Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 113

Total War: Warhammer, you pronounce it Waaagh

There was never a question of which faction I would be playing for my first run of Total War: Warhammer. The Vampire Counts were fun to dabble with, but their brand of corrupt-and-conquer worked a little too slowly for my tastes. The Dwarves, despite being the only race to master the helicopter while most of their neighbors are still working on crossbow technology, were too homogeneous for my taste. As for the Empire, if I wanted to play a vaguely Germanic and very mustachioed nation, I needn’t play a game about wizards and trolls.

The Orcs, with their ultra-aggressive playstyle, their mutilated cockney accents, their goblin-firing siege slingshots, have a special place in my heart as the only part of the Warhammer universe both horrifying and hilarious in equal measure. Besides, they were the army I always fielded in high-school, on my friend’s carpet. My whole brief history with wargaming is tied up with the Greenskins—how could I give up the chance to play them now?

Wargaming has a history that a small number of people argue over ferociously, in part because the definition of the word is unclear. Is chess a wargame? It certainly is a game about war, but diehards would say no—too reliant on abstraction and metaphor. An entire essay was written about the difference between a “wargame” and a “war game.” I will mercifully spare you the details.

In 1871, the French Army were trounced by the Prussians in an upset so severe, part of the blame was laid at the feet of a board game. Instructions for the Representation of Tactical Maneuvers under the Guise of a Wargame (IRTMW), as it was originally titled, was a strategy game prescribed to officers in the Prussian army by their superiors. But IRTMGW was about as fun as you would expect, with a list of rules so long that matches would often take longer than the battles it supposedly simulated. Eventually, someone slimmed it down enough to enjoy, and Kriegsspiel—which literally translates to “wargame”—was born, a recreational pastime so meticulously detailed that it functioned as a military training tool.

Paris, Rommel, von Rundstedt, Gause und Zimmermann via Wikimedia Commons

Kriegsspiel eventually entered civilian life, and the notion spread. In 1913, H.G. Wells wrote Little Wars, a game that could be played with common toy soldiers. The first and second World Wars provided a setting grander than the genre had ever had before; again and again, wargamers re-invaded Normandy in D-Day (1961) and directed the horrors of the Western Front in Trench (1975). By the time Games Workshop debuted Warhammer in 1983, wargaming had evolved into a formidable hobby. The genre of wargaming had been grounded in historical re-enactment, but fantasy was a natural next step.

A common throughline in discussions of wargaming is “complexity.” You’ll find that word crop up in almost all journalistic examinations of the hobby. Less charitable descriptors would be “byzantine” and “obsessive.” But that complexity which passersby seem happy to note but loath to examine doesn’t exist just to fill out codices: it is, in some ways, a dogged, tunnel-visioned pursuit of truth. And truth, as Oscar Wilde wrote, is rarely pure and never simple.

The mechanics of traditional wargames are not about creating depth of play (though that can be a side effect) as much as they are about verisimilitude. Panzer Leader (1974) had different movement rules for artillery over and under 88mm. Advanced Squad Leader (1985) systematizes wind strength, as it affects the density of smoke on the battlefield. Often, the preferred term was not games at all—the most powerful wargaming company, until Games Workshop came around, was tellingly named Simulations Publications.

But one of wargaming’s most interesting contributions to the strategy genre are the rules for morale, which dictate at what moment in a battle a squad will stop obeying your orders and try their damndest to escape harm’s way. Morale is systemized courage, the human spirit reduced to a stat or attribute, and it’s as revolutionary as it is convoluted. Imagine if a pawn would not move into position because it was frightened for its life. The goal of wargaming often seems to be a reduction of the world as we know it into measured sums. How many artillery shells can a man in the trenches take before breaking? It must be quantified.

churning with variables both above and below the surface

The Total War games are, in many ways, blood relatives of the wargaming world. They’re largely concerned with historical struggles and empire building, with the last two games in the series set during the Roman empire. Like wargames, they’re immensely complex, churning with variables both above and below the surface. In more recent Total Wars, the weather of a battle affects the accuracy of archers; fog makes the “spotting range” of units shorter. Fire spreads through settlements with frightful speed. Total War is also one of few large-scale strategy games where morale—that attempt to quantify bravery in the face of death—is vitally important.

The Total War formula mostly acts as a functional framework on which to construct the violent, mystical world of Game Workshop’s Warhammer. This is the most dramatic departure Creative Assembly has taken from their typical playbook with the series, and it needed to be; a game about a warring fantasy kingdom must feel different than one about the rise of the Roman empire. For the most part, it does. As the battle-crazed Orcs who use each other’s teeth as currency, I was unable to even access the trading menu. I couldn’t start in on my technology tree until late in the game, since the Orcs were too busy brutalizing each other to dip their green toes in military science. There were only a few places where the theming and mechanics grind against one another, and remind us that this formula was originally derived from a game about humans at war with one another—why the living races of Dwarves and humans would make alliances or trade agreements with the openly villainous Vampire Counts, for example, is beyond me.

