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The Future of Board Games According to The Cannes Games Festival

During the awards ceremony at the International Cannes Games Festival, three men walked onto the stage with Cuban hats, throwing fake money to the audience. They were the ones behind Mafia de Cuba, an intrigue and deception board game set in La Habana during the Cuban revolution. The game was one of three nominees for the As d’Or Award (Best Game of the Year) and these creators had decided to project its universe into ours by becoming the game’s characters in real life. Mafia de Cuba didn’t win, but this stage act set the mood for the following days: a relaxed atmosphere of confraternity that remained for the whole festival.

After the Spiel International Fair, the Cannes festival is the largest in Europe dedicated to board games. This year saw it celebrating its 30th edition, and as such, an exhibition with some of the highlights from the past three decades was held. The focus of the Cannes Game Festival is to gather board game fans and offer them a glimpse of the games coming out in the next months, as well as to serve as a meeting point for authors, publishers, distributors, and retailers.

Copyright Palais des Festivals et des Congrès Cannes/ Hervé Fabre.

FROM AN IDEA TO THE SHELVES

In one of the corners of the expo floor, a man in his fifties is explaining the rules of a new game that will come out in May. The name of the game is Imagine, a party game conceived in Japan in which players take turns to arrange transparent cards with icons on them while the rest of the group try to name the object, movie, or situation the resulting image depicts. Everyone who gathers around the table seems to enjoy the game, and that makes Matthieu d’Epenoux, the CEO of the game’s publisher Cocktail Games, rather happy. He has more than 15 years of experience in the industry and has recently started travelling around the world in search of a game that could appeals to a majority of the global population. That’s how he happened across Imagine at a trade convention in Japan, promptly inviting the pair of creators to France, who seemed overwhelmed at the number of people interested in board games at the festival.

Aside from the expo floor, the festival also held several conferences during the weekend.

One of them was given by French author Antoine Bauza and Canadian author Eric Lang, who discussed the craft of making board games. They talked on how they usually begin with a story in mind, and how they choose mechanics that help them tell it to players. While Bauza usually works on his own projects and Lang works with third-party licenses—he just announced that he is working on a Bloodborne (2015) board game published by Cool Mini or Not—they share the importance of playtesting the game a lot. “When my playtesters ask me to play the game again without asking them, it’s a good signal,” says Lang. For him, there is not much difference between European and American games. Bauza thinks that both universes are mixing and it’s becoming more difficult to differentiate them. Antoine Bauza and Eric Lang talked in front of an audience formed of industry veterans but also newcomers who were interested in knowing how to publish their first game.Every night, at one of the upper halls of the Cannes Festival Palace,more than 400 authors showcased their games and had playtest sessions to receive feedback.

Copyright Palais des Festivals et des Congrès Cannes/ Hervé Fabre.

In the past, authors like Antoine Bauza—known for 7 Wonders (2010) and Hanabi (2010)—or Bruno Cathala—creator of Five Tribes (2014) and Cyclades (2009)— started their careers by showing their first prototypes during these sessions, and so now many of the attendees are looking to follow that same path. The space was crowded, and on every table there were players eager to play new prototypes and publishers looking for the next big hit. One of the most acclaimed publishers nowadays is Space Cowboys, a small company founded by experienced people from the industry that strictly releases games only when they are ready. Their games, such as Splendor (2014) and T.I.M.E. Stories (2015), have become instant classics, so it’s eager eyes that fall on the new games the publisher is preparing for 2016. One of those is Route 666, a game by English author Martin Wallace, which will try for a new approach to the many zombie-universe games. Players will lead a team of five survivors in a place infested by zombies. They will have to manage their resources and decide their path by taking turns with other players on each round before dealing with the zombies by rolling dice. The game has a fast pace and boosts discussion among players. Space Cowboys says that the final version will be ready for Gen Con this year.

Publishers like Space Cowboys work with distributors on marketing activities and make them available at every shop and boutique available. François Décamp is one of the owners of Descartes, the largest board game boutique in Bordeaux, a city in the West side of France. He visits the festival every year but this time it was special, he was part of the jury for naming the best games of the year. After 30 years, he knows everyone in the expo floor and authors and publishers ask for his feedback for their new games. Board game boutiques like Descartes are at the end of the supply chain, but they also have a pedagogical mission: make players learn about new games and offer them a first look at them. Décamp thinks that this is the main advantage of boutiques against online stores like Amazon, which only offer comments from other players. He thinks that this is why boutiques have survived, at least in big cities.

