Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 227

1979 Revolution remembers the Black Friday massacre in animated short

On September 8th, 1978, the Iranian government opened fire on a large group of protestors in a public square in the country’s capital of Tehran, killing almost 100 and wounding several more.

The event came to be known as Black Friday.

It was one of the pivotal moments in the burgeoning Iranian Revolution, one of the first and most devastating examples of the Shah’s abuse of military power against his people during a time of civil unrest. Sadly, it wouldn’t be the last.

“If I sit silently, I have sinned.” 

The upcoming game 1979 Revolution will begin its story at this point in history, with its first episode Black Friday on the way later this year. In remembrance of the tragedy, and to introduce the context for their first episode, iNK Stories has released an animated short titled “Friday in Fragments.”

Done in the dynamic comic book-style of 1979 Revolution’s cutscenes, the short cinematic narrows in on the game’s protagonist, a photojournalist named Reza, showing where he was when the massacre occurred and how it affected him.

A quote from Mohammad Mosaddegh opens the video: “If I sit silently, I have sinned.” The presence of Mosaddegh’s words are a chilling reminder of the complicated series of events that lead up to the 1979 revolution and beyond, the consequences of which are still felt in the Iran of today.

For an excellent game about Mosaddegh, who was Prime Minister of Iran in the early 50s before being overthrown by the CIA and British SIS, I would recommend The Cat and the Coup. It’s free, it’s beautiful, and it tells a story that is too frequently overlooked, about a country that is often vastly misunderstood.

For more on 1979 Revolution, head over to the official iNK Stories website.

Who We Aren���t Anymore

A look back to understand who we are now.

Before summer ends, Dracula wants to go to the beach

For a character who has already died, Dracula sure is a chill dude. In Hotel Transylvania, the 2012 children’s movie that has a sequel coming out this month, Dracula is clumsily adjusting to domesticity. In Mel Brooks’ 1995 parody of traditional vampire stories, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, Dracula is…well…dead and loving it. All of this is a world away from Bram Stoker’s 19th century horror novel.

But none of those interpretations are as far from Count Dracula’s origin story than Beardo Games’ Surf Monster, a game in which the famous vampire goes surfing. Seriously. That’s the elevator pitch.

There he is, Count Dracula, coiffed like Elvis and awkwardly perched atop a surfboard. Classic tunes play in the background. Bats fly through the sky, because of course bats would be flying through the sky.  You, the player, control Dracula through your keyboard, directing him to and fro in pursuit of a big wave. The longer Count Dracula can stay afloat, the higher the player’s score. In addition to the normal challenges of surfing—namely, it’s hard to keep your balance on a small piece of Styrofoam while out at sea—Dracula must carve the waves in a manner that avoids collisions with bats. As in real life, surfing into a bat at full speed never ends well in Surf Monster.

surfing into a bat at full speed never ends well 

Dracula: He’s just like the rest of us. That’s good news for Dracula. Well, maybe it is, people are weird. But at the point where Dracula is just a pale guy with an Elvis haircut, is he still Dracula? How different does the embodiment of difference really have to be? Surf Monster hints at Dracula’s inner life. There’s a bog-standard beach bum trying to escape from beneath his cape. This is that alter ego’s moment in the sun. Good for him. He may be killing Dracula—or at least his mythos—in the process but at least he’s happy. Now that the undead are all over our cineplexes, televisions, and games, some of them might as well get to have some fun.

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The Witness is close, but these new screenshots make us wish it was closer

New screenshots from The Witness, pulled from its upcoming trailer, provide a look at the varied locations you’ll visit on the vast and mysterious island where the game is set.

Some of the shots look familiar. About a minute into the last trailer—which creator Jonathan Blow points out is two and a half years old—there’s a scene depicting floating platforms spread out over what appears to be a ravine in the woods. The walkway folds out to create a new path, presumably as the maze puzzles programmed into each tile are gradually solved.

What looks like this same area, or at least this same application of the maze puzzles and folding walkways, is seen again in Blow’s latest blog post on The Witness.

The post also shows off a dimly lit laboratory of sorts, with planks laid down to create a walkway over a seemingly flooded floor, plus a gorgeous outdoor shot showing off some of the island’s bright and contrasting colors: a modernist home made of sleek steel and red paneling in a sea of scarlet shrubs and tall grass.

a good look at what’s to come 

Since these shots were pulled from non-final footage as the new trailer is being edited, they aren’t the highest quality possible, but they do give a good look at what’s to come.

For more on The Witness, visit its website.

To catch 'em all in Pok��mon GO you'll need to explore the world around you

Pokémon GO is a videogame that—get this—sees Pokémon invading "the real world." Yep, you don't have to sit in a stuffy room by yourself staring at a grey and green screen of mere inches in size to play Pokémon any longer, as I did for hours as a child. You can go outside and find a Pikachu poking its head out of a shrub through your phone's screen, throw a (pretend) Poké Ball at it, and then trade or battle it with whoever else is around. 

