Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 249

Muse answers the question: What if John Lennon helped create Earthbound?

Hey New Yorkers, come play videogames with us

We're taking over the Ace Hotel again, and it will be radical. 

Pixels is the worst

The most old-school thing in PIXELS is the misogyny.

Buckle up: Absolute Drift is bending the built environment to a car's will

Your car is not supposed to go sideways. If it has, you’re in trouble. This is but one of the reasons the expression “going sideways” refers to a breakdown. But in the grand tradition of things being so wrong that they are right, there’s drifting. It’s a motorsport practice that embraces oversteer to such an extent that a car’s front and rear wheels often point in different directions while drifting. When done right, a drifting car slides through corners, slicing up the pavement as if it was soft butter. Absolute Drift, which will be released for Mac, PC, and Linux on July 29th, is a game about getting drifting right.

Absolute Drift is not a wonky game. It is not interested in the finer points of automotive design. There is no discussion of brake calipers and suspension of adjustments to be found here. The game simply challenges you to drift around a series of cubist environments, hitting a variety of targets that help direct your drifts and leaving burnt rubber traces on the ground. For all this abstraction, however, Absolute Drift still has something to say about automotive mechanics. Whereas drifting normally subverts a car’s natural predisposition to move in a straight line, Absolute Drift makes sideways drifts the car’s natural state. Indeed, as Kill Screen’s Chris Priestman wrote when previewing the game, “Straight lines are one of the game's biggest challenges.”

Insofar as it alters the normal functioning of a car, Absolute Drift also encourages the subversion of urban geography. Streets, with their lights, turning lines, and lines, are designed to accommodate the broadly linear and foreseeable movements of cars. Drifting dispenses of this predictability and therefore does away with much of the logic of the city street. A city designed for drifting would therefore not look anything like the car-tropolis that is Los Angeles. Indeed, the ratio of buildings to asphalt in Absolute Drift is roughly the inverse of what it would be in real life. Abstract buildings dot large open expanses; their only function is to give you something to drift around. In that sense, Absolute Drift is a bit like Monument Valley for cars.

Absolute Drift is a bit like Monument Valley for cars. 

Absolute Drift is a world built for the needs of a drifting car, which is not all that dissimilar from what engineers are currently trying to do in Michigan. As Bloomberg recently reported, automakers have banded together to build M City, “a 32-acre (13-hectare) mini-metropolis, [that] seeks to replicate modern urban chaos with traffic jams and unpredictable pedestrians, alongside suburban streetscapes, superhighways and rural roads.” M City exists to serve as a testing ground for driverless vehicles. Better to experiment there than on real streets with real cars and real pedestrians. (More on that in a moment.) Which is not to say that driverless cars really care about cities or geography or physical realities. As Geoff Manaugh put it when writing about Google’s autonomous car program:

“The software knows what to expect because the vehicle, in a sense, is not really driving on the streets outside Google's Mountain View campus; it is driving in a seamlessly parallel simulation of those streets, never leaving the world of the map so precisely programmed into its software.” 

To the driverless car, M City is just as much of an abstraction as any other city. This sort of test-track does, however, serve a use. Consider, for a moment, WIRED’s recent story, “Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on the Highway—With Me in It.” The title pretty much tells the entire story. As part of a security experiment, WIRED’s Andy Greenberg drove a Jeep in public as security researchers basically carjacked it. This is an interesting and important experiment, but the fact that it was conducted on a public road with real lives at stake is, to put it nicely, ethically dubious. As Fusion’s Kashmir Hill notes, “If the Jeep hack demonstration requires a car going 70 miles per hour, it should be on a deserted race course, not on a public highway.”  

The digital component of the Jeep that WIRED hacked exists in a similar parallel universe to the one Manaugh described. It makes no real difference to the car’s computer systems if it is on a test track or a highway. That’s why developments like M City matter. So long as the computerized automobile brains are indifferent to physical realities, we have to build environments where they can safely act out their impulses. Absolute Drift’s environment looks to take this logic one step further. Its open expanses aren’t merely safe constraints for the drifting car but the physical manifestation of its whims, a place it can live out everything it was made—and therefore wants—to do.

Find out more about Absolute Drift on its website.

Ico's secret language and the scenes you never got to see

Yorda isn't as much of a pushover as we may have thought.

