Ultimate Playstation Trivia Book. Vol. 10

We’ve gathered together over one thousand of the juiciest facts, figures and shocks from the world of playstation to educate your brain and tickle your funny bone. Topic 901-1001.

901. Battlefield 4 is banned in China due the story’s focus on a Chinese Admiral going to war against America.

902. Tetsuya Nomura designed some of the outfits in Final Fantasy X to test the artists’ abilities to recreate them in game. Lulu has multiple belts that are supposed to be arranged in a specific order.

903. The closing theme for ‘90s Nickelodeon program The Amanda Show is actually music from Spyro that was reused by composer and Police drummer Stewart Copeland.

Kalimba

With each level you complete in Kalimba, another face is added to the totem pole on the level select screen, raising a towering record of your progress. Your monument may be one of shame, crude logs declaring to the world how you’ve scraped through, or of glory, shimmering decorations and even gold-plated visages telegraphing your triumph.

Galak-Z: The Dimensional

17-Bit’s space shooter is all the better for going rogue

When we previously tuned in to Galak-Z, 17-Bit CEO and creative director Jake Kazdal described his retro-themed space shooter as the modern antidote to endless twin-stick blasting and a thousand circles of bullet hell. Not that you’d know it just by looking. With its cel-shading, pause screen drenched in VHS stutter and CRT fringing, teleplay credits before every mission, and asteroids that break into chunks at the merest brush of a hot-pink laser bolt, Galak-Z continues to lean heavily on the visual language of ’80s Saturday morning anime and ’70s arcade cabs. After over a year spent retrofitting Roguelike elements into the game, nothing about Kazdal’s early mission statement has changed either, yet everything is subtly different.

Life Is Strange: Episode One

The locales in Life Is Strange feel much less like rigidly framed theatrical scenes and more like real places

The kids in Life Is Strange are hella keen on youth slang. So much so, in fact, that they can barely get through a sentence without awkwardly inserting bare dollops of teenage argot. Occasionally this chimes cleverly with the game’s adolescent themes, such as when protagonist Maxine ‘Max’ Caulfield tries to be something she’s not in order to impress some skaters, and the dialogue is never anachronistic – nobody ever describes anything as ‘hip’. But for the most part, it just feels forced, the writers imposing their skewed perception of how young people speak onto voice actors who sound old enough to know better.

The Long Dark

Hinterland’s painterly Canadian wilderness aims to reinvigorate the survival genre

Fiery watercolour skies and shimmering auroras are how Hinterland chooses to showcase its take on the end of the world, but even the most atmospheric screenshots can’t convey the sound of Canada’s deep north – the thunderous wind that scorns clothing and shakes window panes, or the thoughtful silence that follows fresh snowfall. Abstracting heavily, this Vancouver Islandbased team of 13 is creating an escapist’s game, and it’s one that achieves an even better sense of place than DayZ’s hyper-real countryside of Chernarus.