Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 194

The impossibility of Life is Strange’s conclusion

In its fifth episode, or roughly its fifteenth hour, Life is Strange reveals itself at last as what it’s covertly always been: a love story. This will come as no surprise to the attentive player. Dontnod Entertainment’s serialized adventure has intimated as much from the beginning. All the shared silences and affectionate looks, the nightly sleepovers and kisses on a dare: this is the stuff of romance. Max Caulfield, aspiring photographer and self-confessed high school hipster, is deeply enamored with her long-estranged friend Chloe Price—and vice versa. Life is Strange is simply the story of them coming to see it.

This journey is not without detours. And indeed, episode five, “Polarized,” opens with a fairly radical deviation: a turn toward the realm of basement lairs and imperious monologues, of murder mysteries and serpentine intrigue. Max has been drugged and kidnapped. Chloe has been shot in the head. The malefactor behind it all, meanwhile, turns out not to be petulant bully Nathan Prescott, as the game persuaded one to long presume, but rather Mark Jefferson, the seemingly benign photography teacher at Max and Nathan’s school. This revelation was the last-second twist that concluded the game’s previous installment. For six weeks we’ve thus been waiting for “Polarized” to pick up where the surprise ending left off.

the prophesized storm is a consequence of our hero’s time-meddling

What proceeds is the sort of confrontation between murderer and prospective murderee that ought to be familiar to fans of crime novels and police procedurals. Max sits restrained in steel chair in a bunker underground. Mr. Jefferson alludes ominously to the plans that lay beyond. He alludes to a great deal, actually. Now that he’s been outed as the villain, Mr. Jefferson is free to address the player with the grave theatricality of a TV serial killer, affecting a nice dulcet whisper as he holds forth on the subject of beauty in death—a pedagogue even in murder. At length Mr. Jefferson drones on. It’s all Max can do to sit back and endure the lecture.

Max of course has a distinct advantage over Jefferson’s former victims: with a bit of concentration she—and with the touch of the left trigger the player—can rewind time. And so with some effort Max manages to plunge backward through the sprawl of her captor’s nefarious machinations. (The challenge for the writers here was to furnish their heroine with a plausible escape route, and the one provided is rather elegant.) It’s none too soon. All told, this Jefferson business lasts twenty-five minutes—nearly a quarter of the episode, much too long to dawdle in the throes of genre-movie cliche. It’s therefore with some relief that the one finds Max returned swiftly thereafter to the brisker rhythms of time travel and the looming demise of Arcadia Bay.

From the game’s beginning, the town has been in apparently cosmic peril, mere days away from doom wrought by squal and tornado. It’s been clear enough since episode one that the responsibility for this destruction is Max’s—Max, with her cosmic gifts. One gathers that the prophesized storm is a consequence of our hero’s time-meddling, the hurricane to her butterfly’s wings. So what’s to be done about it? Certainly the chronological hopscotching and leapfrogging of this episode’s second act isn’t helping any. Upon fleeing through an errant photograph from Mr. Jefferson’s deadly hideaway, Max finds herself ensnared in a thatch of alternate timelines, each stumbled into more calamitous than the last. Though for the player this stuttering romp is quite delightful: it’s the first occasion we’ve had to really indulge Max’s powers. The more drastic a leap through time seems, the more astonishing it is to experience.

The rigmarole culminates in a return, by way of a polaroid snapped toward the end of episode four, to the parking lot outside Blackwell Academy, where a pre-murder Chloe is set to march angrily into the Vortex party to meet her fateful end. And in the few seconds she has in the past Max must convince Chloe against it—to hole up with her alone, away from the threat of Mr. Jefferson, until Max can make it safely to the present. It’s at this point in the game that romance shimmers conspicuously into view. Chloe Price has been restored once more to life. Max is overwhelmed: overwhelmed by relief, by fear—and by love. The intensity of feeling in Max and Chloe’s reunion here is nothing short of extraordinary; indeed, it seems to me among the most moving things I’ve ever seen in a videogame. I can hardly overstate how fully the relationship has been realized: the grief in Max’s eyes as she recovers from the near-loss, the intensity and desperation in her voice as she pleads with Chloe to stay. The connection is resounding. It felt as true to me in this moment as relationships I’ve had for real.