I ran my commander Grimgor Ironhide through other Orc encampments like a dump truck with no brakes, leaving them ruined and smoking (though, strangely, no less ramshackle-looking than before I had passed through). I smashed armies against the teeth of the World Edge Mountain. Winning felt good with the Greenskins, and it bred more winning—get an army’s “fightiness” rating high enough, and you inspire a Waaagh, a fully stacked army that heard there’d be some good scrappin’ as long as they follow your Orcish lord around. It’s a great mechanic, a powerful carrot to tempt you into further violence and bloodshed even if it might not be the best strategic decision. Like the Dwarven book of grudges or the Vampire’s battlefield reanimation, it’s both flavor and function, a narrative told through systems.

My Waaagh took me deep into the Badlands, far from my capitol of Black Crag. I took province after province, hacking my way south until I had conquered nearly all the Greenskin pretenders. I was technically at war with five factions, and I was doing magnificently. My largest army was five turns away, when the Dwarves—who I’d knocked heads with not too long ago—showed up on my doorstep. By the time I got back to Black Crag, half of Grimgor’s empire had burned to the ground.

Even worse, all that time spent chasing off the dwarves let my Orcish rivals recover enough to challenge me for the territory I had claimed. Greenskins flowed up from the south, furious Dwarves from the North. By the time the Chaos Warriors arrived, bringing with them the end times, there wasn’t much left for them to do: my empire was consumed by the same war and bloodshed that had gotten me so far. It was honestly how you might expect the reign of an Orc warlord to end—carried away by his own thirst for further conquest and battle. It felt, if not real, truthful.

While simpler than some of its more Gordian cousins, the original table-top Warhammer (1983) applied wargaming’s obsession for simulation to the battles of elves, orcs, and vampires. Final Fantasy has never concerned itself with what might happen if a wizard channeling eldritch powers from beyond the stars were to, say, fuck up his pronunciation and lose control of a spell. Warhammer did, through a bureaucratic combination of dice and charts. By sketching out the boundaries of the universe through rules, and by taking itself so seriously as to approach parodic levels, Warhammer tried to make real a world of monsters and magic.

With Total War: Warhammer, wargaming eats its own tail. Like Warhammer in 1983 adopted so many methods of thinking previously reserved for the world of historical simulations, Total War: Warhammer uses the language of a game grounded in historical realism to tell a story of a mythic, imaginative world. In extraordinary and meticulous detail, the game recreates the landscape, politics and—did you catch it the first time?—war, as if its troubled fantasy world lived and breathed.

There is a trait that a few units possess called “Terror.” It’s easy to miss, lumped in with things like “Shielded” or “Poor Accuracy,” but it has a notably different effect. When a unit with Terror—such as the Varghulf, a massive, slavering bat-hulk which lopes across the field with disconcerting speed—first makes contact with enemy forces, it doesn’t matter what the state of their morale is; they will run. Warhammer’s world is sketched out by an ocean of rules, obsessed with the collision of fantasy with the specter of realism. At one end, terror is gut-wrenching emotion, a failing of spirit. At the other, terror is a rule, a factor to be considered. From the cold, complex, and baroque throne of wargaming, come full circle as it is in Total War’s latest entry, terror is both.

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If a pixel-art kitty game doesn’t turn you into a cat person, nothing will

Let’s start off with a confession that’s sure to have my friends messaging me all day: I don’t really like cats. I know, I know—I’m nerdy, I’m introverted, I write about games on the internet, I’m queer. By all accounts, I should be queen cat over here. But ever since growing up with my adorable labrador retriever, Gretchen, I’ve always been more partial to dogs. I don’t particularly have anything against cats; I just tend to have a bit of trouble finding them cute.

After playing ᗢ, though, I may finally be a convert. Created by duo katslevania and takorii, ᗢ is a first hand look at what kitties do when their owners let them out for the day. The player takes on the role of a lone black cat exploring a set of islands, and the game gives them little in the way of direction or goals beyond “arrow keys to move”. You swim, you climb trees, you stowaway on ships, you take naps in old caves. Just like a real cat, you simply do whatever you like whenever you like, and everyone who would tell you no can buzz right off.

do whatever you like whenever you like

This combination of player freedom with a lack of explicit objectives makes for a calming experience, and it’s hard not to get attached to your cat as it paddles from shoreline to shoreline like it owns the place. But just as you’ve startled your hundredth bird and begin to declare “These islands are mine,” you start finding yourself blocked off by strange gates and mysterious symbols. Ambient, mystical tones begin to pop into the soundtrack, and your caving trips slowly give way to ancient ruins and statues. It would seem that there’s more to this day than a simple trip to the beach.

