Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 108

Weekend Reading: Rage in the Cage

While we at Kill Screen love to bring you our own crop of game critique and perspective, there are many articles on games, technology, and art around the web that are worth reading and sharing. So that is why this weekly reading list exists, bringing light to some of the articles that have captured our attention, and should also capture yours.



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1979 Revolution: Black Friday, Will Perkins, Art of the Title

A thought provoking game-cum-docudrama about the Iranian Revolution, 1979 Revolution was a unique and tense project. Art of the Title speaks with its creators about how you open a game frozen in time.

Meet the Father of Modern Space Art, Erik Shilling, Atlas Obscura

Being outside of Earth’s orbit was never a precedent to imagining what the cosmos looks like. Erik Shilling writes about the legacy of Chesley Bonestell, an artist, architect, and Hollywood production designer who gave the world a vision of other ones decades before the moon landing.

Saturn as seen from Titan, 1944 (Photo: Reproduced courtesy of Bonestell LLC], via Atlas Obscura

The Creative World’s Bullshit Industrial Complex, Sean Blanda, 99U

Be it the immediacy of the web or the hardship for the modern creative, the rush job has become more popular than ever. Sean Blanda, 99U editor-in-chief, believes this has created a new pyramid-shaped ecosystem for non-experts, people who spout phony baloney over Medium posts and TED talks because the world suddenly values a job done more than a job done well.

Is Everything Wrestling?, Jeremy Gordon, The New York Times

Is everything kayfabe? In a world that increasingly feels entirely kayfabe, Jeremy Gordon takes a good hard look at how everything might just be kayfabe.

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The Witness swaps polygons for pixels in its NES demake

For all its naturalistic beauty, one of the more interesting lines to come out of reviews for The Witness when it dropped earlier this year was that it didn’t actually need to be in 3D. Creator Jonathan Blow and his team may have spent eight years crafting the game world’s intricate details, but conceptually, as noted by Dan Solberg in Kill Screen’s review for the game, as well as popular YouTube journalist George Weidman in his own, it is most similar to a collection of newspaper brainteasers or a book of riddles.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Even while the player interacts with the world primarily through isolated puzzle panels, usually abstracted from the environment (though the world and the puzzles do overlap later on), that does not inherently mean that exploring said environment is any less meaningful. This does, however, put The Witness in the position of being extremely demake-friendly.

a clever introduction to the original’s core principles

Enter The Wit.nes, an 8-bit version of Jonathan Blow’s latest opus built to run on actual Nintendo Entertainment System hardware. Though just a ROM file, you can actually play it on an old Nintendo yourself if you happen to have some custom tools lying around—the game’s itch.io page calls for a Powerpak or an Everdrive. For everyone else, it can be emulated with relative ease.

What you’ll find when you boot it up is an overhead world that brings The Witness’ peaceful and contemplative environment into 8-bit form and pairs it with a collection of puzzles that, despite the retro hardware, wouldn’t be out of place in the original. While The Wit.nes is only a demo at the moment, the game’s trees, meadows, reeds, and ponds still carry a similar sense of mystery and charm as the original, largely through their use of color. Additionally, though the game’s constant “soundtrack” of wind blowing through meadows has now been replaced by the sound of static, its contemplative nature remains.

The Wit.nes is intended as a “reinterpretation and tribute to the original,” and though short, it makes a convincing case. For those who have yet to play The Witness, The Wit.nes serves as a clever introduction to the original’s core principles, and serves as a fantastic entry point for those who have been too intimidated to play it until now.

You can download The Wit.nes for free over on its itch.io.

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Want to weed through a suspect’s phone? There’s a game for that

A few days ago, a terrorist attack devastated a major city. Officials don’t have a body count for you but it’s bad. Do you really need to know the exact number? Would that change anything for you? Anyhow, officials now want to find out how this happened and prevent future attacks.

That is the opening premise of Replica, and from that fact pattern alone you can almost sense callous indifference to civil liberties coming around the bend. And so it is: the game challenges you to piece together a story by rummaging through someone else’s cellphone. There may be some utility to the material on this phone, but much of what you’re digging through is relatively innocuous stuff. Of course, that innocuous stuff has value; our lives are largely made up of innocuous stuff, stuff we’d rather not have someone dig through. But here you are, sifting through the digital sediment of someone’s life.