an effort to remind players that Life is Strange is principally a game

The moment is over as quickly as it starts. Then we’re off again into the recesses of Max’s chrono-mad mind: a dream sequence whisks us along her subconscious, with opportune stops for gaming along the way. A dark jaunt through a labyrinth of interlocking dormitories is a riff on the hotel scene that winds up Silent Hill 2 (an audacious reference, and not an ineffective one); a reprise of the game’s introductory stroll through the halls of Blackwell, this time in reverse, nicely evokes Twin Peaks (a reference point cited many times throughout the game). And you may perhaps detect a bit of Arkham Knight’s first-person Joker finale in the maze-roaming set piece that caps this nightmare off.

“Polarized” is otherwise so linearly story-driven that the puzzle play of its dream sequence feels a little out of place. Or, less charitably, it feels like an effort to remind players that Life is Strange is principally a game: winding through the hallways of Max’s mind as spectral boogeymen with flashlights attempt to ferret you out is the sort of mechanical busywork you only do if you wish to assuage concerns about passivity. I suspect Dontnod is at least aware of the problem, even if they feel beholden to it. The only other time the integrity of Life of Strange seemed compromised for the sake of convention was when it contrived a pointless scavenger hunt for cans in the middle of its second episode. The cans resurface in the dream, scattered around for your collecting pleasure. “This again?” Max complains. (You’re welcome, mercifully, to leave the section without gathering any of them.) This sense of humor does much to alleviate the sense that the game is forestalling its own end.

As a whole, the dream reflects the path Max has so far taken, with its curves and bends, its loops and meanderings. And what emerges in the path’s retracing is how central to it all Chloe has been. A kind of highlight reel reminds us of their time together, and its most momentous occasions, revisited in succession, begin to resemble a keen and impassioned—if mainly platonic—romance. I take it to mean that Max is apprehending her true feelings for Chloe as we are. Coming forth from her reverie, Max is brought back to the present and into Chloe’s arms, left to watch Arcadia Bay’s sudden obliteration. And then a final choice is yours to make.

Much has been made already of the ending of Life is Strange and in particular its unpleasant climax. You can do one of two things. You can return to the first juncture at which Max reversed time and stand by as Nathan Prescott shoots Chloe, thereby stopping the butterfly effect before it starts. Or you can accept the fate of your hometown at the hands of the storm and run away with Chloe safe and sound. What many players find objectionable, I gather, is that they want to save Chloe but feel it’s somehow unjustifiable to sacrifice the town. Or perhaps it’s that this choice commits the player to a certain moral ambiguity. In the cutscene that follows, Max and Chloe are found simply driving out of the ruined city in silence—not exactly what you’d call a satisfying denouement.  

no less than love itself is the alternative

But for me the difficulty of this final choice, as well as the frustration provoked by either decision, expanded the game’s emotional richness. Over the course of its five episodes Life is Strange has been patiently establishing two irreconcilable arguments. The first is that Max loves Chloe. The second is that Chloe needs to die. Throughout the game Chloe has been repeatedly under threat, spared narrowly, even implausibly, by the time-shifting ingenuity of the young woman who most wants her alive. It takes a supernatural force to intervene time and again with destiny’s apparent design. But at what cost comes even well-intentioned interference?

What we were being trained to understand through the rigors of Chloe’s imperilment is that all of the attendant pain—all of this destruction, this chaos, this death wrought by the butterfly’s storm—is the price of Chloe living. (That surname is not incidental.) Thus the final choice is not whether Chloe ought to live or die. It’s whether you believe that Chloe living is worth it. How could any decision fail to be frustrating? Choosing Chloe is, in a sense, wrong—morally wrong, cosmically wrong. It’s supposed to be. What the game wants you to appreciate is how difficult it is be morally and cosmically right when no less than love itself is the alternative.