If this were any other game, this is where there would be hints of either danger or wonder, maybe a Lovecraftian menace to confront or an ancient hoard of treasure to discover. But these aren’t really things an animal can appreciate, and it makes for an endearing perspective not usually seen in these types of stories. Imagine if Indiana Jones were less “This belongs in a museum” and more “Can I eat it?” This cat is chill, and it has a point. I’d probably get more use out of a bed than a pile of gold, too.

However, by the end of its dungeon dive, this cat will have found something worth caring about. I won’t spoil it for you here, but I will say that I left the game thinking that maybe cats are more capable of love than I’ve given them credit for. I’m not exactly at the point where I’m willing to adopt a cat yet, but hey, maybe I’ll hit up the cat cafe once in a while and try to see what all the fuss is about. I owe my new pixel cat buddy that much.

You can download ᗢ over on its itch.io, and you can follow kat and tak over on their respective twitters.

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A forgotten, decades-old game about slavery has returned

In 1988, Super Mario Bros. 2 and 3 were released. The first Metal Gear was ported to the NES. Square Enix came out with Final Fantasy II, the second Zelda was brought to the US, and Mega Man 2 was published in Japan. A budding industry’s greatest hits were surfacing as consoles came into their own and series loyalties were set. The same year as all of this, French publisher Coktel Vision released a small game for the PC entitled Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness.

Freedom, the brainchild of Martinican artist and engineer Muriel Tramis, shows little resemblance to its Irish twins. Instead of Link or Mario, it stars one of four enslaved men and women on a plantation in Martinique; instead of rescuing the princess, they seek to break their own chains. The fantasy role-playing standard that had been set by Ultima (1981) and Rogue (1980) was of little concern. A review in Computer + Video Games from 1989 showed breathless enthusiasm at the premise:

“I must admit that at the time Freedom arrived on my desk, I was fed up!! I had played sword-wielding macho white male barbarians in almost every role playing game that had been booted up on my computer, and to be honest I was getting sick and tired of them. But after reading the introductory bumpf on the Freedom cover, I felt my Role Playing buds tingling once again.”

Hang on. Surely the desire for diverse stories in gaming is a modern one. Was it not born in the crucible of unsatisfied Anita Sarkeesian fans, ungrateful for the place at the table afforded to them out of the generosity of a white male industry’s hearts? Could it have existed—pause for dramatic effect—more than 20 years ago, during the birth of the medium?

instead of rescuing the princess, they seek to break their own chains

I digress. We’ve been able to answer these questions because the evidence is still there, trapped in digital limbo, waiting to be unearthed by the few DOS preservationists working to immortalize these games, which by and large remain forgotten in the corners of basements or garages. Free sites like the Internet Archive allow anyone to upload older media that may never be re-released by publishers, and dosnostalgic’s efforts are just one part of a grassroots attempt to make sure that that these games are recorded before they disappear entirely.

Like any half-decent librarian would tell you, preserving the past comes in handy. Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness continues to be relevant today, in the way any game this bold is: it’s a story that gaming has never told. Slaves show up in games, sure. They’re commonplace in fantasies that attempt to parallel real-world conflict. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2001) contained the slavery of the in-game races of Argonian and Khajiit, where you could join an abolitionist network or crush a budding rebellion in equal measure, not to mention stroll boldly through the slave market in the city of Tel Ahrun. It’s peppered through open-world games like Mass Effect (2007), Dragon Age (2009) and Fable (2004), presented as the cold reality of an unjust world, degrading and reprehensible but a fact of life. It also takes the story away from those still suffering its repercussions today and puts it in the clean, safe hands of fiction.

Next to these examples, a game by an Afro-Caribbean woman about a violent slave revolt on the plantations of Martinique is frightening in its honesty. “It was my duty to remember,” Tramis said in an interview with Tristan Donovan for Replay: The History of Video Games (2010). 25 years later and that idea still seems shocking, as if games are somehow exempt from the calling of every other artistic medium: to tell the story of humanity, without censorship and in a way that can be understood. The desire we see for truth now is no different than it was in 1988 when Tramis told this story. These stories can be diluted, given new names and new colors, set on new planets in new galaxies with new perpetrators, but the story they tell was born on Earth, with people who are still alive today, looking for faces they recognize.

You can emulate Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness for free on archive.org .

