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Three Battlefield games—but not Mirror's Edge!—are being removed from sale foreverMar 21, 2023 - PC GamerBattlefield: Bad Company 1 and 2 and Battlefield 1943 are going away forever: Electronic Arts has announced that their online services are being shut down in December, and as a result they will be removed from sale from all digital storefronts on April 28... Read more.UPDATE: EA to pull Battlefield 1943, Bad Company 1 & 2 - and not Mirror's Edge - from digital storefronts in AprilMar 21, 2023 - VG247UPDATE: EA has since told fans that Mirror's Edge will not be delisted from the PlayStation store. This is after EA said that the game would be removed from digital storefronts, alongside Battlefield 1942, Bad Company, and Bad Company 2. EA explains that the mention of Mirror's Edge in that announcement was an error, and that it has no plans to remove Mirror's Edge from digital storefronts. EA will soon pull four older DICE games from digital storefronts. According to EA, Battlefield 1943, Bad Company, Bad Company 2, and Mirror’s Edge will be removed from sale on April 28. Read more Creator of Mirror's Edge's rad achievements list believes that achievements are bad, actuallyJan 10, 2023 - VG247Former Mirror’s Edge achievement creator Fredrik Thylander has posted on Twitter that he believes achievements and trophies have been bad for gaming, despite his history of creating some pretty swell achievement lists in the past. His initial tweet reads as follows: “Unpopular opinion: achievements/trophies have been bad for gaming. It narrows games down, it disrupts and diverts attention, and it eats resources that could have made the game better.” In replies, he elaborated that, “games should have the reward mechanisms most suited for them, and the one-size-fits-all mandate from platform holders to make reward systems that benefit the platform makes games worse.” Hot take or not, it’s a compelling argument! We’ve all played games where achievements feel slapped on as a second thought. They can seem included just because they have to be, farmed for meaningless points rather than adding anything substantial to the experience of actually playing the game. Read more EA shutting down Mirror's Edge online services in JanuaryOct 18, 2022 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunA few more classics have made their way onto EA’s list of games they’re shutting down online services for, with Mirror’s Edge the most notable casualty for PC players. The shutdown will come into effect from January 19th, 2023, just overshooting the 13th anniversary of the game’s launch on PC. It’ll presumably affect the dystopian parkour game’s online leaderboards, and downloadable Ghosts of other players. Read more Check out this gorgeous Mirror's Edge inspired Unreal Engine 5 projectApr 13, 2022 - VG247If you’re an old and jaded Mirror’s Edge fan, 3d environment artist Thomas Ripoll may be creating something that’ll put a big grin on your face. Built with the shiny new Unreal Engine 5, Thomas has released screenshots of their own project onto Twitter, and it looks like they nailed it. Linked above is the tweet containing multiple screenshots of this early project, all of which features that awesome mix of minimalism and modernism with clean primary colours pasted all over a sea of bright white urban sprawl. Everything in the images above is self-made and immediately fits the Mirror’s Edge aesthetic. According to the creator, they’d like to have something playable in this loving recreation of the Mirror’s Edge style, although with no coding experience a dedicated parkour movement system may be outside of their ability for now. Nonetheless, even running around these environments would be lush and would no doubt cause a wave of nostalgia to rush in. Read more Mirror's Edge is still the undisputed queen of parkourMar 29, 2022 - PC GamerYou don’t often think about running in games, do you? Hold W to go forwards, maybe tap shift if you’re really hoofing it. Then there’s Mirror’s Edge, a game so committed to putting you in the free-running shoes of leading lady Faith Connors that you can practically feel the soles wearing out with each jump, slide, and wallrun. Parkour might not be as cool now as it was in 2008, but over a decade later, Faith is still running circles around the competition... Read more.Awesome Games Done Quick 2021 has begunJan 4, 2021 - Rock, Paper, Shotgun Get your speedrunning shoes on and prepare your glitches: Awesome Games Done Quick has arrived for its yearly speedrunning extravaganza. As with previous years, the charity event is raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. It’s been live since yesterday evening and runs until this Sunday, and there are already some fab runs in the likes of Mirror’s Edge and Dragon Age: Origins to catch up on. (more…) Awesome Games Done Quick 2021 has begunJan 4, 2021 - Rock, Paper, Shotgun Get your speedrunning shoes on and prepare your glitches: Awesome Games Done Quick has arrived for its yearly speedrunning extravaganza. As with previous years, the charity event is raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. It’s been live since yesterday evening and runs until this Sunday, and there are already some fab runs in the likes of Mirror’s Edge and Dragon Age: Origins to catch up on. (more…) Holy cow AGDQ 2021 starts this weekendDec 30, 2020 - PCGamesN2020 is almost over. I know, yes, I'm also having a hard time believing it, but here we are, and the traditional marker of the new year is upon us: the Awesome Games Done Quick charity speedrunning marathon. AGDQ 2021 kicks off this Sunday, and while I know that sounds completely absurd at this point in time, there's a whole schedule to prove it and everything. AGDQ 2021 starts on January 3 at 9:00 PST / 12:00 EST / 17:00 GMT, though a 30-minute pre-show will begin just before that time. The show proper kicks off with an inbounds run of the parkour classic, Mirror's Edge, and the day continues with PC games including Just Cause 3, Dragon Age: Origins, and Ori and the Will of the Wisps. There are plenty of other notable titles throughout the week, including Hades, Left 4 Dead 2, and the original Warcraft 3. The show comes to a close on Saturday, January 9 with a gotta catch 'em all run of Pokémon Blue and an all dungeons run of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: The best parkour games on PC A team of speedrunners think they've set an unbeatable Mirror's Edge record See a Mirror's Edge map painstakingly recreated in Call of Duty 4 A brief history of cyberpunk gamesDec 6, 2020 - EurogamerThe long-awaited release of Cyberpunk 2077 brings to an end years of feverish anticipation for those who have been itching to roam the streets of Night City, but it's only the latest example of gaming's fixation with the trappings of the cyberpunk genre. It's perhaps inevitable that gaming and cyberpunk are so closely entwined, given that both were birthed in the technological boom of the 1950s and gained mainstream pop culture presence around the same time in the late 70s and early 80s. The hard part is working out how to separate the games that cherry-picked aspects of the cyberpunk aesthetic - of which there are literally hundreds - from those that are, or at least attempted to be, genuine examples of cyberpunk fiction. For that, we need to nail down the genre's key tropes; namely a dystopian outlook on the near-future, an interest in alternate digital realities, drug or technology assisted human modification, and a cultural milieu in which corporate interests have long since outranked the quaint notion of elected government. Things got started pretty early, with adaptations of 1980s cyberpunk movies for 8-bit home computers like the ZX Spectrum. The Blade Runner game, rather cunningly, was licensed from the eerie synth score by Vangelis rather than the more costly movie despite asking you to fly your "Spinner" craft over Los Angeles, locating errant replicants then chasing them down in simple foot chases. An amusing distraction, but one that failed to grapple with the themes of cyberpunk in any meaningful way. Read more Steam Trading Cards Added to Mirror's EdgeJun 11, 2020 - Community AnnouncementsOn June 10th, as part of the celebration of EA content (Including Mirror's Edge Catalyst) coming back to Steam, we enabled Steam trading cards for the original Mirror's Edge.The best platform games on PCNov 27, 2019 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunThe biggest names in platforming used to live only on console, but it’s on PC now that the genre is thriving. Indies have taken the simple ingredients and spun them off in umpteen directions (but still normally from left to right). Below you’ll find a collection of the very best platform games on PC – including puzzle platformers, physics platformers, platformers with roguelike elements, and platformers about absolutely nothing but pixel-perfect jumping. (more…) Five of the Best: Zip wiresNov 15, 2019 - EurogamerFive of the Best is a weekly series about things you don't notice when you're playing a game because you've got more pressing things to do such as saving the world. Things like hands, potions, crowds, dinosaurs - we've covered an eclectic bunch so far (and there's a Five of the Best archive where they're all compiled). But these incidentals, they're essential, and you'll find they're lodged deep in your brain. So much so that if I were to say "best maps in video games - go!" I bet you'd be able to rattle off a handful without too much trouble. And that's what I want you to do: get involved, because Five of the Best is as much about you celebrating your favourites as me celebrating mine. So here goes, prepare yourself: "Best zip wires in video games - go!" Read more Picking every fight in Mirror's Edge, part 3Sep 20, 2019 - PC GamerThis diary was originally serialised in PC Gamer magazine. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US. This is the final part. You can read part one here, and part two here. Authoritarian regimes often pick train stations as the place to present an idealised face to the world—a sort of dictator’s Instagram account. A station in a capital city is a point of entrance, a shiny front door to a society. It’s a confined space where message can be easily controlled. No expense was spared on Moscow’s famous metro system, with enough marble and chandeliers to suggest an underground ballroom. At the height of the Soviet Union, photographs of Stalin were hung from its walls. The street facade of the central station in Pyongyang, meanwhile, has the appearance of a shrine—thanks to the portraits of the two Kim Jongs at the foot of its clocktower. On their flanks, a long colonnade props up a row of letters, “Long live the Great Leader Comrade Kim Jong-un! Long live the glorious Workers’ Party of Korea!” There’s nothing so audacious in Ryding Park, a subway station far beneath the rooftops of The City in Mirror’s Edge. There’s an intimidating order to its symmetry, yes—and a patterned configuration of thin bulbs in the roof offers strange light, like that from the heat element of an oven. But the chairs are orange plastic, and the blue and white tiles of the platform suggest a swimming pool. The evidence of a surveillance state comes instead from the advertising—for gated estates, and secure, reliable phone connections. “With our network,” reads the CityEar advertisement, “you are never alone.” Trains rattle past at breakneck speeds, shaking the whole structure, but I’m done with running. It’s here, in a couple of hours from now, that I’ll make my stand. When we last left Faith, she’d emerged from the sewers to triumphantly blast away at riot cops with their own shotguns—but been forced by some gated level design to leave all those weapons behind. Even now, with mastery over the game’s disarm techniques, it feels as if I’m at the mercy of an invisible quartermaster who doles out the game’s firearms only when they see fit, before locking them away again once the fight is done. The wrestler As I jog through dry canals to reach the old runner training grounds, snipers stand high above on unreachable bridges. Ducking in and out of alcoves to dodge their sights feels like an indignity—when can I get my hands on one of those rifles and finally face down the city’s security forces? The only weapon around these parts is Jacknife, a former runner who’s found a permanent home among the city’s criminal element. As expected, he kn...Picking every fight in Mirror's Edge, part 2Sep 18, 2019 - PC GamerThis diary was originally serialised in PC Gamer magazine. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US. You can read part one here, and part three is due on Friday. There’s a decommissioned nuclear bunker just outside York where the walls are painted in calming tones—designed to help its occupants keep their heads as they carried out essential logistics in the days and weeks after a hypothetical strike. It seems like wishful thinking to hope that a nice shade of paint might make the difference against the weight of the world’s end. Then again, colour associations are strong and laden with meaning. When I think of Mirror’s Edge, I tend to remember the gleaming whites and deep blues—the aspects of its palette I associate with serenity and freedom under an open sky. Now that I’m playing through it again as a killer, I’m noticing a whole other part of the colour wheel—the angry oranges and block reds that kick in with greater frequency as I punch my way through to the middle of the campaign. As Faith, I’m a runner who lives in the gaps left by The City’s surveillance society, making highways of its roofspaces and maintenance shafts. But the cop gauntlet of our last instalment made it clear that something has changed—power in The City is shifting, and Faith’s outsider status is in flux. In fact, right now I’m about as