There’s only so much you can do to fictionalize these premises

The moral arc of this universe bends towards invasions of privacy. Fiction, after all, excels at creating the sort of urgent “ticking time bomb” scenarios where questionable behaviors can be justified. Indeed, Replica takes place in a virtual country where governmental powers are not really a concern. But who are we kidding? This is also our world. The basic scenario in Replica closely resembles attempts to unlock the San Bernadino terrorists’ iPhone, and Apple’s decision to not comply with court orders to break their device’s encryption. There’s only so much you can do to fictionalize these premises; they are part of the world we now live in.

Replica is concerned with the act of surveillance, but also with its effect on people. There is, of course, the surveilled, whose life gets picked through by strangers. But there is also the person tasked with going through the intimate details of a stranger’s life. That work is taxing in its own way. Just because your life isn’t being picked apart doesn’t mean it won’t be affected. In the end, surveillance picks apart everyone’s life, and Replica will watch it take its toll.

You can find out more about Replica on its website, purchase it on itch.io. and vote for it on Steam Greenlight.

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New book lets you play your way through Romeo and Juliet

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has been adapted to numerous genres and mediums since the 18th century and finally we might have an adaptation to rival Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film, Romeo + Juliet. The classic story has now been adapted into a choose-your-own-adventure book by Ryan North, aptly titled Romeo and/or Juliet. North is creator of Dinosaur Comics, and the writer behind Marvel’s The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, and was first inspired to tackle Shakespeare’s work with To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure. That project was crowdfunded through Kickstarter, and by its conclusion had become the highest-funded publishing project ever. Romeo and/or Juliet serves as the sequel to that acclaimed project.

North describes the format of the experience as “book as game”

In both To Be Or Not To Be, and in Romeo and/or Juliet, North describes the format of the experience as “book as game.” This approach, as he told The Mary Sue, was more obvious with the first project, “Hamlet… is structured like a game: get the mission at the start, screw around with sidequests, then at the end kill the final boss and/or die in the attempt and get your entire party killed.” The potential for books and videogames to intersect with one another is immense, and still something being explored in different ways. North’s projects put forward how the weigh up of Shakespeare work should not be limited to whether you simply read or watch it, but rather adds the element of being able to play it.

Romeo and Juliet is notorious for its tragic and frustrating conclusion. The ending was one of the barriers to North’s interest in the play, until he realized that his dislike for the ending didn’t need to be a barrier in a format geared towards choice. As he says “you really get the sense that if these teens had made their choices just slightly otherwise, things could’ve turned out way different.” The book seeks to answer the pressing “what if?” questions we’ve always had about the story, some of which are highlighted by the website: “What if Romeo never met Juliet? What if Juliet got really buff instead of moping around the castle all day? What if they teamed up to take over Verona with robot suits?”

Illustration from Romeo and/or Juliet by David Hellman

The book features some massively talented people, who North co-opted to illustrate the more than a hundred different endings. The ones that got me excited were, Noelle Stevenson (Nimona), Ian Herring (Ms. Marvel), and Randall Munroe (XKCD), though the list will likely include some of your favorite people too, so check it out here.

For ultimate videogame-like enjoyment, it also features a secret unlockable character. Be sure to check out all the places you can grab Romeo and/or Juliet (if we’re lucky it will get a Steam release later like To Be Or Not To Be). And make sure to keep up to date with Ryan North on his Tumblr and Twitter.

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Cuphead programmer’s side project is inspired by Canada’s long winters

One of the people behind the upcoming Cuphead has begun work on his next game, a Canadian winter inspired open-world adventure RPG called Winternight. A game developer out of Ottawa, Tony Coculuzzi is working to create an indie RPG in the spirit of Morrowind (2002) or Ultima Underworld (1992).

While the game is influenced by classic RPGs, Coculuzzi has also used his home city and state as inspiration. “I live in Canada, in the city of Ottawa, and we have long, cold, snowy winters. Winter here is often dark and dreary, and I feel like that has fueled my idea for the world I want to create for Winternight. I want the player to be afraid or unwilling to go outside into the world.”

a never-ending blizzard has blotted out the sun

Early pictures of the game show fresh-falling snow with the horizon bleeding off into cloud bank, as well as warmer interiors that call to mind a retro RPG like Ultima. Understandably, Winternight is still in the early stages of development while Coculuzzi finishes work on Cuphead. “The scope of Winternight isn’t overly ambitious. When I tell people ‘it’s like Morrowind or Oblivion’ they assume I mean huge and long but I’m aiming for a six to 10 hour game,” Coculuzzi writes.

