Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 202
November 2, 2015
What are the most common places used in horror games?
The architecture of our fears.
The first few minutes of Below shows the start of a legendary adventure
Exploring the depths of a cavernous island, a tiny warrior rigorously battles their way through the unknown, struggling against a stream of enemies. The story of a small hero up against a dark scary world isn’t a new concept, but it’s a powerful one. In Below, this concept is put into practice, and the promise of the adventure of a lifetime is dripping in the atmosphere created by dark colors and wide shots of the world around the character, reduced to a pinpoint of light against the vast backdrop.
Below is a roguelike adventure title, where exploration and survival go hand-in-hand, as the player braces themselves against difficult combat instances and the threat of permanent death. This week, IGN released the first 18 minutes of the game, which sets the mood with the sound of dripping water and the echoing rustle of footsteps as the protagonist traverses the darkness.
Journeying through dark and sparkling caves illuminated with little more than a torch and the occasional flicker of a firefly, the player maneuvers through rows of enemies in randomly generated pathways. As you enter rooms and begin your trek towards the path, the camera pans back to expose a huge expanse of darkness before you, ripe for the taking. The character seems smaller than ever, even in the emptiest of rooms.
The world feels rich and endless with a story of its own
In one room, there’s nothing but a sliver of a rocky path, hanging above a black pond; in another, red, glowing bug-like creatures swarm at you as you battle near a waterfall. The world, despite being randomly generated, feels rich and endless with a story of its own. Drawings and markings occasionally litter the cave walls you walk past, while lit candles placed by some unknown figure give the environment an air of some secret legendary lore behind every dark corner. Be sure to check out the rest of the video, featuring in-game combat, crafting and collecting mechanics.
You can learn more about Below on the game’s website, here.
Pro Evo Soccer 2016 is a leviathan of approximation
Letting soccer get lost in the scramble
October 30, 2015
It's okay. Lego was never your friend anyway
Corporations are not your friends.
Case in point: Lego recently refused to ship a bulk order to artist Ai Weiwei citing a longstanding policy of not directly providing pieces to those who seek to make political statements. Ai took to Instagram to declare: “Lego's refusal to sell its product to the artist is an act of censorship and discrimination." The more charitable interpretation of Lego’s actions, most eloquently voiced by Jay Ong, is that Lego wasn’t meaningfully restricting Ai’s freedom to make art since there are plenty of other places to buy in bulk. No matter how you look at the situation, however, it is clear that Lego at least desired some distance from a political piece of art.
A photo posted by Ai Weiwei (@aiww) on Oct 24, 2015 at 3:14pm PDT
In a narrow sense, fair enough. Lego is a company and can do basically whatever it wants, including not fulfilling bulk orders to Ai Weiwei. That, as noted corporate ethics scholar Britney Spears tells us, is their prerogative.
poor choices in things to care about.
Exercising that prerogative, however, has consequences. Lego’s commitment to creativity comes with an implicit asterisk. In a sense, it always has, but periodic reminders are helpful in this regard. Lego is a tool for creativity, but some creative expressions are preferred with a certain distance from corporate headquarters. So Mike Doyle’s Lego tableau about the costs of the Iraq War can be made out of the little plastic bricks, but the suits would sure-as-hell rather have nothing to do with this.
Previously in prerogative: Lego asked the UK government to retract ads opposing Scottish independence that featured its bricks. The company feared the ads violated their political neutrality.
Recently in prerogative: Apple pulled Metadata+, an app that tracked American drone strikes, from its App Store. We’ve been here before. During this spring’s justified uproar over the continued presence of the confederate flag in front of South Carolina’s statehouse, the company removed a number of games featuring the treasonous symbol from its store, even though many of them actually (#actually) used the flag in a historical sense. We ultimately live at the App Store’s mercy.
Where does that leave us? Well, right where we started. Corporations are not our friends. They make things we like, but their support for our preferred use cases is not a given. The tragedy here is not that corporations have their own interests so much as their poor choices in things to care about. Tech companies could care about so many things, but harassment so rarely makes the list. Lego could be concerned about so many things, but here they are fretting about Ai Weiwei.
Oh well, it’s not like they were ever our friends anyhow.
2Dark, the next game from Alone in the Dark creator, gets a classically horrific trailer
You know when a horror game or trailer for a game pulls out the creepy little girl lullaby music, it's a sure sign that shit's about to get real—too real. 2Dark, the next project from creator of the classic Alone in the Dark series, Frédérick Raynal, knows his game is supposed to be a hokey, fun-scary time. The title in itself connotes a self-indulgent humor: being alone in the dark isn't great, but apparently 2 isn't better than 1.
being alone in the dark isn't great, but apparently 2 isn't better than 1
The trailer presents a classic band of characters from various horror subgenres. There's the criminal profiler, Mr. Smith, who just wants to make the world a better place for all the kids out there. Then, there's the kids, who are little more than helpless, kidnapped props for the protagonist to assert his skills and "good guy-ness" over. Finally, there are the monsters: namely a pig man (named Lewis) with a hankering for butchering ala Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a mad doctor (or pediatrician, I suppose), and an oversized baby woman in a tutu. The gangs all there!
