After five years in the making and hardly any time taken out for interviews or status updates, you'd imagine Digi-Guys' WarDevil would be just about wrapped up and ready to grab some GOTY awards, right? Not so much, as Edge discovered during a studio tour. Although Digi-Guys does have some very cool technology to show off, that may eventually result in a game.

To prove the effectiveness of the developer's mysterious texture technology, Digi-Guys gave Edge a demonstration of the game engine as it was in 2005 -- running on an Xbox. The first one. "So what you'd expect to see even in modern games – textures that turn to porridge if you look too close – doesn't happen here," Edge notes. "Then there's motion blur, of the kind seen in Jurassic Park rather than the harsh, sometimes nauseating vector blur used in modern games. Add to that many of the light and particle effects you'd expect to see today, and a healthy layer of anti-aliasing."

Another demo on more recent hardware is similarly impressive, showing high detail in skin and clothing as the camera zooms in. Evidently, this version of WarDevil was actually playable behind closed doors at Tokyo Game Show -- and not, like the Xbox demo, in a placeholder rail shooter mode. And that is progress.