The game intends to connect a series of underground cities carved out of volcanic caverns, in a world where a never-ending blizzard has blotted out the sun. By putting the cities underground and using natural constraints as pathways, it narrows the scope of the “open-world” game; “Winternight is only ‘open world’ in the sense that the game allows you to explore as much of the world as you want, but most of the game’s world is in fact, based inside.”

You can follow the game on the Winternight itch.io page, or by following Coculuzzi on Twitter.

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OmniBus can’t stop, won’t stop

Beating one of the levels in OmniBus means driving over a ramp, bonking the head off a statue, and careening into a set of bowling pins before turning right-side up to drive straight into the endless blue ocean. I take no responsibility for that last part.

After you beat any of the game’s levels you can continue to watch the titular OmniBus drive in its configuration—whether that’s straight ahead, doing donuts, or otherwise. This is consistent because your foot wasn’t on the gas pedal to begin with, and this is a driving game with no brakes. Strap in buckos, your bus driver just transformed into Freddy Krueger, and this love bug doesn’t stop for pee breaks on this wild journey to an amazing hyperdrive hellscape!

Fast won’t slow down for you

There’s nothing funny about normal speed. That’s why Disney recently made McDuck-sized piles of cash from a joke about a sloth in a work shirt agonizingly responding to a watercooler joke. Likewise, there’s something real dang funny about there being a Sonic the Hedgehog game in which he drives a police car and enforces responsible driving which must feel like an eternity to him. Going slow can be funny.

And fast? Oh lordy, fast is even funnier. Fast is unnatural and overwhelming. Fast is everything at once. Things go fast for reasons they don’t have time to explain. When you see a smart car zipping by it’s hard not to imagine that it’s being chased by the SUV behind it. And if you’re in a fit, gut busted open from the funnies, trying to catch your breath and slamming your fist on the table like there’s an invisible bail button there, too bad. Fast won’t slow down for you. Fast won’t slow down for anyone! It’s all happening! Now! And fast is where OmniBus is, it’s what OmniBus is, and it just keeps going faster and faster.

Crashed at the intersection of Katamari Damacy’s (2004) goofier sensibilities and the demolition of the Burnout series, OmniBus is an activity set centered around busses that do not stop. Sometimes you’ll need to weave around mad traffic. Sometimes you’ll need to stop a rampaging gorilla. Sometimes you’ll need to escape Earth’s orbit because you’re on the lamb after robbing the bank for the mob. But you’ll never stop moving. That’s not in the OmniBus’ nature.

Made of few polygons and largely weightless, as if it were made of paper, the OmniBus is a very precarious ride. One of the most trying tasks I had while sat behind its wheel was to plant and harvest corn (on a moon base), driving in circles laying the seed, then doubling around to pick them up, which is made even harder as many of the seeds sprouted as a pinball bumper instead. Trying to parse out the rashes of cornstalk and bumpers would be tricky alone, but I was also in a runaway vehicle that only edged up in speed. One nudge from a bumper could easily launch me through the thin glass of the oxygen dome (that’s why I mentioned this was on the moon, it was a key detail you see).

a system made to make you look like a dumbo

Sharp turns and collisions don’t just cause accidents, they cause devastation. Your vehicle may feel paper-thin, but the buildings are most certainly made of birch skin. You can spiral like a football through civilization and watch it crumble in your wake, feeling like Chris Farley stumbling through sensible Japanese doorframes in Beverly Hills Ninja (1997).

The calamity is a three-dimensional version of Captain Games’ criminally overlooked No Brakes Valet (2013), a multiplayer parking game full of fender benders and bated sound effects, and one that’s perhaps sharper than OmniBus. Both games thrive on chaos, though Valet may be two-fifths chaos, while OmniBus is four-fifths. Which might be a little too much.