However, he acknowledges that the board game industry is evolving, and specially due to crowdfunding.

 

THE FUTURE OF BOARD GAMES

These days, crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter are giving everyone the possibility to publish their own board game projects. Games like Cards Against Humanity (2009) and Exploding Kittens (2015) are two of the most known examples but the category, in general, is thriving. According to Ico Partners, In 2015, almost 1,400 board game projects were financed on Kickstarter, with more than 85 million dollars in pledges, becoming the best year ever for board games on that crowdfunding platform. Authors are not the only ones using Kickstarter, as publishers are also using the platform for financing higher quality editions and as a marketing tool.

Another trend in the industry that is starting to grow is the use of digital elements for enhancing the experience. At one of the far ends of the expo floor, a company trying this new field is showcasing some of its products. Volumique is a studio that focuses on creating experiences that have the social component of board games and the interaction of videogames. This year’s World of Yo-Ho is an example of that, where players control pirate ships that they can customize from their phones, and then place them on the game board to challenge other players. Unlike games where you can use a companion app, in World of Yo-Ho the app is essential, it’s like a magical token that can change according to the circumstances.

Copyright Palais des Festivals et des Congrès Cannes/ Hervé Fabre.

Finally, a third trend is bringing existing and popular franchises from the board game world to the digital world as individual apps. Asmodee opened its own digital division dedicated to this and has released games like Ticket to Ride (2004), Small World (2009), and Splendor as game apps for mobile devices and also on Steam. The next step will probably be VR. Ubisoft announced that it’s working on a virtual reality version of the popular game Werewolf (1986), where players will use a VR headset to be immersed in the universe of a small town that’s harassed by werewolves at night. It’s a game of deception where players have to communicate with others in secret and plot strategies with their teams in order to win the game. The challenge of these games will be to maintain the same social features as the original games while offering a more immersive atmosphere and adapting technology to the special needs of each game.

The Festival continued during the weekend, and despite the bad weather in Cannes, more than 150,000 people went to play board games and attend the conferences. The French touch is seemingly at the heart of the current board game movement and in the next years it will only continue to increase.

 

Header Image: Copyright Palais des Festivals et des Congrès Cannes/ Hervé Fabre.

Virtual reality showrooms turn your living room into a universal storefront

How much are you willing to pay to be a loyal customer? For me, it’s $100. I pay Amazon $100 a year so that I can buy things from them without feeling guilty about paying for shipping at checkout. I haven’t actually taken the time to do the math and figure out if this is saving me money in the long run—I have a sneaking suspicion that I won’t like the answer—but it makes me feel better about using their service. If a Prime membership cost $700 instead of $100, though, I’d be having second thoughts.

Which is to say, I suppose it was inevitable that commercial upheaval would come to virtual reality. It’s already come to beautiful anime people and twee new-age “museums,” after all. But at least Square Enix doesn’t make customers own expensive hardware to watch Lightning from Final Fantasy rock a pink Louis Vuitton leather jacket (WANT, by the way). For those willing to go in on a virtual reality headset, though, #brands are plenty happy to supply new, #immersive ways to buy their products.

Take Japanese fashion house Chloma, for instance, which is teaming up with VR developers Psychic VR Lab to bring their customers a new virtual storefront named STYLY VR. The app uses 3D scanning technology to simulate Chloma’s clothes in virtual reality, allowing users to preview what their collection looks like in greater detail than offered by 2D photos and even letting them buy any clothes they might like straight from the app. It’s a simple idea, and for me, at least, it fulfills a purpose. As much as I enjoy shopping without having to leave my couch, I’m always hesitant to purchase clothes online, since I worry that I can’t quite get a good idea of what they might look like on me without seeing them in person. And while virtual reality isn’t quite at the point where it can allow users to try on clothes yet, being able to handle a new top with my own weird wireframe hands before buying it might make me feel better about taking the online clothes shopping plunge. According to its website, STYLY VR will work with many different VR headsets, somewhat reducing the barrier-to-entry, but it seems to require motion controllers as well. Sorry, Google Cardboard users.