In our previous coverage of 2Dark, Malachi Lakey describes how the "game’s characters and objects are modeled in three dimensions, but rendered in two, giving it a distinct sort of plasticine or Playmobil aesthetic." Similarly the childish aesthetic of 2Dark, coupled with the unadulterated horror of the situation, strikes an interesting juxtaposition. Though you are cast as the hero, saving all the children, 2Dark doesn't appear to overpower you either. There doesn't appear to be guns. And your main course of action is sneaking past all the horror in the mansion, scooping up kids and escorting them to safety while a bunch of murderers traipse about.
Doesn't sound like my ideal father-son or father-daughter outing, but I'm sure it'll bring them closer together. Oh Halloween. Aren't the holidays great?!
There's no information on a release date yet, but the beta is already happening now.
The Basement���s Basement
Silent Hill’s such a screwed-up city even its buildings have issues.
Play the platformer hidden behind your desktop
Did you know that there's an entire platformer hidden beneath your desktop? Alright, it isn't there right now. But if you go ahead and download Simon Milfred's game Omni there will be. It brings a delightful twist to the windows that we use to peer into software and the internet on our PCs.
The idea is to guide a monk named Omni across the 2D environments inside your computer to rid it of a virus (no, not a real virus). But the only way you can see Omni is through a small window on your desktop that he's keeping open by magic. As you don't have a full screen to work with, in order to see where you're moving Omni you'll need to grab the window with your cursor and physically move it around to reveal more of this cloaked world.
recaptures the magic that the invention of 'windows' had
Having this limited view to move around as well as Omni himself can make even the simplest of jumps a challenge. You can make the window bigger by pressing the 'Maximize' button (just as you would on a real window) but as it's fueled by Omni's magic so it will steadily run out and shrink. You can see how much mana that Omni has left by how much of the word "MANABAR" written in blue in the top left of the window remains.
There are other little tricks that re-purpose the functions of the windows we're so used to staring into. Press the 'Minimize' button and Omni will turn into a flying ball for five seconds. This is used to get to out-of-reach areas. Pressing the 'Close' button doesn't close the game as you'd think but I'll leave what it actually does as something for you to discover (you'll want a full mana bar when you do).
What's great about Omni is that it recaptures the magic that the invention of 'windows' had back in the 1980s. People went from the black screens of DOS to staring at the first graphical interface design for PCs that made sense and felt intuitive. It's trifle to point it out now, but calling them windows alluded to the idea that these 2D squares allowed us to peer into a separate virtual world.
Anyway, Milfred made Omni for the 16th gm(48), which is a 48-hour game jam held quarterly in which every participant uses the game development tool GameMaker. The theme of the one Milfred participated in was "Environment as a Weapon." Omni is perhaps not the most fitting use of that theme but it's certainly the most experimental and unexpected result.
The creepypasta hell inside Animal Crossing: New Leaf
Why videogames are great for creepypasta.
Slack's error page is actually an interactive scene from a defunct game
It wasn't long ago that working in America was defined by a common image: people gathering around an office water cooler every morning to drink coffee and discuss the latest episode of shows like Dancing with the Stars (team Bindi, by the way). However, with 1 in 5 Americans now working from home thanks to the rise of internet, that image has become a little more dated in recent years. Instead of a water cooler, these online workers often employ chat programs like Slack, which allow them a sort of virtual office-space to gather around. With it, they’re easily able to discuss assignments, share reports with each other, and post way too many gifs of cats. And as great as it is to be able to get in a full day’s work without ever needing to leave your couch, working online means that occasionally, progress is halted by a nasty little error—or Glitch.
a nasty little error—or Glitch
Personally, Slack’s always been extremely stable for me. Which is what makes the attention to detail they’ve put into their error page so charming. If, on the off chance you stumble across a 404 error in Slack, you’ll be greeted by the following page.
At first glance, it seems to simply be a pleasing, grassy field to offset the frustration of encountering a hiccup. However, it also serves as a winking throwback to Flickr and Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield’s short-lived MMO, Glitch, as it recreates a level from the game. In Glitch, players focused less on combat and more on collaborative exploration, collection, and building tasks. It’s remembered by users for its imaginative, friendly atmosphere, and though it was unfortunately shut down in 2012, a fan-made remake of the game entitled Eleven is currently using Glitch’s creative commons art assets and source code to allow fans to step back into its world.
experience a little bit of that Glitch magic
Unfortunately, the project doesn’t yet have a full release date, but for now, Slack users can experience a little bit of that Glitch magic. Going above and beyond a simple image, the Slack error page actually allows users to scroll around the level and click on a variety of objects to play a short animation. Maybe it’s not a substitution for the full game, but clicking on chickens to make them hop around certainly does make me feel better about encountering an error.
You can explore Slack’s recreation of Glitch yourself here.
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