Balance is thrown into the end-zone so that OmniBus is moreover a playground for jokes. That works for Amazing Frog? (2013) and Goat Simulator (2014), but the speed and goals in OmniBus feel like a specific challenge that I don’t think is even meant to be met—points, high scores, missions and truly tough collectibles.

What is there to prove by beating a system made to make you look like a dumbo? The missions are charming, but they can also become agonizing as your vehicle is blown over like a birthday candle. And the free-roam modes, where you might better embrace that chaos, don’t feel quite as fleshed out. OmniBus would work better if it rolled with its own punches instead of creating a system that only exists to be fought with—the reward is smaller when randomness does so much of the grunt work. Just sit back and let the car drive you into the sun. Life just flies by so fast when you’re having fun.

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Speed dating sim lets you find the burly wrestler of your dreams

Before the dating app Tinder swept the modern dating scene, one of the only examples of gamified wooing was the absurd activity of speed dating. In speed dating, you’re given a limited amount of time to get to know another person, before a klaxon sounds and the next desperate individual shuffles in for your judgement. Instead of genuinely getting to know someone you’re left with asking the same cookie cutter questions, over and over, until one person kind of clicks. The South African Team Lazerbeam poke fun at this old past time in their latest charming dating sim, Wrestling With Emotions.

Big beefy wrestlers, looking for love (in the ring)

Wrestling With Emotions sounds just like what its name implies. Big beefy wrestlers, looking for love (in the ring, of course). In the 400 unique outcomes, you generate your own wrestling persona using the game’s “LOL” (also known as, Look Out Lovers) character creator. After that, it’s off to the races (or the speed dating races that is) to match with one of eight hunky wrestlers. “Whether you like them big and hairy,” writes Team Lazerbeam in the game’s description. “[Or] mysterious and deadly, oiled-up and angry or friendly and hideously-mutated, we’ve got the man for you!”

Team Lazerbeam’s no stranger to dating sims. In the game Snow Cones (2015), the adorable perils of a poor snow cone’s first date are explored. In the recent Bionic Bliss, while not quite a dating sim, operates similar to one. As a nameless employee, you communicate with cybernetic-limb-recipients, choosing either to help them with their problems, or make their lives difficult.

Team Lazerbeam consists of the coding and “feel” prowess of Richard Pieterse, the chipper music and sound effects orchestrated by Jason Sutherland, and the eccentric art and writing of Ben Rausch. With Wrestling With Emotions, Team Lazerbeam triangulates their trifecta of gaming expertise into one, singular bizarre experience. After all, it’s not everyday that my wrestling alter ego “Captain Unstoppable Mewing Master” finds true love.

You can romance bicep-y wrestlers to your heart’s extent by downloading Wrestling With Emotions for PC or Mac here .

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Star Wars Rebellion breaks the canon … and itself

Fantasy Flight’s space opera tactics game Star Wars: Rebellion is a seemingly brilliant mashup of Star Wars canon. Classic elements from the original Star Wars trilogy are here—Hidden Rebel Base! A Death Star! Han Solo frozen in carbonite! A reconstructed Death Star!—but inventively recombined. Rather than send Princess Leia to steal the Death Star plans, send Han Solo or Lando Calrissian. Push Grand Moff Tarkin out to Nal Hutta to stop a Rebel Sabotage mission. Freeze Mon Mothma in carbonite. Star Wars is in the box, but it’s served via blender.

Rebellion is nothing if not epic. The box comes with two map boards which, when placed next to each other, form the Star Wars galaxy. One or two Imperial players hunt down one or two Rebel players, who have hidden their base on some planet. If the Imperials find the rebel base and destroy it, they win. If the Rebels run down the game’s timer (made easier by accomplishing specific missions or triggering events), they win. Both sides draw on a deep pool of characters, abilities, and tactics, as well as a bowlful of plastic ship miniatures.

Star Wars: Rebellion upends the canon in favor of the more playful, creative approach

At the heart of Rebellion is the underdog vs. oppressor narrative of the films. Much has been made in Fantasy Flight’s promotional materials about the asymmetrical competition. The Empire begins (and typically maintains) a vice grip on the galaxy, while the Rebels snipe at their weak points. Moments from the film—a single X-Wing fighter blowing up the Death Star, for example—feel organic and surprising in execution. The asymmetry in Star Wars: Rebellion encourages a heavy role-playing bent, as well. Playing the Empire, I found myself growing increasingly smug as my probes helped me zero in on the Rebel base; as the Rebellion, I rode the high of every foothold and victory, no matter how small.