new, #immersive ways to buy

Meanwhile, Swedish furniture giant IKEA has gone in on a more expansive offering for any of its customers lucky enough to own an HTC Vive. Simply titled IKEA VR Experience, the app allows users to walk around a fully-furnished IKEA kitchen, open and close drawers, toss vegetable peelings in the garbage, and thanks to its multiple viewpoint options, apparently also “become a child again.” “This kitchen is very similar to a kitchen in the 2016 IKEA Catalogue,” writes IKEA. “Can you find it?” Unfortunately, since I don’t make a habit of collecting IKEA catalogues or own an HTC Vive, I’m sorry to say that I can’t. Still, virtual reality does seem a logical next step for IKEA, since its stores already feel like they transport you to an alternate reality, just one of newlywed disputes and surprisingly delicious meatballs rather than age-warping kitchens.

As with STYLY VR, these virtual showrooms do seem capable of serving a purpose beyond the novelty. Maybe, in the future, physical malls will go on the decline as VR-equipped shoppers enjoy the same experience from the comfort of their living rooms. As of now, though, VR is a new and expensive technology. While some early adopters have already purchased VR headsets for the purpose of playing games, it’s difficult to tell if the lifestyle market is willing to do the same. For the most loyal of customers—those willing to drop $700 on an HTC Vive to mimic the mall at home, or those who already own a Vive and also might find it fun to walk through a virtual catalogue—maybe this is true. For the rest of us couch-shoppers, though? Well, there’s still Amazon.

The first eerie footage of Lioness beams in from another dimension

Zak Ayles isn’t budging. Sure, he’s released the first footage of his upcoming game Lioness at last, but it’s warped and degraded to the point that you have to squint your eyes and rewind it a few times to make any sense of it. In fact, it seems as if Ayles has transmitted the footage to a CRT monitor or, if not that, made an effort to replicate the look of one so that it judders, the scanlines tumbling about, the colors probably much more psychedelic than they actually are.

As you can see below, the video is titled “retrograde” and, at first, shows what appears to be an artificial moon spinning in a violet rendering of outer space. It looks like something out of a 1950s sci-fi TV show. We then transition to an upward shot of a building that glides gently into a side-on tracking shot that follows a man as he walks across a city block. Traffic whizzes by in the foreground, creating an ominous hum, and then music fades in with a distorted chime; a sound that crawled in from The Twilight Zone. The screen soon after becomes a tumultuous glitch-haze as if to say “listen to the fucking music.” And so we do.

You can be excused for not knowing what the heck Lioness is. Hell, you probably haven’t even heard of it before. The reason being that, after having doubled its funding goal on Kickstarter back in August 2013, Ayles has ensured that he and his game have only become impenetrably cryptic. Back then, Lioness was described as an “experimental adventure game about human connection,” one that follows a journalist called Eggbert Kirby as he researches an article on seven people who all mysteriously vanished. “Of course, nothing is as it seems and he soon befriends a nicotine addicted cat and unravels a plot involving time-travel, yakuza, and interdimensional coffee,” the Kickstarter page reads. You can see why people give a shit about this game.

photocopied passages of texts about “strange forces”

However, updates on Lioness since its successful funding have driven those following it wild. They’ve included photographs of desktops and fragments of buildings, a storyboard featuring a talking black cat, and photocopied passages of texts about “strange forces,” all of it arriving without explanation. And all these updates are collected under titles like “Welcome to Paradise” and “I feel the.” Then there are the ones written to or about Mr. Kirby, the game’s protagonist, either as an email from who is presumably a fictional character, or stating his death in 1992 from “unknown causes.”

There is a single exception. One update is actually wholly tragic. It reveals that Phillip Lanzbom, an electronic musician who was helping with writing and design on Lioness, and who also created all its music, passed away due to mesothelioma on January 1st 2016. He was 25-years-old. Ayles has since made an archive of all of Lanzbom’s music, which you can download here, or through the mirror here. It’s all worth a listen.

There’s still no release window on Lioness, it’s very much a case of ‘it’ll be done when it’s done’, but you can at least check out the game Ayles released last year, im null. It’s a first-person online multiplayer game that’s as mysterious as everything else Ayles and crew have put out recently. It’s playable here.

