Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 237

Bros in mourning

Remembering the true legacy of Gears of War.

In Excuse Me! the real obstacle course is social decorum

Humanity’s most common phobia, according to a plurality of strange websites that specialize in this topic, is arachnophobia. Fair enough. Creepy crawly spiders are hardly pleasant. But fear is contextual: Your biggest fear when home alone is rarely your biggest fear when at a public event. For research into that latter category, we have the decidedly far-from-exhaustive profiles of contestants on The Bachelor. Every year, these profiles reveal that televised Lotharios and their concubines fear nothing more than the sudden onset of diarrhea on a date. Again: fair enough. 

“The world's first flatulence crisis management simulator” 

This scatological tidbit came to mind while considering Excuse Me!, a game that bills itself as “the world's first flatulence crisis management simulator.” In Squiddershin’s entry for the 2015 “A Game By Its Cover” game jam, you control the movements of Peter Le Pétomane, a moustachioed man who is feeling decidedly gaseous. If that weren’t a big enough problem, Peter is at a restaurant. Your job, then is to navigate the crowded environment and find Peter a secluded place to pass wind.

Excuse Me! reimagines social mores as something of a maze. The flatulence angle is new, but the underlying gameplay ideas aren’t that radical. In practice, you are on a race against time through an obstacle course of sorts. Been there. Done that.

This similarity to other games is what makes Excuse Me! so compelling. Insofar as our fears are contextual, it makes sense that a typical venue can be recast as a chamber of social horrors. A restaurant is scarier when full than when empty, much as it is scarier when you’re on a date as opposed to eating alone. In effect, to reckon with your fears is to reckon with a series of social constructs. Flatulence need not be understood at crisis, but we—and Excuse Me!—choose to do so. So let loose (not in that way!) and navigate the obstacles that are the construct that is decorum. 

Play free games at the Ace Hotel

Kill Screen is bringing games to the starving masses once again; make sure you come out to the Ace Hotel tomorrow night for the August edition of Playlist, our free public arcade. Local independent music label GODMODE will be DJing once again, and the bar will be stocked.

This month, you can practice zen gardening with Prune, play ball from your driver’s seat with Kasketball, and explore the dark and dangerous forest of Feist. Bid goodbye to summer with some choice offerings from the weird, wonderful world of video games.

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Until Dawn is a smart riff on horror-movie tropes

Play as a bunch of asshole teens who reenact the past half-century of scary movies.

Circular platformer Circa Infinity is absolutely mesmerizing

Hypnotizing new game will make you trippy, very trippy

Fear Chatroulette's walking dead, but in a good way

On a daily basis, Chatroulette is home to far scarier interactions than Realm Pictures’ zombie-themed “Real Life First Person Shooter,” but few—if any—are as endearing.

The setup is familiar: A player is dropped into a gameworld and explores it through their avatar’s point of view. This world, it turns out, is filled with zombies and the player must kill those from whom you cannot run away. Along the way they can pick up weapons that might be of use. Should their health meter hit zero, they die. Game over. It’s all quite typical, really. Or, rather, it would be quite typical if the player’s avatar weren’t an actor with a camera on his head being controlled by the oral commands of random Chatroulette users as he traverses a world populated by actors and props.

This setup works because it is familiar. “Real Life First Person Shooters” painstakingly follows the formal conventions of the first-person shooter genre. In and of itself, this dedication is fascinating to watch. But it’s also why the gameplay appears to work (though the clips released are obviously selective and edited). A random Chatroulette user dropped into this game can understand how it works. Sure, there are real humans instead of 3D models, but the underlying visual language is fundamentally the same. It’s the game you know and possibly love, albeit with a different, real skin. 

The secret charm “Real Life First Person Shooters” comes from its use of vocal inputs instead of the normal tactile controller. The avatar keeps asking the player “what should I do?” and players respond in something resembling full sentences. Their responses contain bits of doubt and uncertainty. Traditional controllers inputs flatten this emotional range: A pressed button is a pressed button is a pressed button. But Realm Pictures’ gameplay footage reveals how gamers might behave in a world with far less technological intermediation. Of course they’d still play games, but the mechanics for expressing certainty or the lack thereof would be different.   

Voyage out to sea and uncover your own creativity with Trawl

Trawl invokes the solitude of creativity and asks you to explore your own mind

Discover the artifacts that make up your very being by diving into exploration game Trawl

Uncover the treasures inside your mind with Trawl

In the sea exploration Trawl, the treasure you uncover is your own creativity

Trawl is a sea exploration game that brings your own creativity to the surface

Trawl casts you out to sea, leaving you alone with your own thoughts and creativity

The Identity of a Fighter

What do fighting games teach us about identity?

What new virtual world does the Second Life creator have in store for us?

Virtual reality, today, means Oculus Rift. Project Morpheus. Samsung Gear VR or HTC Vive. But say “virtual reality” just a decade ago, and the first thing that likely would’ve popped into people’s heads is Second Life.

Second Life seems ahead of its time 

To those not active in its virtual world, Second Life may seem like a poorly aged artifact of the internet, where people spend real money lavishing digital luxuries on their customized avatars and land or engaging in awkward role-play with others. But now that modern virtual reality hardware has begun to impress the mainstream with its technological advancements, something like Second Life seems like the logical next step.

This is especially apparent considering that Facebook, the biggest social media network on the planet and parent company to Oculus VR, has spoken about virtual reality not just as a new way to play videogames, but as a communication platform for fostering new, “immersive” social experiences. Suddenly, Second Life seems ahead of its time.

"We want to lower the barrier of entry for VR experience creation" 

Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, probably knows this better than anyone. Second Life, which launched in 2003, helped pioneer the type of experience people expect from virtual worlds, and now that the tech is fitting, Linden Lab is ready to take it a step further.

Project Sansar, the latest project from Linden Lab, will be a VR-optimized interactive experience slated to launch sometime in 2016. Linden Lab’s goal with Sansar is to “democratize virtual reality as a creative medium.” That means, like Second Life, it won’t just be a pre-built experience for users to explore, but a platform where the people have the power to build, share, and even monetize the experiences they want.

Remove any familiarity with Second Life from the equation, and it’s all pretty unclear what exactly Project Sansar is. Linden Lab has been understandably quiet about it, and only just this week invited a small selection of creators to take part in an exclusive testing period. The first to use Sansar will build “3D content” with Maya, a popular computer graphics tool, but once the platform is out for the public, people will have more building options available.

Will people be able to build games in Project Sansar? Or will it be more like Second Life 2.0, a more ambitious virtual world creator and social hub optimized for virtual reality hardware?

"Project Sansar will do for virtual experiences what WordPress has done for the Web" 

We’re not sure yet, but here’s what Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab, has to say for now:

“We want to lower the barrier of entry for VR experience creation. Project Sansar will do for virtual experiences what WordPress has done for the Web: empower a broad range of people to create with professional quality and reach global audiences. By greatly expanding who can create virtual experiences, Project Sansar will also extend the value of VR to a wide variety of use-cases — from gaming and entertainment to education, architecture, art, community-building, business meetings, healthcare, conferences, training, and more.”

The Night That Speaks brings a Slender Man-like ghost to the GameBoy era

This ghost story is a self-reflection on teen years and the fear of growing up.