H/t The Obscuritory

Update: A paragraph was added to note the importance of software preservation.

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Mourn your favorite Game of Thrones characters in this virtual graveyard

Warning: this story will allude to events up to Episode 5 in Season 6 of Game of Thrones. Featured image is censored because I don’t want to get yelled at on the Internet for spoilers.

What is dead may never die. Valar morghulis. Hodor.

HBO’s bleak fantasy epic Game of Thrones, based on the book series written by George R. R. Martin, has a number of recurring mottos. All mostly meaning, or leading to, death. The show’s made headlines often for killing off beloved characters in shocking, gut-churning ways. From the tense betrayal in the Red Wedding of Season 3 that offed a handful of main characters in one fell swoop, to Episode 5 of the latest season, wherein a sweet man met his demise in the most heartbreaking of ways. That’s how death works in Game of Thrones: it’s inevitable, and it sneaks up on you. It’ll happen someday, so it’s best not to sugar coat it.

Due to the frequency at which Game of Thrones fans are mourning character deaths, Slate has created a virtual graveyard for the dozens of deceased. Perfect for leaving flowers and saying a prayer. Each gravestone bares a name; be it a former king, a lord, or even a peasant. Some stones are even accompanied by a signifier. Like a measly crow perched atop the grave for the deceased men of the Night’s Watch, or a house sigil for the royal lords, ladies, and of course, direwolves of Westeros. For one specific resurrected character, a zombified hand emerges from the grave.

That’s how death works in Game of Thrones: it’s inevitable

The more popular characters are littered with flowers, sometimes growing to the hundreds of thousands (as a tally beneath each stone reads). The lesser characters are less-popular though, as their graves gather virtual dust over time. As Slate writer Chris Kirk writes in the interactive project’s description, “good or evil, they all touched our lives in some way.” Right he is. Rest in peace, former denizens of Westeros and beyond. Unless you’re resurrected by the Lord of Light or whatever.

As Roose Bolton once did, you too can send Lannister-laden regards over on Slate’s virtual graveyard .

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Mosh Pit Simulator’s new trailer is equal parts creepy and funny

The human body is weird in alternatingly horrifying and hilarious ways, and sometimes both at once. This is true all of the time, but becomes all the more apparent in extreme situations such as sex or mosh pits.

That is the central intuition behind Mosh Pit Simulator, Sos Sosowski’s virtual reality game for which a new trailer was released on Monday. Intuition might be pushing it. As Michelle Ehrhardt previously reported for Kill Screen, the game was born out of happenstance and strange discoveries more than a linear plan. But here it is: a video of strange nude-ish bodies deforming, singing, dancing, falling, and jumping. It’s like a child’s book of gerunds but far creepier. As promised, it is weird in alternatingly horrifying and hilarious ways, and sometimes both at once.

For all that Mosh Pit Simulator is a collection of ghoulish poses—think Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” extended to the whole body—it is oddly compelling. The strange warping bodies, like the inflatable characters that stand in front of used car dealerships, are not actually scary. Instead, there’s the mystery of how they’ll deform next. (Spoiler: it’s oddly reminiscent of a melting candle and when that’s not the case it’s just plain odd.) All of which is to say that there is something endearing about these bodies. They are not attractive, but their exertions resonate with the viewer. Everyone looks silly in a concert’s mosh pit and nobody really cares, and the same holds true here. After a few viewings, the trailer becomes more liberating than horrifying; this is what everyone on the dance floor aspires to.

Everyone looks silly in a concert’s mosh pit and nobody really cares

In that respect, Mosh Pit Simulator is tonally of a piece with Italian artist Alessandro Boezio’s “Temptation”. The surrealist white ceramic sculptures are formed of limbs folding in on one another, like a human centipede but less scatological. If you choose to think of Boezio’s works as collections of dismembered body parts (which, in a sense, they are), the experience is rather horrifying. But interpreting Boezio’s work as an act of horror is a choice, not an obligation. You can also choose to see “Temptation” as a somewhat silly collection of limbs—Twister for dismembered grown-ups. Crucially, the work encourages both interpretations. Mosh Pit Simulator, on this most recent evidence, is doing the same thing.

Reunion of the Delights — Alessandro Boezio, 2016

Watch the Most Pit Simulator trailer here. You can also check out its website.

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Soccer tactics and the evolution of Rocket League

Soccer as we know it has undergone several modifications since its earliest stages. Back in 1529, a soccer-esque sport called ‘Calcio Fiorentino’ was being played between two teams with 27 players each in the Piazza Santa Croce, a famous plaza in front of a basilica in Florence, Italy. The players used this game to solve their political differences in a match full of violence and intensity. These differences were normal back in 16th century Italy, when competition was more a matter of showing superiority and dominance over a rival group—as in matches between aristocratic families and gangs that dominated different parts of the city-states—than playing for fun.

