Video Game News, Reviews & Gaming Jobs

Oculus Rift: Palmer Luckey on throwing out the virtual reality rulebook

Ben Maxwell at 05:45pm November 7 2012

Palmer Luckey is a self-described virtual reality enthusiast and former engineer at the USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). Now his company Oculus is bringing, thanks to a huge show of support on crowdfunding website Kickstarter, what looks to be the world’s first viable gaming-focused virtual reality headset to market: Oculus Rift. Ahead of his keynote address at Evolve in London, we spoke to Luckey about his potentially revolutionary technology, why the time is finally right for VR and why indie mentality allowed him to innovate more than bigger companies.

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Illo – Birth Of The Cool Kickstarter developer diary, part two: leaping through flaming hoops

Raylight Games at 05:35pm November 7 2012

Illo - Birth Of The Cool developer diary, part two

Italian indie studio Raylight Games is seeking $270,000 on crowdfunding website Kickstarter to finance development of Illo – Birth Of The Cool, a handsome puzzle adventure game for iOS and Android. It’s not the first, of course, and it surely won’t be the last, but this is a project with a difference: the team is documenting their Kickstarter experience in an exclusive diary here on Edge. In this, the second installment, the Italian studio explains how it got onto Kickstarter when it was restricted to US bank account holders, and reflect on the project’s first week.

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Dyad dev Shawn McGrath on his game’s four-month European delay: “It’s totally my fault”

Nathan Brown at 04:09pm November 7 2012

Dyad, a psychedelic shooter-cum-racer for PS3, was released on the North American PlayStation Store on July 17. Almost four months later it is finally being released in Europe, joining a growing list of mostly independently developed games to suffer significant delays in crossing the Atlantic. Developer Shawn McGrath insists, however, that those who take to comments threads and forums to blame SCEE are wide of the mark; instead, it was his lack of awareness of the workload required to bring a game to European shores that caused the delay.

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The Edge ExPlay panel: Street Fighter IV’s Focus Attack

Nathan Brown at 01:44pm November 7 2012

Street Fighter uses six buttons, as I’m sure you all know. Two rows of three, with light, medium and heavy punches on the top, and kicks on the row below. When I was growing up playing Street Fighter II, I only ever pressed one of those buttons at a time. As time went on – and as Capcom settled into that groove of near-endless iteration, something like 14 games in as many years – that changed.

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Ubisoft posts £46.6 million loss, remains positive as Assassin’s Creed III reaches 3.5 million sales

Ben Maxwell at 12:10pm November 7 2012

While Ubisoft started the week with a record-breaking number one chart position for Assassin’s Creed III, it has followed that feat by reporting a £46.6 million (€58.1 million) operating loss for the six month period ending September 30.

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THQ faces bankruptcy as shares drop 46 per cent following earnings call

Ben Maxwell at 10:39am November 7 2012

THQ’s stocks have plummeted 46 per cent following the release of its Q2 financial report, in which it told investors that it intended to delay all of its planned fourth quarter releases. It also revealed that a mergers and acquisitions consultant had been hired to discuss other potential strategies.

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Quadrilateral Cowboy: Blendo’s cyberpunk game wants to hack its way into your heart

Edge Staff at 05:07pm November 6 2012

Developed as a counterpoint to the dumbed-down hacking distractions commonly used in games, playing Quadrilateral Cowboy is like stepping into a lo-fi William Gibson sim. Opening a window or turning off a CCTV security camera takes more than solving a simple numerical puzzle. To hack an object, you’ll need to throw down in the VR world your deck (a suitcase-bound laptop, instantly recognisable to Neuromancer fans) and enter commands in its OS to temporarily manipulate various objects that stand between you and your goal. But how exactly does running a virtual approximation of DOS make for interesting gameplay?

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They Bleed Pixels review

Edge Staff at 04:27pm November 6 2012

Spooky Squid’s savage platformer is deceptively adorable, with its soft purple hues and cutesy-Cthulu monster designs. Attack one, however, and the gushing pints of pixelated blood should give you fair warning of its sadistic streak. They might bleed pixels, you see, but you will too.

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Dyad review

Edge Staff at 03:48pm November 6 2012

Dyad is both shooter and a racer, which should be quite enough for any videogame to take on. If you’re prepared to squint a bit, though, you’ll see that this is a game with deeper ambitions, too. If you peer past the leaderboards and psychedelic particle effects, the whole thing becomes a brisk little primer in arcade archaeology – and this secret element turns out to be a lot more fun than it sounds. The ideas driving Dyad may sometimes seem complex, but they rarely weigh it down. The pace is frantic, the tone is light, and the syllabus is richly varied.

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Final day to take advantage of Edge Presents early bird rates

Ben Maxwell at 02:45pm November 6 2012

A breakfast briefing running from 8:00 to 10:00, prior to the Evolve conference itself, Edge Presents: Changing The Game will feature two renowned names from the game development world offering insight into the challenges facing today’s content creators, and valuable advice for overcoming them.

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