A commercial failure by comparison with its rival the PlayStation, the Saturn nevertheless boasted stylish, genre-defining titles that are still played and beloved by retro games enthusiasts today It is one of the greatest injustices of video game history that the Sega Saturn is widely considered a failure. The console, which was launched in Japan on 22 November 1994, almost two weeks ahead of the PlayStation, is continually and pejoratively compared to its rival. We hear about how Sony produced a high-end machine laser targeted at producing fast 3D graphics, while Sega’s engineers had to add an extra graphics chip to the Saturn at the last minute. We read that Sony’s Ken Kutaragi provided creators with a much more user-friendly development system. We know that Sony undercut the price of Sega’s machine, using its might as a consumer electronics giant to take the financial hit. All of that is true, but what aren’t always mentioned are the vast success of the Japanese Saturn launch, and the extraordinary legacy that Sega’s 32-bit machine left behind. What I remember is this: Edge magazine reporting from Akihabara in Tokyo, where its Japanese correspondent had joined a queue outside the major Laox computer game centre to try and snag one of the thousand or so machines not already preordered by fans. Two-and-a-half hours later, the writer emerged with his purchase, which included a copy of Virtua Fighter, the best arcade fighting game of the year. It was a lucky buy: the shelves were emptying fast all over town. Sega shifted an unprecedented 200,000 units that day. Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch, Acquire/ Nintendo The moustachioed plumber brothers have a sun-kissed comic adventure in this breezy island-hopping RPG filled with puzzles, sand sharks and talking acorns If there was ever a series that reminds me of being on holiday, it was the Mario and Luigi role-playing games. I fondly remember squinting at the Game Boy Advance’s screen in 2003, commanding my plumbers through thrillingly dynamic battles from a sun lounger. Brothership is the first new game in the series in almost a decade, and it brings a jaunty, seafaring adventure to the mercifully better lit screen of the Nintendo Switch. In a classic Mario plot device, our heroes are whisked away from the Mushroom Kingdom via a giant portal, and groggily awaken marooned in the oceanic world of Concordia. This place is utterly gorgeous. As you leap around the first of many vibrant, cel-shaded islands, you can practically taste the sea breeze. A stunning Wind Waker HD-esque bloom lighting effect lends this bright and breezy adventure a washed-out, sun-kissed feel. Continue reading...

Hollow Ponds, Richard Hogg; Finji; PC, Mac Fill the walls of your nice big empty house with pictures delivered – in pieces – by your friendly local postwoman Wilmot the anthropomorphic square has a curious but not exactly undesirable existence. He resides in a spacious, empty house to which his friendly local postwoman, Sam, brings regular deliveries of tiled puzzles; a subscription that never seems to expire. Wilmot unpacks each new delivery, scattering the pieces on the bare floor. Then he can shunt, grasp and rotate each fragment to form a coherent picture – each of which has been drawn by British illustrator Richard Hogg. Matching pieces snap together pleasingly, and when the artwork is complete it can be hung on Wilmot’s big empty walls. As soon as one puzzle is finished, Sam arrives with the next, and soon enough Wilmot’s wall is as cluttered and colourful as a Saatchi gallery. There are, typically, several fragments left over when you complete a picture, so some of the challenge is in identifying these rogue pieces, setting them to one side (you are free to organise your floor space to suit your organisational requirements) to return to once you have all the necessary components. In time you’ll have several puzzles on the go at once, each one at a different level of completion, and it’s this arrhythmia that gives the game its unique feel, elevating it beyond a mere digital jigsaw simulator. Continue reading...

PC, PS5, Xbox; Deck Nine/Square Enix There’s much to enjoy in this sequel to the trailblazing female-led narrative game, but inconsistent characterisation lets it down In 2015, when I first played as Maxine Caulfield in the original Life Is Strange, it was only the second time I had ever played a game starring a teenaged girl. (The first time was The Last of Us: Left Behind, which came out the year before.) It was an awkward game in a few ways, particularly its cringeworthy (mis)use of teen slang, but the intense, life-changing and sometimes conflicted relationship between Max and her (more than) friend Chloe rung true. It carried the whole game, actually, more than Max’s time-rewinding powers or the murder mystery that powered the plot. I believed in Max and Chloe. The end of that game forces you into a horrible choice between, as Max would put it, two shitty futures, proving that even time travellers must live with the consequences of their actions. The reverberations of that choice run through this sequel, nine years later. Grownup Max is now artist in residence at a prestigious arts college, placing her somewhere between the students, with their parties and dramatic breakups and secret societies, and the teachers in the faculty, whose pettiness and preoccupations with their own agendas rarely paint them in a flattering light. She abandoned her home town and stopped using her time-rewinding powers after the events of the first Life Is Strange. Now she is tentatively trying to form new relationships in this fresh place. And, as she discovers when one of her new friends is murdered, she has a new power, too. She can slip between timelines, investigating the murder both in the timeline where it happened, and in an alternative reality where it didn’t. Continue reading...

Sony is shutting down Firewalk, the studio behind its live-service flop, Concord. It’s the biggest, most expensive casualty of an increasingly crowded hero shooter market – and it won’t be the last • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here It’s official: after Sony pulled its struggling hero shooter Concord from sale shortly after it launched, the studio that made it will now be closing. Firewalk Studios was bought by Sony less than two years ago, as part of a strategy to improve PlayStation’s live-service portfolio. The closure of Firewalk cements Concord’s place as one of the biggest and most consequential flops in gaming history: the cost to Sony will have been in the hundreds of millions, with estimates of Concord’s development cost ranging from $200m to $400m in total. Sony also closed Neon Koi, a developer with offices in Helsinki and Berlin, which focused on “mobile action games with epic stories” but had yet to release a game. Continue reading...