The game lacked strategy, coordination, rotation, and positioning—even goalkeepers. Henry III of France once attended a game of Calcio and said it was “Too small to be a real war and too cruel to be a game.”

Some scholars have reported tentative tactics used during these matches, in which 15 players were attackers and five were midfielders. If we look back to 1950s soccer distributions, such as the ones with four attackers and two midfielders (4-2-4), the formation in Calcio was not all that different from soccer. The key point, however, is that in Calcio this was not always true and followed strictly. Almost every player was both an attacker and a defender depending on the situation. As the tactics were still being formed, the teams were not used to following them and would instead focus solely on the main objective, which was to run towards the goal to score or to prevent the other team from doing so. Tactics such as setting up a counter attack were not as important as chaos. It’s telling that all players were allowed to use their hands and feet to carry the ball.

Too small to be a real war and too cruel to be a game

Calcio, then, was more a sloppy blend of soccer and rugby rather than something closer to either one of these two sports as we know them individually. The first set of rules that started to change this scenario were the Cambridge Rules, in 1848, which still kept the sport positioned closer to rugby, with rules such as “No player is allowed to loiter between the ball and the adversaries’ goal,” but also prevented players from holding the ball or from pushing and tripping their adversaries.

This distinction was even clearer with a code created in 1858 by the English team Sheffield Football Club, which stated, among other rules, that players could no longer hold the ball with their hands, although they could still use them to hit it—Cambridge still allowed players to hold the ball and kick it, without running, if it was caught with their hands directly from their foot. The system of having 11 players on each side, the statutory number in current soccer, was first used by Sheffield in 1863, but it was widely adopted by other teams by 1867. Some of these, though, still thought it was fair game to keep using 14 players.

Tactics on the pitch started to gain importance when the first goalkeeper appeared in 1871.  The matches looked more organized with only 11 players on the field, although the oldest video recording of a soccer match, between Blackburn Rovers and West Bromwich Albion, shows that, although some players should were meant to stick in midfield, they still focused a lot on scoring regardless of their tactics.

Today’s World Cups were the main catalyst for tactical evolution in club football. By 1925, defense had become a priority through the formation commonly known as ‘WM’, with three defensemen, three attackers, and four midfielders; all forming a W and M on the field. Midfield control and ball possession were essential in Brazil’s 1970 team. And the Netherlands’s renowned ‘Clockwork Orange’ (a nickname for the national soccer team) in 1974 used a defensive strategy in which more than one player would quickly swarm an opponent to steal the ball. It looked like the Netherlands was always about to run over a player. A bizarre tactic to watch but one that turned out effective.

LiveStrong Sporting Park by brent flanders

From 1986 until now, almost every World Cup champion focused on having a strong midfield presence with at least four players in the position, from Argentina in 1986 to Germany in 2014. In the first case, due to the limitations the 1986 Mexico World Cup brought to most teams—such as playing in altitudes and temperatures higher than usual, and under an overbearing sun at noon—they pulled back one attacker to the midfield and played with three attackers and five midfielders. This change was then adopted by other teams because it allowed them to split these five players in offensive and defensive positions on the midfield itself.

I won’t detail the other strategy because the 7-1 German win against Brazil in the 2014 World Cup, held here in Brazil, still makes me cry every night. We Brazilians even created the expression “Each day is another 7-1” when talking about disappointing facts off the back of it.

Rocket League‘s (2015) history is not as long as that of the sport’s that inspired it—and, fortunately, 7-1 is not a highly unusual score. The ‘soccer with cars’ game was released in July last year and if we consider its PlayStation 3 predecessor Super Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars (2008), the game still has less than eight years to its name, which is not enough time to spot a legitimate strategic evolution.

However, what should become clear after a few weeks playing the game in the standard 3-on-3 mode is that the strategies in Rocket League progress as the player’s skill progresses. There are several tactics that players of all levels share, and we can spot an evolution of these through individual player progression, and this evolution is a mirror of soccer’s changes throughout history.

there was a need to constantly rotate between attack and offense

If you can’t play the game, watching YouTubers such as Blitzwinger, Markiplier, and Pyropuncher play their first matches is a good way to watch a digital approximation of Calcio Fiorentino. They only focus on hitting the ball without any defined positioning or organization, all while looking for the goal or boosting towards their own net to defend it. It is common to see players ruining the plays of their own teammates because of their instinct to chase after and hit the ball no matter what. As with the Cambridge Rules stated for soccer in 1848, in my first matches of Rocket League there were no players between the adversary’s goal and the ball. Due to the low number of players on the pitch, there was a need to constantly rotate between attack and offense.