For updates on Lioness check out its Kickstarter or follow Zak Ayles on Twitter.

Hold your guts in as you’re thrown around a virtual reality art space

Created for a Render the Metaverse OTOY and Oculus sponsored contest last year, the virtual reality project “Mashup Between the Clouds” is a surreal journey into a world of stacked pallets, overturned desks, and cardboard boxes. It’s also a virtual reality still, meaning that while you could look in 360 degrees, you are constrained to simply observation.

More recently, the project’s creator Moritz Reichartz released a new way to look at his Metaverse, throwing a “collision cam into the scene” to see what happened. The resulting video, “Ride the Metaverse,” is a carnival ride in perhaps all senses of the word. From the sound effects and the cries of distant, unseen people to the overt sense of nausea that accompanies a lack of control in such a well-rendered three-dimensional space, Ride the Metaverse is very different from the original VR piece that it explores.

Moritz had previously published HD stills of the piece, which highlight the surrealness that only virtual reality can reach. But they were still, motionless, and didn’t really give the audience any sense of feedback. They didn’t, in Mortitz’s words “show the exciting spacial qualities of the piece,” as he said to me.

“The thrilling and unforeseeable is more thrilling to me”

The collision cam, which hurtles the viewer past gravity-defying towers of boxes, does just that. For Mortiz, it also allows the piece to be viewed in a more “classical medium.” Virtual reality does not currently lend itself to accessibility but Ride the Metaverse at least gives viewers without access to the technology a full 360 degree experience of a digital still.

Ultimately, Ride the Metaverse and “Mashup Between the Clouds” are two parts of the same work, two different vantage points from which you can look into the imagination of Moritz Reichartz. He could’ve simply filmed someone walking through the space, but instead gave a completely different experience, a new way of looking at something he had created prior. “The thrilling and unforeseeable is more thrilling to me,” he says.

Moritz Reichartz’s portfolio can be viewed here.

h/t The Creator’s Project

Computer algorithm mimics Rembrandt, creates his next painting

I’ve never seen The Starry Night (1899). I mean, obviously I’ve seen it. Pictures of it are everywhere; in textbooks, on t-shirts, and just about everything in between. But I’ve never actually been to MoMA and seen the physical painting The Starry Night itself. Art has been at odds with replication for centuries, all the way back to when the very earliest printing technology suddenly made art cheap enough that common (see: not rich) folk could own it.

When art is no longer confined to a museum, the line between what is and isn’t art gets more and more blurry. The digital age has only made all of the flaws and benefits of replication that much more pronounced—you can browse entire museum collections online, you can 3D print the Bust of Nefertiti, and now you can even create a new Rembrandt original.

a “mockery” of true art

The recently-unveiled The Next Rembrandt is a new portrait 3D printed based on algorithms derived from Rembrandt’s body of work. Yep, that’s right—it’s not just a copy of one of Rembrandt’s existing paintings, it’s an entirely new composition created by a computer. The project brought together top minds from the worlds of data science, engineering, and art history to create an algorithm that can mimic the look of a genuine Rembrandt painting. The result is a freakishly convincing artistic product, heavily guided by human hands but ultimately executed by mechanical ones.

It’s ironic that they chose Rembrandt, an artist known for his particularly raw and human work, to be reproduced by algorithm. Gary Swartchz, an art historian who contributed to the project, defended the endeavor, saying “While no one will claim that Rembrandt can be reduced to an algorithm, this technique offers an opportunity to test your own ideas about his paintings in concrete, visual form.” Meanwhile, critics have flat out called The Next Rembrandt a “mockery” of true art, claiming that a machine will never come close to duplicating the soul of the artist behind a real painting. The project creator, however, didn’t set out to determine if art requires something human, nor where that line should get drawn.

In fact, if things weren’t messy enough, the whole project is the brainchild of an ad agency. The J Walter Thompson agency in Amsterdam, led by Bas Korsten, developed the idea for the project for their client, ING Bank. The concept was to bring the innovation that data analytics allows to the art world, not that art hasn’t already been butting shoulders with algorithmic generation. Whether or not The Next Rembrandt is actually art is still up for debate, but it begs the increasingly-prevalent question of where algorithm ends and art begins.