inside as it’s possible to be, in the offices of Robert Pope & Associates. Pope is a mayoral candidate running on an anti-surveillance platform, which might be why his building is full of frosted glass windows, as opposed to the transparent panes found everywhere else. I’m on the 26th floor, Marketing. The carpets are thin and the walls are adorned with TVs, in places nobody would stop to watch them. Fighting with my family I’m here because police chatter suggests Faith’s sister Kate—a cop—has been involved in a violent incident. Sure enough, we find her in Pope’s corner office. The would-be mayor sits at his desk overlooking the whole city, but he’s not enjoying the view. Blood pours from his head, and Kate stands over him. Apparently this sort of thing runs in the family. Kate says she’s been set up, and a piece of paper on Pope’s desk points to an “Icarus”, but there’s nothing to be done about it right now. Sis is going to jail, and I need to get out of here. As I make my way out, SWAT boots fl atten the carpet thinner still. “You are surrounded,” a voice bellows. “Do not attempt to exit the building.” My new philosophy dictates a third way, however: before I leave, I have to try and fight them. A dozen militarised policemen have the entire floor covered with assault rifl es. If I’m going to stand a chance of beating them, I hav...Picking every fight in Mirror's Edge, part 1Sep 16, 2019 - PC GamerThis diary was originally serialised in PC Gamer magazine. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US. You can read part two here, and part three is due on Friday. Mirror’s Edge is worse off with guns. That’s the received wisdom, anyway. The theory goes like this: DICE, upon inventing the running simulator, panicked a bit. Any new series is a challenge for a AAA developer—a cacophony of newness, where a sequel builds on past successes. And this game, more than most, was an expensive unknown—one that stripped away the familiar paraphernalia of first-person games. Sticking Colts and SCARs in Mirror’s Edge was a way of anchoring it in something safe. The guns represented reassurance, both for the Battlefield developer and an audience it worried wouldn’t quite get it. Perhaps the studio was right to be worried—Mirror’s Edge didn’t sell particularly well by EA’s standards. But a core fanbase really, really got into it. They understood it was a game about momentum, and that the guns were antithetical to that goal. They encouraged you to slow down and take aim, breaking the pumping pulse the game offered at its best. People never really stopped talking about Mirror’s Edge, and when the time came for DICE to have another crack at the series, it seemed to agree with the consensus. For Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, the studio changed almost nothing about the pace or moveset of Mirror’s Edge. But it got rid of the guns. In its place, DICE designed a melee system that would capitalise on momentum. You could gather speed, spring off a wall, and plough all that force into the face of an enforcer. A suite of attacks was built to weaponise your catalogue of slides and spins. The idea was that you would use your enemies’ armoured weight against them, sending them stumbling into your waiting foot for a roundhouse finisher. In practice, most players weren’t particularly hot on that either. In the wake of Catalyst, combat is still considered the weakest element of Mirror’s Edge. I’m left wondering if we gave up on the guns too soon? What would a combat-heavy run of that first game feel like? Kick! Punch! It's all in the mind! I’m going back to The City—to the time before it gained the addendum “of Glass”. I’m going to play through 2009’s Mirror’s Edge and take every possible opportunity to start a scrap. Wherever there’s an option for fl ight, I’ll pick fight first. In each instance, I’ll keep firing until the enemies have all fallen over or the ammo runs dry—whichever comes soonest. Faith might have got us this far, but it’s time to meet Fury. I’m on a job. The runners in The City exist in the membrane between civilised and criminal society. They’ve opted out of ...Time Extend: Mirror's EdgeMay 27, 2019 - PC GamerThis article was originally published in issue 288 of Edge in December 2015. That means below you'll find some forward-looking references to Mirror's Edge Catalyst, which we've kept here for context. You can subscribe here for more great features like this. Mirror’s Edge arrived in 2008 as a searing white riposte to a just-ended generation of over-brown WWII shooters and firstperson trudging. It was different, and new—different partially because it was new, forming