This is all possible due to the technology that Niantic Labs (which has just broke up with Google) has developed over the years with its augmented reality game Ingress. It used the location tracking function of your phone to include you in a virtual battle that took place across real cities with tens or hundreds of other people. Now Niantic has teamed up with The Pokémon Company and Nintendo to add Pokémon to that idea.

The Pokémon GO trailer demonstrates this concept by having adults jumping around excitedly in the middle of Times Square, as if they were out of their head at a rock festival, while battling Mewtwo. Notice how all the wild Pokémon are all hiding in cute places too, like behind rocks on a hillside or inside the ruins of an ancient temple, and not luring children into the middle of busy roads as they probably will be... let's hope not.

"help players discover the world and people around them." 

That aside, what the trailer also shows is what these three companies are hoping to achieve other than converge peoples' dreams with modern technology for huge profits. And that is to "help players discover the world and people around them." Ideally, people would be interested in exploring the places they live by themselves. But this is a cruel world and we are often jaded. So chasing an over-grown caterpillar is probably the only way we're going to head down a dark alleyway at this point.

There's also an extra doohickey that can be bought to complement the game called "Pokémon Go Plus." It's a little plasticky Poké Ball fob that connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth. Its function is to flash and vibrate to let you know Pokémon are nearby so that you can look around to admire the views (if there are any) rather than hunting through a touchscreen. It's made with kids in mind: they can have the vibrating plastic while the parent is dragged around with the phone. So, gutted to you, mom and dad, you're going on a city safari whether you like it or not.

Pokémon GO will be coming out for iOS and Android in 2016. 

The sequel to dys4ia explores the failure of empathy games

Despite being about "the experience and aftermath of getting hit by a car," you'll probably expect Anna Anthropy's latest autobiographical game, titled Ohmygod Are You Alright?, to take the subject lightly at first. Get a little further into it, however, and you may understand why Anna says that "you could call it a survival horror."

The game's intro is upbeat. You're told that you (that is, Anna) have just got back from hosting a New York gallery show that landed you some decent cash. It's Wednesday, and as with every Wednesday, your friends are waiting to meet you at the pub by the lake. "You could get there in a minute on the bus," the game's text tells you. "But you've got time, and you've got money in the bank, and it's a beautiful Oakland day. You decide to walk."

we zoom right into Anna's thoughts 

A bright and cheery arcade game then opens over the black background to replace the text. A little pixel-art likeness of Anna says "LET'S GO!" in a speech bubble. And a small tune of no more than a few notes blips along in the background. This is, essentially, a game of Frogger in every way from the look, to its sounds, and especially its form. The big difference is that, instead of controlling a frog, you're helping Anna to dodge the fast-moving traffic as she crosses a number of busy roads.

It's a bit of a challenge as pixel-art Anna slips forward a little with the momentum of her run—which can mean you walk into the road accidentally—and the cars only blast their horn and never slow down if you appear in front of them. You have to be careful and panic at the right moments to avoid being hit. Nevertheless, it should keep you smiling with its cute presentation (including pixel-art cats!) and the relief you feel upon completing each screen. 

But there's a lot more to the game than that. This is about being hit by a car, right? Yes, eventually, you will get struck. The difficulty ramps up to the point that this becomes inevitable. At this moment, the game suddenly crashes into a corrupted smear of colors while a loud computer error blasts. This lasts only half a second but immediately jolts you out of the vibrant pleasure you were experiencing, and back into the black screen. The text returns.

From here, we zoom right into Anna's thoughts as they arrive just before, during, and (for the majority of the time) after she is struck by the car. The car accident seems to dissect her life, opening up parts of it like a cross-section for her to analyze. She thinks about the immediacy of death, worries about having no insurance, as well as how she'll be able to work and make money if she's injured. It's mostly financial troubles that seem to concern her.

a reaction to empathy games 

This shifts upon arriving at the hospital. It's here that some of the distress Anna endures due to being a trans woman bubbles up: her legal name and actual name are used interchangeably, and she is constantly misgendered. Anna offers levity during her distress through a mini-game that has you roll a number at random every time you encounter one of the hospital staff to see if you'll be misgendered. It makes a point out of the absurdity of the situation.

As Ohmygod Are You Alright? offers some insight into a part of Anna's struggles as a trans woman it might be called an "empathy game." This is a term that has been used more frequently over the past few years and, importantly, especially in conjunction with Anna's 2012 autobiographical game dys4ia. You might think that how dys4ia was celebrated by players and the press that Anna would be endearing towards the term "empathy game," but that is not the case.