3D scanned images capture the urgency of the refugee crisis

The refugees in London design collective Embassy for the Displaced’s video “Where the Land Meets Sea” are not moving; they have already moved. That is why they are on the island of Lesvos in Greece. They might want to keep moving, but they are stuck on Lesvos. That’s the problem.

“Where the Land Meets Sea” conflates formal visuals and political points. Embassy for the Displaced used 3D laser scanners to capture models of scenes on the island. These scenes, rendered in black-and-white as often as in color, are not entirely lifelike yet they still represent—however incidentally—political realities.

One cannot help but note that the apparatuses of the state—boats, men in uniforms—look incredibly heavy when scanned and rendered in three dimensions. This equipment has the sort of heft that a scanner can pick. Refugees and their tents, however, take on an ethereal lightness in these renderings. Some of these materials don’t even register. There are holes and gaps that the technology cannot fill. In that respect, Embassy for the Displaced’s technology choices accentuate the symbolism of the scenes captured.

Don’t you think they want to go somewhere else?

There is no movement in “Where the Land Meets Sea,” but it is heavily implied. How do you think the refugees came to be on the shores of Lesvos? Don’t you think they want to go somewhere else? Were it not for the quirks of geography, transportation, and the European Union’s Dublin Regulation, which requires refugee seekers to request asylum in the first members state they reach, do you really think a disproportionate number of refugees would choose Lesvos? But here they are. They are undeniably here. The implications of “Where the Land Meets Sea” are no replacement for actual testimony—more refugees’ voices need to be heard—but they are an interesting complement.

The stillness of Embassy for the Displaced’s work is also an interesting complement to the ways videogames have treated the refugee crisis. A videogame narrative requires movement. Even if much of what happens during a refugee crisis involves stillness—life in liminal spaces; camps; waiting—those are not really events that can be captured by a game. On its own, “Where the Land Meets Sea” may go too far in the opposite direction, but it is nevertheless a necessary corrective.

Dark Souls III: Super Dark Souls World

Spoilers for a few Dark Souls III bosses below.

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The hardest Souls game, people say, is the one you played first. That’s where you learned the language, starting with the common nouns: the grunting Hollows who bust through wooden barricades, the poison swamp, the dragon who toasts the same spot forever like a puzzle in an adventure game, the giant whose feet must be pummeled until he loses his balance, the soul-lovin’ lady who has suggestive level-up conversations with you, and so on.

But internalizing the games’ finicky grammar is the difficulty. A fluent Souls player follows dozens of bizarre conventions without hesitating. You know to tumble into a swinging sword, rather than away, to capitalize on the untouchable portion of your roll; you’re primed to roll left first, because so many of the world’s monsters are right-handed. You know the number of hairs away from an enemy’s spine or gut you have to stand to enter the riposte or backstab animation. You know to wait for that enemy to halfway stand up before striking again. You know when to queue a roll right after a strike, when to combo slow and aim for a guard break. You know how to kick. You know to use the D-pad to change items as you walk through the fog door to the boss, and you know that boss will have a huge stamina pool and long recovery periods. Most of all you know the cadence of the world, the shape of attacks and the speed of missiles. You follow the clean line of action running beneath the game without needing to think, even as you traverse some of the most intricate digital settings ever built.

Dark Souls III revises these invisible rules with such confidence that the changes barely register; in motion it feels more Soulsy than Dark Souls ever has. It’s set in the new (sort of) kingdom of Lothric, but brings back almost every old face, if not in the flesh then as a statue or weapon or grisly little trophy worn by someone unpleasant. It’s picked up a bit of the pace that Bloodborne introduced last year (and its directed splashes of blood), which you feel when you chain-roll or dive out of the way. Enemy movements are sharper, without the false notes of Dark Souls II (2014), where even big guys could turn continuously on their heels to face danger, as if they had your character lassoed. In fact many legacies of Dark Souls II have been tartly dismissed, from its greasy feet to its miserly backstab windows and stat-derived iframes.

