Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 205

SCALE creator examines how small details can have a huge impact

SCALE captures so much of what makes videogames exciting: that feeling of interacting with ordinary objects in new and strange ways, the abstraction of mundane things, the sense of wonder that comes with experimentation, and the reward when your presence in the world means something.

But it isn’t all fun and games trying to turn SCALE’s mysterious, size-shifting playgrounds into a coherent whole, as evidenced by the game’s latest Kickstarter update. In the blog post, creator Steve Swink goes over the many iterations he’s made and scrapped just for SCALE’s hub, the central zone that connects each of SCALE’s individual levels and lets players track their progress through the larger adventure.

“Since the beginning of this project I’ve been looking for the right meta structure for this game. Every time I think I’ve got it, it unravels,” writes Swink. “When people test the game, I see something in the structure of the hub that isn’t quite working. I work on small incremental fixes and then before I know it I’ve rebuilt the whole damn thing. So, that’s happened three times since the last update.”

sizing up tiny objects to reveal the hidden, explorable spaces inside 

One of the main issues that Swink has run into designing SCALE’s hub is unclear visual language that obscures the purpose of certain objects or what’s required by players to advance. After some experimentation, which you can read more about on Kickstarter, Swink settled on the idea of glass tanks, themed according to the various levels they link out to and filled with doors that actually transport players to each new stage.

In my experience with SCALE, sizing up tiny objects to reveal the hidden, explorable spaces inside was one of the most interesting parts, so it’s neat to see that possibly incorporated in the central hub.

Learn more about SCALE on its Kickstarter page.

Why are we so afraid to walk?

A budding movement in games takes its first steps.

Job Hunting Simulator has all the soul crushing reality of an actual job hunt

Great news, everyone! Unemployment is down to 5.1%, the lowest its been since 2008! The American dream is resuscitated, pumping a feeble yet confident fist up into the air.

Well, except for millennials, that is, where unemployment is still at a resounding 13.8 % as of May 2015. Yeah, that's right, if you're anywhere from 18-29 years old, the supposedly stabilized economy doesn't mean shit to you. Granted, this year's millennial unemployment rate is better than last year, when it hovered over and above 15%. According to research from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, millennials are estimated to make up about forty percent of the unemployed in the U.S.

a nihilistic and depressing game for us to air all our millennial grievances 

As one Newsweek article points out, even when millennials do manage to get the job, they make far less when "compared with the nation’s median income, versus people of that age a decade ago." Which is, of course, not to mention the crippling debt many face following college. And it's realities like these that twist the knife when you read another thinkpiece about how your generation just can't grow the fuck up. We'd love to, America. But growing up kind of entails being allowed employment.

Thankfully, there is now a nihilistic and depressing game for us to air all our millennial grievances about the state of the job market for young people. Job Hunting Simulator is a simple yet powerful game: there is no music, no points, no winning. You can only click one button and it's a button that supposedly sends out your resume to potential employers. This "SEND" button is the only thing you have any control over in the game world—your one and only domain. But it doesn't really matter how many times you click it, because your resume will always come back with a big red "DECLINED" stamped across it, and a "DELETE" button to replace that "SEND" button. Your only recourse? To do the pointless process all over again.

Image via tedd4u

The creator, known only as D0UBLEJUMP, boasts that Job Hunting Simulator will help any player "experience the thrill of reality!" The art style recalls the clean and looping design of Tinder or other such millennial app design philosophies. Even the online nature of Job Hunting Simulator captures another frustration for many applying millennials. As the Newsweek article says, young people are often frustrated by the new technology for job applications as well, which prove so impersonal and inconsequential that many never even hear back on why their application was not received. "You’re like, ‘I’ll do anything and apply for everything, but usually it’s an electronic filing and you’re spending all your time on it and never hear back,” says one Washington, D.C. graduate. There is no option to get feedback or learn from mistakes. You're just left in an endless loop of failure, with no hope for improvement.

The hands-off experience of Job Hunting Simulator captures the sense that, when you apply for a job nowadays as a young person, you're just another voice screaming into the void. Yeah, maybe we are having a hard time growing up. But I mean wouldn't you when a bunch of internet randos give you more feedback on a Reddit forum than the people who supposedly need to hire you?

You can play Job Hunting Simulator on your browser for free.

Dead End Road will conjure up the dread of late night driving

A couple years ago, I had a job that required me to work late. I’d have to drive home on the verge of midnight a few days a week, through an unlit part of town I wasn’t very familiar with. There were jackrabbits in the field by the office. I saw one alive once. More often I’d spot them at night after a day’s worth of traffic had its way with the area, leaving misshapen heaps of red in the street like clumps of smeared oil paint. I never hit one myself. There were barely any cars out that late so I could drive slow and watch for any fleeting shadows darting around in my peripheral.

Even when I wasn’t worrying about roadkill, driving tired down a dark road does something to you. I can’t pin the feeling, but it’s the same one I get watching this trailer for Dead End Road, which describes itself as an “atmospheric driving game” about being pursued by an unknown force.