In fact, as Offworld points out, the gallery show that Anna gave in New York, before being hit by the car, included an installation called "empathy game." It consisted of a pedometer and a pair of Anna's old boots. The challenge was to walk a literal mile in Anna's boots in order to score a point. Writing about it, Anna described it as a reaction to empathy games, "especially how privileged folks will use them as a kind of shortcut to allyship, using a game like dys4ia as a substitute for truly educating themselves on issues surrounding trans women's lives and how to support them."

The point of the installation was that you could walk a mile in Anna's shoes and not learn anything about her experiences or how to actually help her or other trans women. The same goes for other personal games. And, as you learn by the end of Ohmygod Are You Alright?, despite the widespread championing dys4ia has received, it hasn't helped much with Anna's financial problems, nor her sense of loneliness and failure. She has reached many with her games but it seems not many have reached back.

You can purchase Ohmygod Are You Alright for $2 on itch.io. 

This is probably the closest we'll get to that Hunger Games videogame we want

When the reality show Survivor first aired on May 31, 2000, it almost immediately become a national phenomenon. Viewers tuned in to watch the drama of a group of supposedly average people trying to compete and survive in the harsh wilderness. Like loyal sports fans, they rooted for their favorites, and they cheered when their picks won the weekly immunity challenges, which prevented contestants from being voted off the show, which was the only real threat to victory the seemingly dangerous locales presented.

Those immunity challenges, at their heart, were always a concession to morality. While people tuned in for the tension of typical Americans being thrust into danger, because we don’t live in ancient Rome, the studio wasn’t allowed to actually threaten their lives. Thus competition was reduced from gruesome battles to the death and scrambling for resources to cutesy gym-class obstacle courses and locker room socializing. As much as Survivor trumpeted the theme of a blood sport, its reality far more resembled high school than anything else.

So we moved to fiction. If we couldn’t force real people to fight to the death, then we’d have to settle for imaginary proxies. Films like Battle Royale, The Running Man, Death Race, and most recently Hunger Games thrive off of this desire to see human competition laid out at its barest, most primal extreme. Knoxville, the latest game from Microsoft second party developer Press Play, asks us, “where does this desire to witness deadly competition come from?”

At its core, Knoxville is essentially a Hunger Games fan game. Starring seven contestants thrown into a harsh wilderness as part of a game show, it mirrors the film’s basic structure to a tee. It even allows defeated players to fly around the stadium as robots and spawn hazards, just like the game organizers in the Hunger Games franchise. But through its interactive nature, Knoxville touches on something that no other piece of blood sport media can: it lets those who would otherwise be the audience compete.

it lets those who would otherwise be the audience compete 

Knoxville predicates itself on the vicarious nature of blood sport. The idea that, as tragic as it all seems, the average person would jump at a chance to compete were they somehow guaranteed safety. The conviction that the crowd is more bloodthirsty than the competition has always been the central thematic focus of the blood sport genre, after all. It’s why Katniss Everdeen is cast as a reluctant hero while the viewers in the Capitol are shallow and cruel instigators. They project an image of pomp while at the same time forcing proxies to fight to the death for them because they are too afraid to do it themselves.

Knoxville finally takes the blood sport and allows us all to compete without fear of actual physical harm, allowing those who would otherwise be spectators a risk-free chance to fight and thus demonstrating the blood sport as being the result of the crowd's own inherent bloodlust. This desire to jump into the arena is evident in Knoxville’s origin as the result of a community vote asking which game Press Play should make next. As one of three game pitches, people chose Knoxville as the game they would most like to play.

And yet, Knoxville also presents players with one central twist to the Hunger Games formula: everyone can make it out alive. Whereas The Hunger Games can only have one winner, Knoxville gives each player a chance to succeed if they can just stow their primal need to stab each other with sharp bits for a few minutes. Throughout the forest, there are seven hidden coins, and each of the seven players only need grab one coin to escape. In addition, they must work together to clear obstacles on the way to these coins. However, leaving with more than one coin allows the player to upgrade their character in preparation for future matches. This produces an environment where you’re never quite sure if the teammate who helped you reach your coin will stick with you to the end or will turn around and kill you for a chance at a shiny new weapon.

The result is a test of human nature. Either the gladiatorial crowd’s primal desire to engage in bloodlust will be proven, or competitors will defy the cynical message of the blood sport for a more optimistic approach. Will you be like Katniss Everdeen and try to save as many of your allies as possible? Or will you give into your bloodlust and become a legend in the arena? Both are tempting in their own way. Perhaps most frightening, though, is the constant fear of which of these paths your supposed allies will choose.

Knoxville has no release information as of yet, but will likely be coming to the Xbox One and PC. Check out its website for updates.