Dark Souls III revises these invisible rules with such confidence that the changes barely register

Dark Souls III is not the hardest Souls game (unless, of course, it’s the one you play first), but it feels like the most playful, the one that forces the most adjustments from you. Many of the snappy new attacks are there to mess with your conditioning. A casual shield push stops rolling backstabbers cold. A rib-disintegrating back kick sends you flying away as you step up to take a free shot. A murderous bite arrives from an impossible angle. A goat-man jumps on your head at odd intervals. Lothric’s inhabitants simply have more answers to your attacks, even if they look a lot like someone from Lordran or Boletaria who used to be less quick. The player’s toolkit expands in turn with Weapon Arts. One of these is the Uchigatana’s quick-draw slash, which ducks under taller enemies’ swings and turns out to be the best dog-killing move in the series. You get a clinic in how to use it from the redoubtable Sword Master, a nearly nude man you’ll find completely surrounded by players’ bloodstains.

When you climb the craggy steps to fight Sword Master, you’re maybe 15 minutes into the game, which is enough time to see that it is great. It begins in a graveyard where the tombstones are jammed together Yharnam-style, too closely to mark bodies buried in any configuration, which is the kind of thing you can get away with when all the corpses come back to life anyway. Twisted gray trees bow down from the ridges above, the first of many entities in this sovereignty-obsessed game to abase themselves. (See also: the bending statues in Irithyll, a town that always looks like Christmas, and various legless lords). Crumpling arches slouch toward the stones below, which have been turned up by roots. The smeared textures and planed surfaces of previous mainline Souls games return fibrous and uneven. Some of the most painterly details reveal themselves only when you walk through the level in reverse: a series tradition that was allowed to lapse in Dark Souls II, which favored a kind of big-box level design.

You find a dead knight in full armor—the original icon of Demon’s Souls (2009)—with his head resting in a cracked basin, and see an eroding bell tower above him that recalls the first task of Dark Souls. Soon afterward you arrive at the game’s hub, which leans out over a sea of fog (an unmoving Hollow is placed on a cliff’s edge to make the reference explicit), and see inside that it too is a dreamlike mixture of the first and second games. The series has always rambled about the past and present overlapping. In the “transitory lands” of Dark Souls III you see them together everywhere, sometimes overlaid and sometimes broken against each other in seismic movements. There’s a man who has literally cannibalized the past, and a place so crammed with mismatched and decaying fortifications that it looks like the actual ash heap of history.

There’s some recycling we’re not supposed to notice: statues in Irithyll swiped from Cainhurst, for example, or the red-eyed guys in the swamp who move like Sages and howl like Vicar Amelia. But more often the old material is revisited openly. When Dark Souls III brings you back to spaces you know well, but shows them empty or cracked open or foul with muck, it provokes a nostalgic reaction that can be both intense and kind of ridiculous. The previous games were never set in a golden era but in hopeless, apocalyptic times; now we’re meant to look back at the end of days as the good old days.

Dark Souls III isn’t the kind of melancholy original that Demon’s Souls was, and it doesn’t pivot to another genre like Bloodborne turned toward horror. Instead it leans into the absurdity of bringing together every idea the series ever had and throws a pretty amazing going-away party for it. (Note: series may not actually go away.) When you see that ol’ grunting Hollow crash through his barricade one last time, his placement and delivery play like a joke—in fact, I’m convinced it is a joke. Levels are stuffed with little gags that work like the new enemy movesets, playing against the expectations of the old crowd. One famous hazard reappears in the very first level, and many who die to it will do so thinking “they wouldn’t do that to me in 1-1.”

it leans into the absurdity of bringing together every idea the series ever had

Strangely, the sequel Dark Souls III reminds me of most is Super Mario World (1990), and not just because they both have an area I think of as the “Vanilla Ghost House.” There’s something about the joyful excesses of Dark Souls III—six-player brawls! Purple phantoms who do whatever they want! Mimics fighting demons! Sand worms out of Dune (1965)!—that looks back to the mad scientist spirit of that older game. Both rebuild and remix old settings in a shameless and hugely successful way. Both refine (and don’t significantly expand) a language their players were already intensely familiar with, and manage to add nuance to action rhythms that already felt close to perfection.

A single movement in Dark Souls III might be the best idea in an action game this year. It’s a cruel spin that a few enemies (notably, one nimble species of skeleton and a giant blue woman) launch into with two swords. Not a balletic motion but a back-breaking thrash, it brings both blades around the torso in tilting loops, over and over, as the right foot crosses below to revolve the monster’s waist toward the player. It’s the sort of unreal combat technique associated with fast wire work, but in Dark Souls III it’s deliberately slow and off-tempo. Some other enemies use halberds and axes for a brisk, even spin; a fuck-off Phase 2 Gascoigne-style spin that just means “get away.” But you can’t get away from the slow spin, because it travels with you. You have to live inside it.