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Sir Michael Rocks’ new video is an anime come to life

Japanese culture and hip-hop have a long relationship, from the genre’s mid-90s kung-fu obsession to Kanye’s mid-oughts evocation of Japanese pop art up through its current commingling in the very production of Drake’s ubiquitous “Hotline Bling.” The Chicago emcee Sir Michael Rocks has always been a nerd, but in his new video “In My Mode” he goes the full cosplay: it’s essentially a three-minute homage to modern shonen anime. The first half is a back-alley brawl, all close-ups of eyes and stylized violence, recalling Akame Ga Kill and Sword Art Online. The rematch takes place in an open field, and is a lot more Dragonball Z, at least until (spoiler?) Mikey pulls out an uzi. 

a three-minute homage to modern shonen anime 

I think most prominently, the track itself is pretty fire, a stuttering, black-light affair. Sir Michael Rocks is an interesting dude. He first emerged in the mid-oughts as part of the Cool Kids, whose early singles were trunk-rattlers meant to be listened to on headphones. Alongside Chuck Inglish, they trafficked in endless punchlines and minimalist, throwback beats that managed to feel contemporary, thanks in large part to rap’s otherwise low-rent production aesthetic at the time. (It was all Weezy tapes.)

Last year, Mikey re-emerged with the solo effort Banco, which was as dense and abrasive as a Kit or Ratking record. Mikey’s always been a beat-forward emcee—that is, his verses largely feeling in thrall to the beat—and it had similarly warped, becoming scattered and alien where it had once been engineered for the rap-along. 

This year’s Populair EP builds on that record’s successes, but is a little more fun, and it’s perhaps because of those pulls from Japanese culture. Second track “Come Outside” takes a melancholy loop from the first Resident Evil, and “Perfect” has an unexpected drop from Street Fighter. The result splits the difference between his party-making early stuff and the abstract reinvention of Banco.

You can watch the “In My Mode” music video on YouTube.

Sir Michael Rocks' new video is an anime come to life

Japanese culture and hip-hop have a long relationship, from the genre's mid-90s kung-fu obsession to Kanye's mid-oughts evocation of Japanese pop art up through its current commingling in the very production of Drake's ubiquitous "Hotline Bling." The Chicago emcee Sir Michael Rocks has always been a nerd, but in his new video "In My Mode" he goes the full cosplay: it's essentially a three-minute homage to modern shonen anime. The first half is a back-alley brawl, all close-ups of eyes and stylized violence, recalling Akame Ga Kill and Sword Art Online. The rematch takes place in an open field, and is a lot more Dragonball Z, at least until (spoiler?) Mikey pulls out an uzi. 

a three-minute homage to modern shonen anime 

I think most prominently, the track itself is pretty fire, a stuttering, black-light affair. Sir Michael Rocks is an interesting dude. He first emerged in the mid-oughts as part of the Cool Kids, whose early singles were trunk-rattlers meant to be listened to on headphones. Alongside Chuck Inglish, they trafficked in endless punchlines and minimalist, throwback beats that managed to feel contemporary, thanks in large part to rap's otherwise low-rent production aesthetic at the time. (It was all Weezy tapes.)

Last year, Mikey re-emerged with the solo effort Banco, which was as dense and abrasive as a Kit or Ratking record. Mikey's always been a beat-forward emcee—that is, his verses largely feeling in thrall to the beat—and it had similarly warped, becoming scattered and alien where it had once been engineered for the rap-along. 

This year's Populair EP builds on that record's successes, but is a little more fun, and it's perhaps because of those pulls from Japanese culture. Second track "Come Outside" takes a melancholy loop from the first Resident Evil, and "Perfect" has an unexpected drop from Street Fighter. The result splits the difference between his party-making early stuff and the abstract reinvention of Banco.

You can watch the "In My Mode" music video on YouTube.

What the NFL could learn about colorblindness from videogames

One might reasonably suspect that the NFL’s Buffalo Bills and New York Jets (which fans reliably inform me is spelled J-E-T-S) are fundamentally interchangeable, but last Thursday the league took this theory a bit too far. 

The Jets played in their customary green while the Bills wore red—or, as colorblind viewers saw it, both teams wore indistinguishable shades. To those suffering from red-green colorblindness, a population the National Eye Institute estimates as “8 percent of men and 0.5 percent of women with Northern European ancestry,” the whole thing was a vision in brown. If you are not red-green colorblind, Deadspin has helpfully modified footage of the game to reproduce the experience. It’s not pretty.