Dead End Road features a lo-fi style that reminds me of Pol Clarissou’s Station Fantôme. It’s dark, grainy, blurry, like the best found footage films, and it obscures faces and objects just enough to convey that dread you get trying to decipher what that thing emerging from the shadows actually is. There are several screenshots of Dead End Road on its Steam Greenlight page and Twitter, where creator Depressing Drawers also reveals a shop screen and a map of various towns and pit stops along the way to the titular destination.

delirious late night driving 

According to the game’s Steam Greenlight description, you’ll need to reach the home of an old witch who lives on that road in order to escape a curse you’ve somehow brought upon yourself. You’ll need to do it before daybreak too, leaving plenty of opportunity for delirious late night driving. I don't know what’s supposed to be chasing you, but this eerie Red Room-esque image on Greenlight indicates it’s probably not something pleasant. (This wasn’t initially revealed as “Spooky Car game” for nothing!)

Depressing Drawers is also the creator of the decidedly more humorous Breakfast at Cemetery and the partly text-based first-person shooter Illuminascii.

Learn more about Dead End Road on Steam Greenlight.

Old people rejoice: Halo is slow again

Halo 5's arena mode is straight outta 2007. 

A videogame tribute to the action-comedy of Bud Spencer and Terence Hill

Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, the Italian movie stars known for three decades of action-comedy, always deserved a videogame. A classic Spencer and Hill scenario is a mass brawl, the pair squaring off against a jittering hive of incompetent opponents, each punch over-exaggerated in gesture and sound effect. Smacks landed with mouth-sounds: a "THWIP," a "BOOM," a "KERR-ASH". Each opponent was another stunt, another gag, another way to combine goofy violence with prop comedy.

flipping an entire person at the end of his hooks 

It's everything an arcade beat 'em up ever was sans the pixels. And, yes, to be fair, Bud Spencer did have a videogame starring him made once. It was based on his 1997 TV series "We Are Angels" and shared the same title. It had you guiding Spencer across six scenes, running and jumping to avoid prison guards and the hostile tribes of a jungle for whatever reason. But look at this thing. It's not the game that Spencer deserved.

We can rejoice now, then, that a small Italian team has finally produced the Spencer and Hill videogame that should have been shouldering Streets of Rage. Made for Indievault's Spaghetti Western Jam, the demo for Schiaffi&Fagioli that's currently available, recreates the archetypal scene from one of the pair's movies. They're in a small western town, people are angry with them, a fight breaks out. 

What's more wonderful than the integrity of the scenario is how the fighting styles of the two stars has been detailed. Hill, the smaller of the two, would mainly duck and dodge with a grin sucked to his face. In this game, he struts a quick-step with hands on his hips, coolly throwing headbutts and quick punches.

Spencer, on the other hand, was so big that he squashed the tops of skulls with the side of his fist as if it were a game of whack-a-mole. This signature move gets its own button. His large strides and hulking shoulders also capture the presence he brought to the camera—a common sight would be Spencer flipping an entire person at the end of his hooks, or turning madly to deliver regret to whoever it was that hit his brick wall of a back when it was turned.

Another interesting detail, deliberate or accidental, is that you can have Spencer and Hill hit each other. It's not something the pair typically did but the chaos of a fight sometimes lent itself to a gag in which they faced each other angrily before realizing their mistake. Here, in a videogame, it rides that precarious line between humor and frustration. Players can reduce each other's health bars if they were annoyed at each other or simply wanted to wind the other one up. The latter is how I imagine Spencer and Hill playing their own beat 'em up together.

You can download the demo of Schiaffi&Fagioli for free on itch.io.

The Rise of Dating Sims for Women

A traditionally Japanese genre is learning how to spread its wings in the west.

Someone Hire This Man

This is a story about a cheeky gambit that, by virtue of our covering it can only be said to have succeeded. So much for the journalist as a neutral force. But it’s a good, cheeky gambit, so let’s not get too bogged down in the observer effect.

Seth van Heijster has created an interactive resume that is also a game, but is basically a really cool resume. In his platformer, imaginatively named Interactive CV, your character runs and jumps around a streetscape, unlocking details about Van Heijster as you go.

the game itself means much more than its content. 

Walk under a sign reading “education” and learn where he earned his BA and BSc. Shimmy up a drainpipe, jump across a series of platforms, and learn that Van Heijster speaks seven languages—some better than others. This is not the most navigable of resumes—if you want to skip from top to bottom, the traditional setup is still the way to go—but it is exponentially more memorable. 

What is the takeaway here? At an obvious level, that you should remember the name Seth van Heijster, so mission accomplished. But more generally, Interactive CV might be understood as an argument against the traditional CV. The game itself—and not the various descriptive panels—offers the real proof of Van Heijster’s skills. While I have no reason to believe that any of the skills listed within the game are inaccurate, it would hardly matter if they were. Again, the existence of the game itself means much more than its content. If you follow that idea through to its most extreme point, what’s the point of a resume? Just go out and make something.

I don’t believe Interactive CV is going quite that far with its commentary. In fact, I’m not sure it’s much of a commentary on anything so much as it simply is a clever idea. Nevertheless, Interactive CV’s game-puzzle approach to employment recasts the whole process as something of a gauntlet. Jump here. Run there. Climb. Climb some more. The world of employment likely isn’t a hellscape for Van Heijster, but he has created a game that suggests it might generally be one. 

You can check out Interactive CV on itch.io.

Revisiting the original, quietly revolutionary Assassin���s Creed

The original Assassin’s Creed had a radical agenda that later games forgot.

Drake's awkward "Hotline Bling" dancing is the ultimate in uncool as cool

Those goofy Hotline Bling moves show that "nerd culture" is now pop culture

Drake, memes, and the art of being uncool