Everyone has their own personal Mt. Rushmore of Soulsborne bosses, with the faces of Artorias, Ebrietas, or Smough & Ornstein glowering down—the great practitioner of the slow spin, Dancer of the Boreal Valley, may soon be carved onto yours. (Alternatively, it might be the optional tough guy/Heavy Metal cover Nameless King, who took me so many tries that the final boss felt like a lightweight afterward.) She’s a stick-thin veiled giant who hunches down and swims forward, breathing deeply and moving languidly until she whips her sword across the floor. Her variable speed and too-long combos are all of the little enemies’ efforts to screw with your patterns writ large.

At the start of her second phase she spins nine times in a row, by my count, with a short pause before some descents to change the cadence, in which she lifts her head like she’s thinking and deciding well JUST ONE MORE. The spin covers too much ground to run from, and it’s hard to cut across. Instead you stay in the pocket, find the timing, and roll: O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O. When you get it, it feels as exhilarating as beating False King Allant, or sending Mario hopping over nine distant columns one block wide. You’re proven fluent. You’re absorbed by the spin, by the whole structure of Dark Souls, and for a second you understand it all.

And then you have to beat the boss.

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The King of the Monsters is f*cking back

Remember all the times America has tried to remake and refashion Godzilla (1954)? Cool! Neither do I, because this teaser for the upcoming Godzilla Resurgence (or Shin Gojira, which delightfully could mean anything from True Godzilla to God Godzilla) is so much better than any of those movies or cartoons in their entirety. I would trade a hundred Hank Azaria cabbies, a thousand sobbing Bryan Cranstons, for what we’re being gifted with here. Take a look:

I don’t need to belabor the point, do I? True: the early trailers for Gareth Edwards’s 2014 Godzilla promised a similar level of gravitas and awe, but the final product didn’t deliver and was perversely uninterested in delivering, even. A Godzilla movie doesn’t demand gravitas, of course, but if you’re not going to go all in on “atomic tragedy” you should probably stick with option B, “monster fistfight.”

Here is Godzilla

Resurgence looks like it knows exactly what it’s doing. I mean, the teaser above kicks off with Godzilla screaming about something, then an ominous low-angle shot of his tail sweeping over an entire city block, and then we get a look at him! No one’s being coy here. Here is Godzilla, broad daylight, standing around in a Godzilla movie.

My man is not looking so good, however. His teeth are sort of overgrown and spindly, his hands are super small and gnarled, and he’s got some kind of glowing skin thing happening all over.

These glimpses are so effective, in fact, that the rest of the trailer being largely Godzilla-free is not a problem. It’s got sort of a The Host (2006) vibe—a lot of panicked bureaucrats and urban destruction. I have to imagine that imagery like this is particularly loaded for a nation still recovering from its most recent nuclear disaster:

It’s a fairly sure bet that co-directors Shinji Higuchi (a veteran of the 90s Gamera movies) and Hideaki Anno (yes, that Hideaki Anno, the ruthless son-of-a-bitch who created anime phenomenon Neon Genesis Evangelion) can balance potent subtext with the earthier demands of a kaiju movie.

Am I an easy mark for this, having spent almost my entire life in a love affair with this dumb radioactive lizard? Yes. But the wrathful, almost Biblical treatment of the material here should be its own draw. This Godzilla is not a hokey, well-intentioned environmental parable, nor a goofball franchise character: it’s a plague, twisted and malformed by hate, roiling with sickness and heralding death. It’s nuclear meltdowns and dying planets and fascist politicians and crumbling societies made necrotic, malevolent flesh.

Godzilla Resurgence is due to hit Japan on July 29th, 2016.

The latest broadcast from Radio the Universe’s lonely techno-dystopia is here

After three months of radio silence, over a year of no footage, and a little over three years since its successful Kickstarter at the tail end of 2012, moody pixel-art game Radio The Universe finally has more to show us. Specifically, it’s a new video that shows off one of its boss fights. Since it was last seen, the game seems to have undergone another mild aesthetic overhaul, introducing new player animations and interface elements that better represent the used future setting that earned it attention in the first place.