After some matches, players start to learn from their mistakes—like watching a ball slowly roll unstoppably towards their goal because all players were too focused on attacking. It’s usually at this time that they start to experiment with different tactics, both useful and weird. Two attackers and a static goalkeeper; or one attacker, one midfielder, and one goalkeeper; or even a goalkeeper, a defender, and a single attacker. Players choose where and how they want to play and adjust their strategies during the match according to how their teammates play.

This is necessary due to the in-game communication usually being limited due to the game system. The in-game communication can either be text or voice-based, but the voice chat is not team-exclusive and the game’s pace is too intense to stop and type in the chat in the team-exclusive “tab.” The quick chat system, which can automatically reproduce some sentences at the touch of a d-pad, is also limited to simple commands such as “Take the Shot!” and “Centering…”, and players are not able to customize them. Most of the time, only the goalkeeper can voice her intentions through the “Defending…” command.

At the intermediate levels, it is common to see a much stronger midfield and defense allied with constant rotations to the attack zone, similar to the WM attack-midfield-defense coordination. The game is almost always happening in the middle of the pitch during matches between high-level players, in a similar fashion to the current soccer strategies. Rocket League players appear to recreate the history of soccer as they improve their skills. But if you watch championship matches or Rocket League professionals like M1k3Rules, Kronovi, and Markydooda playing, you can see that Rocket League players are not merely mirroring soccer but are making a distinction between the two—pushing the car game further and making its strategies unique.

Due to the size of the pitch, the cars’ mobility, and the number of players in a 3v3 match, the strategies have started to tend towards offensive and defensive rotations instead of fixed positioning. Hence, the names of the positions themselves mean completely different playstyles when we compare a club football and a Rocket League match. While in club football a defender stays far behind the midfield even when her team is attacking, in the battle-cars game the defender must play on the sides of the pitch, including extremely offensive positions, in order to make passes to the main attacker. The goalkeeper, who stays under the goalposts during a soccer match, is constantly moving to the midfield in Rocket League to make sure the ball will stay in the offensive zone.

Rotations have become so important that MegaChip97 posted a rotation scheme on the game’s official Reddit forums. It becomes clearer that, as in Calcio, all players are attackers and defenders not because they want to score, but because it is the best system taking into account the game’s variables.

the names of the positions themselves mean completely different playstyles

The kickoff in Rocket League also has its own strategy. Every time a goal is scored, players spawn randomly between predefined positions on the pitch and have to tackle the ball in the middle to restart the game, which is very similar to what a horizontal basketball tipoff would be. Based on these positions, a player named pingeee posted on Reddit a kickoff flowchart that guides players on how they should position themselves and act in the first seconds after the kickoff depending on where they are. On the other hand, the ball possession in the kickoff, in club football, is always of the team who received the goal, nullifying any kickoff strategies for the opposing team.

The Major League Gaming Rocket League 2015 Final between Swarm Gaming and Flipsid3 Tactics perfectly illustrates all these points. The midfield is still important, the goalkeeper is practically extinct, a defender can become an attacker in a split second, and a defenseman often plays the role of a winger and play maker. The game has reached a stage in which the high-level players are adopting certain positions in the attack zone so that they can make and receive passes and set-up plays to their teammates, which almost never happens in intermediate and lower levels.

What this proves is that Rocket League‘s strategies may have started copying soccer’s positioning, tactics, and even movement across the pitch, but these years of evolution in Super Acrobatic Rocker-Powered Battle-Cars and months in the modern game have made it possible for players to truly understand how these strategies must be adapted and shifted to fit the game’s purpose. At this point, it is safe to say that Rocket League is not “soccer with cars,” as it is often touted, but an evolving sport in its own right.

 

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Mu Cartographer imagines beautiful, alien archaeology

As analog technology tends to do, our old tube TV died a long and drawn-out death. In the run-up to its final croak, the knob that controlled the volume also turned it on, and in order to get it to display any picture at all, you had to slowly bring the knob to the point at which it would click on, wrench hard to the left, and then back to the right. Usually it wouldn’t work, and you’d try again. When the picture came into focus, you’d have to adjust other knobs to bring the colors into a reasonable palette and the best you could do left the people on-screen a healthy shade of green.

Halfway between fiddling with the antenna to get a clear picture and scouring the seafloor for lost ships, Titouan Millet’s new game Mu Cartographer asks players to use an array of panels and sliders to hunt down archaeological spectacles. The landscape is layered, and therefore only visible in parts through some fraction of your tools. In order to see the temples and pyramids, you’re going to have to explore the interface as much as the world. Sometimes one clue leads to another, sometimes you set out at random, hunting for any sign that you might be headed in the right direction.