a partnership of opposites with fellow EA newcomer Dead Space. Both were fresh IP, released a month apart in a publisher’s schedule otherwise dominated by licences and sequels, and both were built upon contrasting foundations of meaningful design. Dead Space, made in California by Visceral Games, encapsulated a grounded American industrialism, a practical celebration of blue-collar capability that informed everything from its violence to its visuals. And Mirror’s Edge, built in Stockholm by DICE, was almost comically Scandinavian, a bright, minimalist vision of sleek architecture and graceful action—part parkour playground, part Ikea dystopia. Mirror’s Edge is a game about movement. Its heroes are ‘runners’, athletic outlaws who carry off-grid information in a spotless future of oppressive surveillance and security. This is movement as morality; in a society built on passive obedience, speed is rebellion and flawless agility is freedom. It’s a game about energy and creativity, and how these are expressed from the confinements of a perspective and a genre more normally given over to destruction, a window for lining up targets and admiring their ends. If the game’s setting—known simply as The City—has aged well, it’s because it was always designed for beauty rather than realism. It’s not an as-best-we-can interpretation of reality powered by 2008 hardware, but a geometric impression of totalitarianism, a sanitised vision of brilliant white pierced by urgent primary colours (strident and unambiguous, like diktats) and ironic glass transparency. On the outside, it’s shiny, empty and pointed; on the inside, it’s all stark corridors angling to an overexposed vanishing point. At the centre of it all, a looming point of orientation, is a vast watchtower called the Shard, an imposing, eminently visible testament to the power of observation. The Shard, which predates its equally sinister real-world counterpart by London Bridge, is a good example of what Mirror’s Edge does well. It is a game of design, in as much as everything it shows us is far more interesting than anything it tries to say. The gap in sophistication between the elegance of The City’s composition and the heavy-handedness of the game’s script (“It’s not the news any more… it’s advertising”) or its clumsy animated cutscenes is extraordinary. Mirror&#x...Podcast: Into The Breach, Playerunknown s Battlegrounds and running awayNov 23, 2017 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunCowardice is a virtue. So says the team on this week’s RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. That’s because our theme is “running away” – games that encourage you to flee from danger, or that give you a choice between fight and flight. Adam will run from the soldiers of Arma or the post-apocalyptic antagonists of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Brendan will scarper from poor odds in For Honor or Overwatch, while Alice only pretends to run away in Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, tricking her foes into giving chase before ambushing them like some kind of velociraptor. (more…) Mirror's Edge world record-breaking speedrun might give you motion sicknessOct 24, 2017 - PC GamerJackknife is the second and longest level of Mirror's Edge, and is a chapter that Lorna Reid spoke fondly of last year. The following video isn't the best way to revisit its twists and turns—but it is a world record-breaking speedrun that was two years in the making, covering the entire game in just 22 minutes and 40 seconds. Beating the previous record by almost six minutes, the following is 'segmented' wherein 11 players contributed specific sections of the run. A description below the video states it has "been a project of the Mirror's Edge community for the last two years", and that "while the possibilities in Mirror's Edge are almost endless, this is as close as we have ever (and potentially, will ever) come to presenting a run which truly bleeds the game dry." Onto the run itself: The video description continues, suggesting the above is the result of nine years worth of practice without mods, hacks or external aids. "Everything that you see in this run is done by exploiting in-game mechanics," it continues, "and can be performed by anyone with a copy of Mirror's Edge PC." Now, if you'll excuse me I'm off for a lie down. Thanks, Polygon. Daily Deal - Mirror's Edge , 75% OffMar 25, 2017 - Product ReleaseToday's Deal: Save 75% on Mirror's Edge !* Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are! *Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time
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