Inhabiting the characters and situations of canon is at the heart of Midrash, which is the Rabbinic tradition’s own sort of sacred fanfiction. By fictionalizing parts of the Torah, one can exaggerate flaws or virtues of a revered figure or draw out buried truths they see in the text. Midrash creates a space where the devout can dive into the text free from the constraints of canon. The word is derived from darash (דָּרַשׁ), which means “to seek” or “to inquire.” Via Midrash, Abraham contemplates deeper truths as the son of an idol maker, and an infant Moses’ hand is guided by God to sooth an Egyptian Pharaoh’s suspicions.

Star Wars canonists defend their beloved franchise with the same zeal as Biblical and Tanakh apologists. In 2012, George Lucas spoke on the infamous “Han shot first” controversy: “Well, it’s not a religious event. I hate to tell people that. It’s a movie, just a movie.” But Star Wars canonists are rife with anti-revisionist paranoia. The question of whether or not, in A New Hope, Han Solo shot Greedo first in the cantina scene, is both about the character of Han Solo but even more about the narrative integrity of the films: Does the Star Wars journey change the “cold-blooded killer” to a scruffy good-hearted leader?

Star Wars: Rebellion upends the canon in favor of the more playful, creative approach of Midrash. On the tabletop, players are given space to mash iconic moments of the films together as a palate of actions and game moves. In a sense, Star Wars: Rebellion is emblematic of Disney’s act of slashing the Star Wars canon when it bought the IP from Lucas. The metagame is filled with brilliant little psychological asides. “The rebels wouldn’t put their base on Yavin IV,” an Imperial player might think. “That would be too much like films.” But why shouldn’t they?

it gives itself up to becoming a pure tactics game

The preservative aspect of canonization is also somewhat deadening. Nintendo’s valiant attempts to give Zelda any sort of continuity in its 2011 book on the RPG’s many fictional events, Hyrule Historia, also blunted the magic of the series. Games like Dark Souls show how the elusive and speculative narrative can do more work to captivate players than one in which every loose end is tied, every motive explained. Midrash brings the sacred to life by “filling in the gaps” of the text. But Star Wars: Rebellion is all bullet points.

In reducing its characters purely to skills and attributes, it gives itself up to becoming a pure tactics game. Leaders block each other like chess pieces and complete perfunctory moves, but don’t take on life beyond their ability to fulfill mission requirements. It’s an empty Midrash. For better and worse, Rebellion’s characters operate on a plane separate from the galactic war that unfolds onboard. With lower stakes, the leaders carry little emotional weight. Chewbacca or Lando can’t die during an assault, and Boba Fett can’t really expire in the Sarlacc pit. While events and abilities are pulled directly from the films, these are essentially colorless game moves: no more and no less.

Combat is similarly drab. While the strategy and scope are ripe with tension, land and space combat feel tedious. Units are approximated to dice values, which are rolled and re-rolled; damage is assigned; tactics cards are drawn and played with little rhythm or drama in both ground and space theaters. When the combat is unfamiliar, it comes off as confusing. When it is overly familiar, it becomes monotonous. During my second playthrough, my fellow players would groan whenever someone initiated combat. Rather than lend personality, the intricate miniatures become fiddly data bits to tally and settle up at the end of every battle.

Star Wars: Rebellion is all about epic scale and intrigue. The mechanics allow players to fill in the gaps of the source drama and occupy the headspaces of each side: the urgency of the hunt as the Imperials, the imperiled subterfuge of the Rebellion. Putting the array of boards, ships, and tokens on the board gives a sense that something is really happening. When it all works, it works beautifully, until a player initiates combat, and the pace slows to a crawl. The slow combat wouldn’t be damning if it weren’t so central to the game—except it is. And if Star Wars: Rebellion doesn’t work as a tactics game, or allow any meaningful rewrite of its characters’ stories, then all the rules and operatics don’t really count for anything. It simply doesn’t work.