Mu Cartographer came about through Millet’s experiments with graphical shaders in the Unity development environment, and this influence is present in the brilliant colors and in the obscure complexity of the machinery in front of you. There are graphical interfaces to make the process easier, but they’re as obscure as anything else—color wheels and sliders that change things you didn’t know you were touching. Similarly, these landscapes feel intangible and unstable—full of peaks and valleys of static too steep for the real world, and with certain switches properly tuned, the earth undulates and pulses like something living.

the hot pinks and blues of vaporwave imagery

The player is removed from the space and able to view it only through this alien machine with its settings and filters, all more exciting than your average heat map. One filter evokes the purples and oranges of landscape paintings by Maxfield Parrish, another the hot pinks and blues of vaporwave imagery. Through one filter, the rolling hills are bright green, but they are entirely smooth, and have no grass: the circle cut into the white background is presented (on the screen, and on Twitter, if you so choose) to the player, sans rocky detail and without the smell of moss on the breeze.

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But this frame makes the world of Mu Cartographer feel more real—the fictional landscape is not presented directly, but through the technological intermediary, like a radar display. In real life, 2016 TED Prize winner Sarah Parcak does her highly influential archaeological work with satellite imagery, and 15-year old William Gadoury mapped constellations back onto the earth to reveal a lost Mayan city that he’s only seen on Google Maps. If meaningful archaeology could be done from your couch, you might worry that it loses some of the thrill and panache that gives rise to adventure serial heroes like Nathan Drake, but in straddling the gap between old and new, Mu Cartographer gives us access to the moments of excitement and wonder still available in the age of satellite archaeology.

Mu Cartographer is available here on Mac and PC.

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Sex, Fashion, and Dirty Looks: The Art of Katie Skelly

This article is part of our lead-up to Kill Screen Festival where Katie Skelly will be speaking.

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“I want to work harder and grosser and draw uglier,” cartoonist Katie Skelly told the Comics Journal in 2014. Skelly has become a one-woman force in the comics scene, both as a critic and an artist since self-publishing her first comic, Nurse Nurse, in the late 00s. She grinds hard, no doubt about it, but it’d be a stretch to call her art ugly; rather— she deals with ugliness within her characters, the places where social niceties collapse, where blunt, hurtful words carry as much weight as a punch. There are punches, too, though.

Skelly’s comics alchemize her omnivorous cultural intake into her own singular aesthetic. Her most narrative work, Operation Margarine (2012-2013) tells the story of two runaways on a motorcycle, depicted in gorgeous black-and-white and jolted to life by Skelly’s nervy, energetic linework. The book deals obliquely with Skelly’s personal life, which she quietly folds into the protagonist Margarine’s past without making it the focus of the story.

Image from Operation Margarine

The more recent My Pretty Vampire (2015) and Agent 9 (2015) see Skelly moving in a bold, Francophile direction, full of flat block colors and spacious panel layouts. Agent 9 relays the sexual exploits of a fashion model with almost no dialogue: it has an exhilarating run-on-sentence way with narrative, where things burst into the story with no explanation. By the end our heroine has been pushed into some kind of orifice that smash-cuts to her strutting on the runway in a fabulous new outfit.

Like contemporaries Julia Gfrörer and Sarah Horrocks, Skelly’s also an accomplished critic. She reviews comics at the long-running Comics Journal, regularly appears on panels at conventions, and co-hosts the Trash Twins podcast with Horrocks. The Trash Twins rhapsodize about art left behind by popular culture, from French erotic horror maestros Jesus Franco and Jean Rollin to The Anna Nicole Show.  

her incisive, process-minded approach to the material

Skelly’s recent fixation has been the newly restored 1973 anime Belladonna of Sadness: she interviewed the team behind its restoration and her incisive, process-minded approach to the material stands in stark contrast to the hyperventilating coverage of the film elsewhere. She also went deep into Belladonna’s tangled themes for Slutist, cogently dissecting the film’s “powerful, if paranoid, exploration of female sexual agency.”

You can trace Skelly’s influences all day but her work doesn’t feel like mimicry. Her affinity for termite art, fashion, exploitation film, melodrama, and erotica bleeds together into a stylish, indelible artistic voice.

Panel from Agent 8: Skeleton

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To learn more about the Kill Screen Festival and register, visit the website.

