Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 243

Soon anyone will be able to rev their computer up to light speed

Once the practice of enthusiasts, overclocking is becoming democratized.

Rod Humble talks Sims, A.I., and his new work at ToyTalk

The Second Life founder wants to create games we can truly talk to.

At last, a city-building game that allows for meaningful economic experimentation

We are all low-poly before God and the free market. Polynomics is about the latter case, though the distinction is far from precise.

Slated for an initial release in early 2016, Polynomics is an economic simulator. You play as the federal government of an unnamed area, issuing a currency, collecting taxes, and enforcing laws. The non-player characters in this world, which might also be called citizens, are perfectly rational actors who seek to maximize their utility through each of their actions. The intersection of all these wants and needs with (your) government objectives can be a messy one, and Polynomics is interested in exploring the sorts of societies that can grow out of this messy confluence.

This line of study is not a game, per se. It is really a test of how certain economic ideas about human behavior respond to various stimuli. Play Polynomics millions of times and you might have some idea about how policies might work in something of a vacuum. In that respect, Polynomics’ low-poly aesthetic is in keeping with its worldview. This is but a rough sketch of a society, one without much room for romance and aesthetic pleasures.

Despite its more utilitarian—and arguably brutal—aesthetic, Polynomics is still indebted to city-building games such as Sim City or Cities: Skylines. Its primary purpose may be slightly different, but it shares these games’ basic structures and mechanics. Further blurring the lines between Polynomics and city-building games, The Guardian has been using Cities: Skylines to run a series of urban planning challenges. Environmental journalist Karl Mathiesen used the game in an attempt to build an even more environmentally friendly city than Copenhagen. “Eventually, I think I probably came out on a par with Copenhagen,” Mathiesen concluded. But he admitted to having a crucial advantage: “my city begins on unpopulated plain, with plentiful resources and open spaces to plan and craft the most efficient city possible.” As part of the same series, urban planner Finn Williams attempted to “build a post-growth city where the economy is based on social exchange rather than consumption.” This was a challenge because games like Cities: Skyline come with built-in assumptions about how planning and governance should work. Williams’ experiment was newsworthy in large part because it called into question the game’s foundational belief that growth is a necessary good. 

Polynomics might allow the experiment itself to be the highlight. 

Therein lies the difference between Polynomics and Cities: Skylines. The former is being built for economic experimentation. Its documentation declares: “Part of development has included the creation of a custom asset editor and it will be released as an open source project sometime in the near future.” This is no guarantee that Polynomics won’t turn out to have built in biases, but it is at least a positive development. Whereas the main story in Cities: Skylines's experiments tends to be the underlying mod, Polynomics might allow the experiment itself to be the highlight. 

City-building games are appealing because they allow for a degree of experimentation that would not otherwise be possible. It takes years to build cities and see how they turn out. Moreover, experimentation on real people is ethically challenging. Games allow researchers to conduct safer, more ambitious versions of these experiments while also providing those who play them to have this fun. Balancing fun and experimental value is, however, something of a challenge. If nothing else, Polynomics should offer a different vision of how this balancing act should be performed.  

Find out more about Polynomics on its website.

The new King���s Quest looks to the past

King’s Quest shows the virtues and the limits of nostalgia.

MANOS: The Hands of Fate���The movie-based game we never knew we needed

Neuro Fantasy is a lurid soundtrack experience with none of the bullsh*t

Direct your own piece of emergent cinema.

It's best to play this roguelike the same way you'd read The Grapes of Wrath

Have you read The Grapes of Wrath? If you've been through the American school system you probably just hissed through your teeth at the sight of its title. For bringing up those aching memories, I apologize. But if you did study it, you'll be familiar with how John Steinbeck structured the chapters throughout the book.

All the even-numbered chapters follow the journey of the Joad family as they travel from Oklahoma to California in search of work, trapped in the Dust Bowl, subject to death and dehydration. On the other hand, the odd-numbered chapters are considered "intercalcary." In these, Steinbeck zooms out from the Joads and brings in the wider historical context, connecting the family's plight to the novel's wider humanist themes, and analyzing the troubled political and social structures of America at the time.

heading on a journey into the unknown 

This juxtaposition between the chapters in The Grapes of Wrath is how I believe I have been playing Caves of Qud. It's a roguelike, and what some might deem a 'proper' one, as it's far away from the more common action-hybrids you see the term "roguelike" being hung from these days, and much closer to the games that the term was originally applied to (i.e. Rogue).

To give you some context: Caves of Qud is set in a post-apocalyptic land called Qud, it belonging to a terrible future vision of Earth in which most of our technological advances have been lost. It's a jungle-like area that is bordered by a salt desert and large mountain ranges. Mostly, it's a terrible place to be, and a worse place to live, yet there are those that do. People also travel to Qud in their droves as, inside its ancient caverns and temples, can be found valuable lost technology. There is also an ancient evil arising from these caverns but we don't have to be concerned with that right now. 

In the game, the land of Qud is represented from a top-down perspective, and while it doesn't adopt the basic ASCII-style of many roguelikes, its limited graphics feel like a throwback to it. The point being that when you're looking at the screen you can't immediately read everything that is on it unless you recognize the symbols and know what they represent. Another salient point is that when moving across the land, you do so a screen at a time, which gives you four different directions to travel in, and each screen you travel into is procedurally generated as you enter.

