artist Marine Beaufils’ interpretations of Geoff Crammond’s classic, starkly rendered 3D puzzler The Sentinel (pictured right). “The ZX Spectrum version of The Sentinel uses its palette of eight colours in duo, with black or blue as a common denominator, and this masterful use of colours fascinated me,” Beaufils says of her attraction to honouring the game this way. “I hadn’t planned on making a series – embroidery is a long and tedious process – but it was impossible for me to choose among the 13 different duos of colour, so I decided to make them all!” Beaufils says that her “strongest motivation is the feeling that every videogame is a complex flux of images with many unseen…

“We know what times to call. We know exactly who to call and when. We know who has a higher propensity to be more susceptible to our call.” “That first inning ended with the crypto crash last year, so now we’re in the second inning…” ”This #BlockTheBlue pressure campaign are losers and goons. They’re the cool kids from junior high who worked to exclude we nerds…” “It does more to shake our confidence in the future of the opportunity to grow a technology business in Britain than we’ve ever confronted before.”…