As the clip begins, the player is alone in a dim room, their life bar having been replaced with a radio frequency befitting the title. A beep sounds in the distance, a fluorescent light flickers on and off over a nearby ladder. The room is basked in the green glow of a clunky CRT monitor, complete with scan lines. It reminds me most of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) at this point, but it’s not long before the player is teleported to a sunken chamber below and attacked by a four-legged robot more resembling cyberpunk anime Ghost in the Shell (1995).

From this point, a few more changes are shown, as enemy health bars are now also represented in radio frequencies, and the player fires an actual gun as opposed to the more abstract energy bullets of previous clips. Their holographic shield is also smaller and looks particularly more dingy than the old design, flashing intermittently and refusing to work in water. The general feel here is one of corroded, half-broken technology that is somehow still miles ahead of our own, appropriate for the ancient yet wondrous sci-fi ruins the game will task us with exploring. There’s also, like, a bullet-counter in the top left corner now.

doubling-down on its melancholy identity

Some of these changes could perhaps be written off as simply being additional gear collected by the player rather than replacements for what had been shown off before, but the overall tone of the new footage still presents a menace that wasn’t as clear in previous, more colorful showings. This isn’t new for the game, as it was always intended to be “sinister” and “offbeat,” but as development has progressed, it appears to be doubling-down on its melancholy identity.

Radio the Universe is due to come out sometime later this year, following up the recent release of the somewhat similar Hyper Light Drifter. But despite both games being heavily inspired by the The Legend of Zelda series and featuring combat and exploration based on precise dashes, slashes, and gunshots, this new footage makes a compelling case for Radio the Universe’s continued relevance. Not only does it have the mysteries of its own ancient techno-ruins, it seems to take a slower, more methodical approach to unpacking its evironments. It’s a blend of dingy technology and extended, lonely struggles against ancient machines, and its signal calls back to late 20th-century imaginations of a future gone wrong. After three years, Radio the Universe is broadcasting as loud as ever, intermittent as it may be.

You can follow Radio the Universe on its Twitter, Kickstarter page, and YouTube channel. 

New website celebrates stories inspired by pre-broadband internet

Described as “a literary/graphic project…built by three artists with strong interests in screens”, websafe2k16 seeks to provide a platform for memories of a pre-broadband Internet. Using the Web Safe color palette, and its 216 colors, as a point of reference, the project consists of 216 authors who write 216 words each, inspired by a specific color in the web safe range. Beginning 2/16/16, one piece is published daily. The swatches and text of the site provide a homogeneous backdrop for the varied experiences of the authors.

The site is a sparse visual landscape filled with odd and unexpected artefacts

Old internet pages are a powerful source for nostalgia, interest, and hilarity, as we can see from listicles from the last few years from the likes of Mental Floss and Gizmodo (Space Jam’s original website is legitimately amazing). You can also experience the screeching death rattle of Dial-Up internet. Sites like 404pagefound seek specifically to undercut the cynicism towards old internet pages, saying “no one benefits by insulting historic websites”. However, even for those who experienced this era, there is a mix of love, for the new doors of information and communities, and hate, for the inconvenience and trouble shooting. Websafe2k16 provides a space for these complexities, which are often far from clear cut, on the line between poetry and prose.

There are many beautiful nuggets to be found on the site, from Kevin Nguyen’s (the editorial director of Google Play Books) story of building his first website and being woefully misunderstood, to Pitta Snakes’s use of chat speak and text art which touches on boredom and loneliness. Others explore wishful creative projects, ideas of self image, and quite a few mentions of Neopets. The site is a sparse visual landscape with many a story to keep you reading, and clicking. A desert filled with odd and unexpected artefacts. This experience, in a way, emulates the loneliness, strangeness, and excitement of the early internet.

In the sea of colors and names the idea of incredible technology far beyond its peak, and the humans who experienced it, is laid bare. I could say that no matter the technology, our experiences of coming of age, of loneliness, of our own humanity, will remain largely the same. But rather it leaves me wondering how our current internet will be rendered ridiculous and outdated to those in the future (including our future selves).

Be sure to keep up with websafe2k16 through its website or Twitter

Feature image via Robert Deere