Halloween is coming, and our minds are turning to scary games. But which titles are genuine fright fests? Our writers decided to find out in the most ill-advised way possible Shepton Mallet prison in Somerset is the world’s oldest correctional facility. It is also reportedly one of the most haunted. Between its opening in 1625 and its closure in 2013, it saw hundreds of inmates, from Victorian street urchins to wayward American GIs to the Kray twins. Now a tourist attraction, it occasionally opens to paying guests who want to spend a night behind bars. Some are paranormal investigators, some are brave tourists, and others are video game journalists with a silly idea: how scary would it be to play five recent horror games all night, locked in a haunted prison? Carrying just a torch, an electromagnetic field (EMF) detector, and a laptop, we wandered the prison finding spine-chilling locations in which to play these immersive supernatural masterpieces. Here is what happened … Continue reading...

PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox; Treyarch/Raven/Activision If you think you know what to expect from a Call of Duty game, well … you’re probably right, but Black Ops 6 does its thing with panache Whoever thought of constructing this game’s campaign around a safe house resembling a haunted mansion on an abandoned country estate deserves an immediate pay rise. After each foray into shoot-’em-up carnage, your team of militarised misfits is deposited back into this sprawling country pile, which for some reason is filled with intriguing mysteries and puzzles: what happens if you play the piano? Where does that passage lead? What is this, scrawled in invisible ink on the wall? It’s like Scooby-Doo crossed with Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca – a comparison I never imagined making about a Call of Duty game. Lead developers Treyarch and Raven have had four years to work on this title and boy does it show. The multiplayer mode is both familiar and fresh thanks to its “omni-movement”, which lets you run and leap in every direction, radically altering the feel of movement and tipping the balance of lethal encounters in favour of people with spatial reasoning skills rather than lightning-fast trigger fingers. The small maps, taking in derelict radar stations, strip mall forecourts and penthouse apartments, have been intricately built to provide combinations of labyrinthine corridors, long sight-lines and sneaky cubby holes. The weapons, including 12 newcomers, are designed to exploit varying playstyles from quick-scope super snipers to Red Bull-guzzling SMG teens – and the gunsmith allows myriad ways to modify each one, with genuine tangible effects on your play. Continue reading...

PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox; Bioware/Electronic Arts There is lots to do in this huge and beautiful fantasy world, but inconsistent writing and muted combat dull its blade Developer Bioware was never going to have it easy with Veilguard. It’s been a decade since the last Dragon Age game, a decade for fan theories to percolate and expectations to rise out of control – and that’s not to mention all the strife that’s gone on at the studio after the disappointing Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem. Veilguard is by no means a bad game, with plenty of charming characters to meet and new places to see. But the writing, the heart of previous games, is surprisingly mediocre, while the new combat style gets repetitive fairly quickly. You play as Rook, an associate of Varric, who served as companion and storyteller in the previous games. Varric and Rook have been on the hunt for elven god Solas for the better part of a year. Just when it looks as if you can stop him from tearing down the Veil between the physical and nether worlds, unleashing hordes of demons in the process, a magical mishap leads to the release of two other, even worse gods. These new villains are comically evil, but they are a disappointment compared with the compelling character of Solas, who is, after all, right there. Veilguard tells his side of the story, too, through side quests. Continue reading...

Pair stream themselves playing Madden in effort to secure votes just nine days before election Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday streamed themselves playing an American football video game against each other on Sunday as the two Democrats continued their party’s efforts to secure votes from young men just nine days before the White House election. During the stream of their showdown on the latest edition of the Madden game series, Ocasio-Cortez and Walz exalted the importance of regaining Democratic control of the US House, maintaining a majority in the Senate and ensuring Kamala Harris wins the 5 November presidential election against Donald Trump. Continue reading...

The invitation to EXplore, EXpand, EXploit and EXterminate that comes with the game’s unfortunately spelled sixth iteration is hard to resist, harder still to play I am feeling anxious about the world. We have had mayoral elections in my part of Canada in which one candidate was backed with more gold than Croesus, so it wasn’t even a contest. In the UK people have not got the Labour government they hoped they were voting for. And as someone who lives a few hours’ drive from the US border, I can only pray that Orange Hitler doesn’t get in again. Or maybe I pray that he does, lest our neighbours to the south end up in an election-denial-driven repeat of the civil war. So I thought I’d play a game where I get to direct the rise and fall of civilisation myself instead. As a treat. Civilization 6 is what’s known as a 4X game. 4X stands for “EXplore, EXpand, EXploit and EXterminate”, a phrase that offends my pedantic spelling sensibilities. Unfortunately the four “exes” I spent a lot of time doing here was Exert, Expire, Exclaim and then Exit due to this game’s Execrable gamepad controls, which are as intuitive as a Heston Blumenthal recipe. I lost count of the times I moved the wrong unit, or had brain freeze trying to remember what button did what. I would have preferred a more common sense control system, mouse and keyboard support, or an interface that uses the power of thought, like that one Elon Musk pretends he has. Continue reading...