[Insert a joke about color commentators having been faded for years here.] 

"I need to pay extra attention to the uniform my opponent picks" 

But this is the real world, you say, where things are messy and messed up all of the time. This would never happen in a videogame. 

Oops.

The red-green colorblindness simulation Deadspin ran on the NFL footage has actually been performed on videogames on multiple occasions, and the results haven’t been pretty. In a Kotaku essay last year, Cameron Gidari documented his decade of playing games colorblind with gifs contrasting his experience and the intended of experience of the games in question. In hindsight, the following passage would have been instructive for the NFL: “If I'm playing FIFA online I need to pay extra attention to the uniform my opponent picks in case it's a shade too similar to my own.”

Similar experiments have also been conducted by game developers. In 2011, Sim City creative director Ocean Quigley told Kotaku:

I decided it’d be interesting to make a CLUT to emulate colour blindness, so people could empathise with his play experience. So I played around for a few hours, before realising that smarter people than I had already dealt with this problem. 

I discovered Daltonisation, and found the colour transforms for all the standard forms of colour deficiency, and simply applied them to CLUTs to test out. We had enough colour blind people on the team that we could actually see if they worked. Once you've got a CLUT in place, making the game accessible to color blind people is pretty easy.

Once colorblindness is recognized as a problem in videogames the next step is to do something about it. This is the idea behind the color-matching game Specimen. Ostensibly a test of your perception, the game’s developer, Erica Gorochow told The Escapist, "anecdotally, we've found that you can definitely improve (your perception)." A good deal more improvement, however, will be needed before the jersey combination from the Bills-Jets game passes muster. 

You may not eat your greens ever again after playing this food horror game

I'm struggling to eat bananas these days. It's Facebook's fault. The damn thing is ruining my diet. I logged on one day to an auto-playing video of a spider breaking its way out of a banana. The devil of a thing pierced the skin from the inside of its fruity carriage and crawled out of it, into my nightmares. Now every time I bite into a banana I expect to feel hair and legs in my mouth. This is a problem I have now.

Luckily, I'm not such a big eater of carrots. For if I were I think playing the Asylum Jam entry Carrots and Cream would have been similarly detrimental to my life. As with that spider video, it uses food horror to worm its way into your fears and upset your stomach. And it's done with an almost Hitchcockian reveal that has you spinning on the suspense it weaves.  

uh oh, here it comes: the twist 

It starts with you digging carrots out of the earth with a spade. The garden tool oscillates across the screen and you have to time your button press so it lands in the right spot for unearthing the vegetable. It's an everyday activity with no sign of anything horrific about to happen. But there is at least an uneasiness in the grainy image and rumbling screen shake that accompanies this scene. Something's off but you're not being shown what it is quite yet.

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Next up you move into the kitchen where you've got to grate the carrots into a bowl. You move your mouse up and down to mimic the grating action. So far, so good—this is actually an enjoyable cookery game. You might think you'd be happy to prepare a whole meal like but, uh oh, here it comes: the twist. The next scene goes back in time to reveal that there was a worm eating through the carrots as you dug them up. This is where Carrots and Cream's horror splits in two. 

On the one hand, you have the type of gross-out humor that Peter Jackson employed in his 1993 horror-comedy Braindead (or Dead Alive). In it, there's a disgusting dining table scene in which protagonist Lionel tries to get his zombie mother to eat a mannerly meal with two guests she needs to impress. It ends up with her ear falling into her bowl of custard and then eating it. The way it's shot with close-ups, the sounds, and urgh... yeah, it's enough to make you gag.

In Carrots and Cream, the same type of disgust is called upon as you imagine this worm being inside the dish you were so happily preparing a moment ago. You don't want to, but if you're anything like me you imagine the taste and texture of eating this worm. This is before you even know where the worm is and even if it made its way out of the garden. This is the suspense. Where is the worm? Now that it's a part of the scenario you're left waiting to find out when and how it's gross-out gag is going to appear.