Being set in what is essentially a jungle, there are plenty of strange and hostile creatures in Qud, and it's possible to meet many of them right at the start, making it dangerous to move around, each step forward potentially determining your character's point of death. As you play the game, you're heading on a journey into the unknown, and this is where the analogy slips in: this moment-to-moment decision making is the narrative chapters of The Grapes of Wrath—we guide a character around, as close to them as we are the Joads in Steinbeck's novel.

a sense of magnificent history to dredge from its depths 

However, considering how unpredictable Caves of Qud can be, and how tricky its screens can be to read at first, it's vital that you spend some time to assess your environment thoroughly in order to avoid unnecessary conflicts. To this end, the creators of Caves of Qud have supplied a look function. It's tied to the 'L' key, and when pressed, you can select certain tiles on the screen and read a description of whatever it contains—be it enemy, friendly, plant, or mineral. 

But the descriptions in Caves of Qud are more than your typical fantasy world padding. By reading a description of something as insignificant as a plant you can acquire a sense of the place's politics and its people. As an example, read the following description of Mehmet, the first person you talk to in Caves of Qud, and note how class politics is suggested through the man's potential: "Years of the desert have taken their toll on his body, but he commands your ear with his voice like few other men, and you wonder what sovereignty he might've come to were he not born a moisture farmer." Mehmet is also wonderfully given a random set of three relationships with the creatures of Qud, as you can see in the screenshot below, underneath the standard "Loved by the villagers of Joppa."

Returning to the analogy, looking around the screens and reading these descriptions is akin to the intercalcary chapters in The Grapes of Wrath. And if I were to really indulge this line of thinking, I'd say that there was a similarity in how Steinbeck talks about the land and its soil in The Grapes of Wrath, and how Qud is treated as a character itself in the game. Steinbeck does this as, to the farmers, the land was an organ or a body that had to be tended, treated, and sown; maintained so that they could live off it. In Caves of Qud, there are farmers that have the same relationship with the land, but further than that, there are layers of ancient cilivizations buried in Qud's land, and so there's a sense of magnificent history to dredge from its depths, not to mention the characterization it gets from housing an evil. 

Remarkably, you get a sense of all this in the first screen of Caves of Qud, which is probably the only screen in the entire game that remains the same every time you start over. What is established in this first screen is of high importance as it sets the tone for the rest of the journey. But also, as this is a roguelike with permadeath (meaning that, when you die, you have to restart everything), the first screen is the one you're going to see the most. 

A mini stratum of people is set-up in this first screen for you to consider, focusing on their apparel, behaviour, and the condition of their skin and limbs. The farmers are men with "gnarled hands," hot with sweat and with tatters slung around their necks. The religious zealot is said to have "precious saliva" flying from his cracked lips as he preaches around the farmers. Further up, the warden holds a "purring blade" in one hand while the other is "lame and frostbitten," apparently to demonstrate how nature doesn't care for a man's position. And the elder is a "hunched-back ancient" with a warm smile and with eyes in the palms of his hands.

Through the illustrative writing in Caves of Qud you're able to get an inescapable impression of the place simply by taking the time to look. Not just of your immediate surroundings, but of the systems that drive the people around you, giving you an instinctual understanding of how this fantasy world works, which will probably come in handy later on. As Steinbeck pulled back to get a wider picture of what was happening to the Joads, beyond their control, so must we while venturing into the rough jungles of Qud, for we won't otherwise be able to understand and prevent our repeated deaths.

You can purchase Caves of Qud on Steam. It's currently in Early Access.

Badblood beckons you to the hunt with its stylish new trailer

The battles in Badblood are ones of wit and wariness.

Like Manhunt meets hide-and-seek, two trained killers sneak around in a field, hunting and fleeing from the other as the screen orientation constantly shifts to mask their movements. It'll take strong spatial awareness and alertness to find your foe in the blood-stained meadows of Winnie Song's two-player stealth game and that's what makes it such an interesting entry in the local multiplayer space.

Check out its new trailer below.

The most striking thing about Badblood, besides its sharp, stylish anti-heroes, is the way it creates a language from its violence.

It's a necessity for any competitive local multiplayer to do so, but the tense lead-ups and mind games of Badblood's structure has the potential to make that language an extremely thrilling one that I can't wait to master.

Learn more about Badblood in our interview with Winnie Song and its official website. It's also on Steam Greenlight.

A Dota fan convinces you to pay attention to the International finals this weekend

Explain esports to me like I'm five.

If you get anxious about karaoke just wait until you play Stage Presence

Stage Presence is karaoke with less musicality and more social anxiety, and really, what’s not to like about that?

You play as the frontman of a band. You’re on stage at a large festival—think Glastonbury, but without the ambient fug—when something goes wrong. Who knows what went wrong. This is the musical version of Apollo 13: You are not afforded the luxury of thinking about anything other than your current predicament.

Stage Presence has you focus on the task of surviving this calamity. You use the microphone to desperately vamp as a countdown until the resolution of your band’s technical issues is projected behind the waiting crowd. You can hear your band’s manager egging you on, pleading with you to keep the huddled masses happy. And you should keep them happy; that’s the game’s win condition and even if it wasn’t, dealing with the wrath of an unruly crowd sounds plenty unpleasant. (If you’d like to see even more of the unruly crowd, Stage Presence can be played in VR mode with an Oculus Rift. The game’s designer, John Dadley, claims that support for other headsets is forthcoming.)

Why would you want to put yourself through this? That nightmare where you somehow show up to work without your pants on doesn’t really need to be reproduced in other media forms. And yet here we are. Stage Presence cuts out all of life’s bullshit to focus exclusively on that moment where your life flashes before your eyes. Going out on stage, as games such as Leave 'em Laughing have suggested, is an activity for those with a death wish. It’s skydiving for those who believe desirable sounds can come out of their mouths. As Sean Connery’s Mac points out in Entrapment, “If you can’t feel alive now, you never will.”

You can download Stage Presence on itch.io.