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V R 2 asks how much faith you’re willing to put in game makers

The town of Marfa is a repository of modern art and little else in the middle of the Texan high desert. “Whether you aim to remember history or forget it,” reads the first line of the welcome message on its website, a blockish, primitive piece of Internet. That is not the most promising of taglines, but the widget to the right of that text nevertheless advertises a stocked cultural calendar. And why shouldn’t it? Since the late 1970s, Marfa has been home to a series of installations that achieve their potency by appearing on the edge of the world.

Among the earliest of those installations is Donald Judd’s “100 untitled works in mill aluminum,” which serves as the inspiration for Pippin Barr’s latest game, V R 2. Everything here does what the label says: V R 2 is the sequel to V R 1, and Judd’s installation is indeed a series of 100 aluminum cubes. The cubes are arranged in neat rows in two gun sheds, which Barr has recreated in low-poly form. The main difference is that Barr’s installation has 48 cubes to Judd’s 100, but you’re unlikely to miss the remaining cubes.

The trick to Judd’s installation is that each cube, while identical on the outside, contains something different on its interior. You can’t see it, but each of these cubes is different. Or at least that’s the theory. You can’t really prove or disprove it. But the boxes are all different and thus theoretically interesting. V R 2 also promises that its boxes are all different; there are placards in front of each barn explaining what is in each box.

a provocation about the player’s trust in game creators

In the grand tradition of Pippin Barr works, V R 2 is interesting in that it might also happen to be a game. If you believe that there are different things in the boxes—or anything at all—then it is a mystery game, albeit one that cannot provide any answer. If, on the other hand, you have less faith in Barr, V R 2 is simply a walk through two sheds with some cubes on the floor. The latter isn’t exactly an intriguing game, but it’s also basically the same experience. V R 2, in other words, is perhaps a provocation about the player’s trust in game creators. In any game, you put yourself at the developer’s mercy, and that transaction involves a certain amount of trust, but here that transaction is the entirety of the game.

The intrigue of V R 2, however, only lasts for so long, which is why I decided to do the one thing you cannot literally do in Marfa, Texas: I walked off the end of the earth. V R 2’s polygonal groundplane extends beyond the sheds, but not so far that you cannot reach it when you’re done staring at the blocks. That little stroll gives you enough time to consider how much you trust Pippin Barr. It allows you to stretch the experience of V R 2, because walking through a shed doesn’t always do the trick. So I stepped off the end of the world and fell, and fell some more. There is little more to be seen from underneath the sheds; the barns have floors that prevent you from seeing through their cubes. Maybe there’s something in them. Maybe there isn’t. I don’t know; I’m still falling.

You can download v r 2 on Pippin Barr’s website, or play it in your browser here.

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Adventure game is made out of actual Renaissance-era artwork

Four Last Things is the type of game I want to leave open on the title screen for hours, just to stare at and appreciate. But that would be the sin of sloth, friend.

Still…

Alright, alright, I’ll move on. Created in two weeks for Game Jolt’s adventure game game jam #advjam2016, Four Last Things is a Renaissance-era adventure game made using actual Renaissance era artwork.

a museum art tour in game format

The premise is simple: you’re an old man at the end of his life, and you’ve just finished a pilgrimage to a distant church to confess your sins before you die. Unfortunately, it seems you may have been too dedicated, as you’ve accidentally walked past your destination and have reached the wrong church. There’s no time to turn around, and this new church won’t let you in to confess for sins committed in other catchments. Ironically enough, then, the only way to gain entry is by committing a whole gaggle of new sins before you die.

What follows is a 20-30 minute tale of vice told through classic landscapes like those of Hieronymus Bosch and Frans Floris, brought to life through a combination of modern animation techniques like motion tweens (think 2D puppetry) and humor that wouldn’t be out of place in a Monty Python bit.

Almost like a museum art tour in game format, your character will comment on the artworks as he passes by them, making snide remarks like “I don’t want any part of that,” and the dry text descriptions of the increasingly bizarre paintings—”Rabbit-man blowing into horn and carrying burning corpse on pike” is a particularly vivid example—comes across like a commentary in and of itself.

Of course, you’re not the only liar in town. All sins have their comeuppance, even those committed in the name of confession. But like Dr. Faustus selling his soul to the devil so he can fly around with demons and punch the Pope…maybe it’s all worth it in the end.

To play Four Last Things for yourself, visit it’s Game Jolt page. 

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