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The other type of horror that the the game employs here is a simple chase sequence. You don't just watch the worm escaping the sharp digs of the spade but have to move it like an accordion through the soil so it doesn't get killed. Go to slow and it'll meet a grisly end. It's weird, despite the worm being a source of disgust, you root for it to survive.

Anyway, it's in the next scene, when we return to grating the carrots, that the two horrors then brilliantly collide. You can guess what's coming ... I've already half-spoiled it, but you should experience it for yourself to get the full horror first-hand. Unless you're a big carrot eater then, um, yeah, probably don't do that.

You can download Carrots and Cream on itch.io.

Oases is a psychedelic homage to a grandfather lost at war

Celebrate an uncertain past by imagining it as a surreal present. 

A Star-Trek-style medical scanner could be here in the near future

A team of Stanford University electrical engineers have taken large steps towards creating a portable scanning device to detect hidden objects, with possible applications in the medical field as a detector of tumors in the brain. The team says the device could be ready for practical use within the next fifteen years, despite the technology sounding like something out of science fiction—specifically, the medical tricorder tool from the world of Star Trek.

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In the Star Trek universe, a tricorder is a handheld multifunctional tool used for data collection, sensor-scanning, and status analysis. Medical tricorders are used by doctors to scan and diagnose those upon the Starship Enterprise without needing to lay a finger on the patient. This is more or less the possible function of the Stanford team’s technology if applied to the medical field; according to the team, led by Stanford Assistant Professor Amin Arbabian and Research Professor Pierre Khuri-Yakub. The technology can be manifested in a portable device to detect tumors and other signs of early cancer in the body.

"What makes the tricorder the Holy Grail of detection devices is that the instrument never touches the subject," Arbabian said to Stanford News. "All the measurements are made through the air, and that's where we've made the biggest strides."

"In five to ten to fifteen years, this will become practical and widely available."

The scanner works by emitting electromagnetic energy, causing the scanned materials to expand and contract, and then detecting hidden materials through ultrasound waves. Other uses for the scanner outside of the medical field include revamping military equipment to detect plastic explosives usually not picked up by metal detectors.

"We've been working on this for a little over two years," Khuri-Yakub said to Stanford News. "We're still at an early stage but we're confident that in five to ten to fifteen years, this will become practical and widely available."

//

Body image via Stanford Engineering 

Girl Power Video Game Champions Body Positivity

Creators of multiplayer Slam City Oracles stir a riot grrl inspired ruckus with laugh-out-loud trampoline chaos that makes players feel comfortable in their own skin.

Generate tiny ominous landscapes with this procedural generation toy

Mirror Lake is a strange little thing.

Made in a week for Procedural Generation Jam, it creates static black-and-white landscapes, nestled inside a giant patterned bowl and suspended in space. Sometimes the space is dark, dotted with stars and the occasional sun or moon or comet; sometimes it’s a vast white nothing, like a blank page.

The tiny scenes inside the bowl change too, sprouting branchless trees and rolling mountains across wide meadows, shining grey lakes, and bright white salt flats. A few times, I didn’t even get a landscape at all.

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I’d click away from a particularly full terrarium full of rolling black hills and clusters of trees and end up with what appeared to be a bowl of milk, floating in the void. I enjoyed these lonely scenes as much as the busy and the cluttered, especially when there was only one thing off about them: an empty vessel beneath a burning solar eye, a cluster of space debris descending down into a still black lake. They're like little visual poems.

Each scene comes with its own sounds, which vary between the calm of a droning wind and the unease of a shrill, unwavering frequency. The combination of images and audio brings Mirror Lake’s little landscapes to life.

rich in texture and fine in detail 

Creator Katie Rose is also behind picking figs in the �������������� garden while my world eats Itself, a poetry generator that makes use of several different algorithms and bots to craft bizarre and beautiful strings of text. You can download a collection of that project’s creations over on Rose’s itch.io.

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Rose’s whole body of work, at least what’s available on itch.io, is as rich in texture and fine in detail as Mirror Lake, from a small, but particle-heavy arcade game called fishbugs to the constantly regenerating multimedia engima that is inflorescence.city.

Find these works and more on Katie Rose’s official website.

Brigador wants you to die with dignity

A walking simulator filled with guns.