Header image via Katie Skelly

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Weekend Reading: Weird Science, Bad City

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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Ding! Ding! Ding!, Anna Fitzpatrick, The Walrus

In a tale that’s becoming commonplace, a Montreal bar owner is hoping to build his own testament to pinball and pinball wizards, but is encountering roadblocks from bylaws instated in bygone years, back when arcades faced more scrutiny. As Anna Fitzpatrick explores, how these rules become established isn’t nearly as confusing as why they remain in place.

Me and My Monkey, Edward White, The Paris Review

While we all have one friend who can distinguish different animals by the taste of their urine, Charles Darwin’s good chum Francis Trevelyan Buckland sure was a heckuva character. A bohemian interested in science as long as it was shocking, Buckland was perhaps a predecessor to many of the scientific and anthropological TV idols we know today. But if you really want to hear more about Buckland’s house of peculiar tastes and mad science, you should read Edward White’s piece about the man who gave his children stuffed crocodiles instead of toys.

Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

London’s empty towers mark a very British form of corruption, Simon Jenkins, The Guardian

London’s current skyline, with the Shard, the Gherkin, and the Heron Tower may resemble an old liquor cabinet, but with revelations about the St. George Wharf Tower, the view of the city now says something very cynical to the thousands struggling with housing in the capital. How the skyline ended up as a testament to selfish investments, as Simon Jenkins explains, was a remarkably British process.

Milton Glaser Wants You to Prove You Exist, Bradford Wieners, Bloomberg

The current American election cycle is—to put things extremely generously—depressing, but that doesn’t diminish the importance of voting. And who, perhaps, to keep the enthusiasm to vote alive in such trying times than the man who coined “I Heart NY,” Milton Glaser. Bradford Wieners interviews the icon-shaping designer on why, at 86, Glaser has decider to enter the campaign in his own way.

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Phew, No Man’s Sky has been delayed to August

It’s been tense leading up to the arrival of No Man’s Sky, especially if you follow the game’s lead programmer Sean Murray as he occasionally lifts his head from his milieu of computer code to make appearances around the net. “Anyone been to sleep yet?” asks one of his latest tweets. You can see the sleep deprivation and stress in his eyes as he appears in promotional videos, staring blankly at a TV screen with the game he’s been making for the past few years playing on it; the thousand-yard stare becoming more and more prominent with each video. His beard has mushroomed, his hair is shaggy and wild.

It’s probably a good job that Murray and the rest of the team at Hello Games have decided to delay No Man’s Sky a few weeks, then—save this exhausted man’s soul. The game has been slated to come out for PC and PlayStation 4 on June 21st since March this year. But now, in a PlayStation Blog update, Murray writes that the open universe and 18 quintillion planets of No Man’s Sky won’t be delivered until August 9th in North America, August 10th in Europe, and August 12th in the UK (and, as a Brit who works with Americans, I’d like to say that those three days are going to be painful).

“I don’t see mountains and rivers and lakes, I just see the mathematical formulae”

“The game really has come together, and it’s such an incredible relief,” writes Murray, and I can only hope that he actually does feel some relief. “As we sit and play it now, and as I watch playtesters every day, I can finally let myself get excited. We’re actually doing this,” he continues, writing in a manner befitting a man who has finally saw the end of what he perceived as an endless Sisyphean task.

Murray continues: “However, as we approached our final deadlines, we realised that some key moments needed extra polish to bring them up to our standards. I have had to make the tough choice to delay the game for a few weeks to allow us to deliver something special.”

At this point, it’s worth taking a moment to remember where No Man’s Sky even came from. It’s the result of Murray’s mid-life crisis. He had been working on sequel after sequel at EA, and with the independent studio he founded, Hello Games, the pattern was beginning to emerge again—first there was Joe Danger (2010), then Joe Danger 2: The Movie (2012), at which point Murray had become tired and wanted to do something daring; an all-or-nothing videogame formed of his dreams.

Since then, Hello Games has been pulled along by Murray’s vision for No Man’s Sky. A tiny team of around 13 people making what should be the largest videogame world ever made up until now. And it’s all made possible due to complex algorithms and a talented art team. The effort has clearly had its toll on the people sat behind the machines putting it all together. “When I walk around this planet,” Murray said to the BBC last year, “I don’t see mountains and rivers and lakes, I just see the mathematical formulae.” He’s developed some kind of Matrix vision.

That dedication (or obsession) to this dream game has led to Murray becoming the locus of many peoples’ expectations. He’s feeling the pressure and is terrified of disappointing not only the world but himself. “This is the hardest-working, most talented team I’ve ever worked with, and I’m so proud of what we’re doing,” he writes. “For all our sakes though, we get one shot to make this game and we can’t mess it up.” They’ve got players, coders, artists, even archaeologists dreaming big with this game, now they just have to deliver.

Read the update over on the PlayStation blog.

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