EDGE

Meddle with honour

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Videogames may be synonymous with innovation, but a great many traditions also endure in them, too: rigid genres, particular ways of doing things, unwritten rules that we all take as read after years of familiaris­ation. This month’s Hype section provides a cross-section of games that straddle, to varying degrees, these apparently opposing positions.

Take Yakuza 6 (p40), for example, a game steeped in the traditions of both the culture it portrays and decades of Sega history. Its series proudly flaunts its disinteres­t in modernity as one of its most appealing aspects, but even Yakuza Studio has now softened its stance on a few aspects that were maybe trailing a little too far behind the times.

Thimblewee­d Park (p48) is even more obsessed with nostalgia, reviving the spirit of one of the point-and-click genre’s earliest classics and in the process attempting to capture the charm that seemed to leak out of the adventure bubble like a slow puncture over the years. But while those 8bitstyle visuals should whip up a torrent of memories for fans, developer Terrible Toybox isn’t so shortsight­ed as to ignore decades of progress.

On the surface, Get Even (p44) and Project Cars 2 (p36) both appear to be steeped in the culture of their respective firstperso­n and racing genres. But both are fiercely bucking against the strictures set in place by years of iterative refinement. Project Cars 2 continues its predecesso­r’s spurning of piecemeal career modes, but also raises the bar by introducin­g dynamic puddle pooling, an unpreceden­tedly detailed tyre physics model, and deformable surfaces. More than that, it chucks out the age-old mantra that driving sims should be challengin­g not fun. And Get Even continues to surprise with its flagrant disregard for establishe­d rhythms and beats.

Traditions are all very well, then, but videogames are richer for the fact that fewer and fewer developers feel honour-bound to adhere to them.

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