Specimen wants to give you the color perception skills of a veteran painter

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Specimen (iOS) 
BY PepRally

If your passion involves mixing paint to attain specific tones, then Specimen should come easy to you. The game involves picking out the floating blob of color (in a dish containing many) that matches the tone in the background. It's a task that encourages thorough use of the squint, which isn't actually helping you at all, but it feels like it is. For this is a test of your perception under the clock. Is it that shade of purple you're after? Or is that one? You'll only ever have a matter of seconds to work out the answer. And if you're wrong and out of lives your score will be counted early prompting you to jump right back in. Specimen is a remarkable game of slights, both in its color-picking challenge, and how demanding it is of your time.

Perfect for: Petri dish pokers, painters, commuters

Playtime: Minutes at a time

Below���s creative director on procedural generation, making soup, and spelunking

“Delicate and small and precious but also complex and deep and crazy and brutal and dark and awful.”

Cultivate a meditative bonsai garden in your pocket with Prune

We have a lot to thank trees for. Aside from—you know—letting us breathe and all, science also tells us that cultivating plant life can actually boost your serotonin (like an antidepressant) and your immune system. Permaculturists call it the "harvest high," known to both quell anxiety and build a sense of self-worth. Like players in a videogame, gardeners love seeing their visible and positive impact on the world around them, watching the fruits of their labor take shape right before their eyes. Games like Harvest Moon show just how similar the reward system for gardening and gaming can be—though, granted, the feedback loop for real life harvesting tends to take a bit longer than three in-game days.

Prune, a self-described "love letter to trees," abstracts the correlation between gardening and gaming into a beautifully minimalist mobile experience. With the touch of a finger, you breathe life into barren soil, in a world where sunlight only reaches the earth in slivers. By planting a single seed, you bring forth a force of nature that reaches for light wherever it may be. As the cultivator, it's your job to ensure the tree can bloom to its fullest potential by pruning its branches to maneuver around obstacles like wind, darkness, and disease (represented by an infectious red virus that spreads throughout the bark).

a collaboration that feels more like a dance than puzzle-solving 

Though the game certainly gives you the ability to influence, the plant-life possesses its own autonomy that you must accommodate. Certainly, you are an important part of the process, shaping the tree, supporting its growth, ensuring its health and safety. But the world of Prune highlights the reciprocal relationship of permaculture, as an equal partnership rather than one of control. You give, and the tree gives back. It's a painterly back and forth; a collaboration that feels more like a dance than puzzle-solving. There's no winning as such. In fact, if you find yourself stuck on a level for too long, the game gives you the option to skip rather than insist on you conquering each obstacle.

Though Prune can't provide the same benefits of real-life gardening, it grounds you while also providing the immediacy of a videogame loop. Each round, which you spend no more than a few moments with, is scored by a meditative soundtrack that responds to your actions—be them failures or successes. You leave each level with not only a sense of pride, but a feeling of connectedness too. Like a parent doting on a child, you come to love each tree as it blooms far beyond your own reach.

You can purchase Prune on the iOS App Store.

What We've Lost: Nintendo In Iwata's Words

The man who gave us our first real glimpse behind Nintendo's iron curtain.

Evo 2015's comebacks, or the growing significance of the crowd in eSports

The latest Evolution Championship Series (Evo) had plenty of action and drama to fill the weekend. Intense fights were had, hugs were given, tears were shed, and some shirts even came off. One of the highlights of the event, though, was a particularly daring comeback during a Killer Instinct match between players Sleep NS and UA | My God.

About 15 seconds into the video, Sleep's fighter Kan-Ra is down to a pixel of health, up against My God's Sabrewulf, with a full bar. Sleep manages to boldly shave down some of My God's HP before they both settle into a tense standoff, with Sleep spamming ranged attacks on the right side and My God blocking to the left.

It's clear based on My God's defensive approach that he was choosing to wait the timer out instead of finish off Sleep, even though it wouldn't have taken much more than a flick to bring him down. The live audience didn't seem too happy with My God's turtling, either—they begin booing him.

I'm not sure if it was peer pressure from the crowd or the real pressure that Sleep starts putting on My God about 1:30 in, but My God is eventually spurred into action… and then promptly gets destroyed. By a guy with barely 1 HP. It's devastating. It's humiliating. It's a classic underdog story from start to finish, unfolding in less than a minute, and one that should have never happened. So what is going on here?

"What are you standing up for?!" 

When it comes to eSports, Counter-Strike is my game. It's stressful enough having people dictate strategies over your shoulder when you're the last one standing in a competitive match. But imagine being backseat-gamed by thousands of strangers, all in the same room as you. Live. In front of the entire community that supports you. At least the pro-CS:GO players get to wear noise-canceling headphones.

My God wasn't the only one who may have lost due to the pressure of the crowd at this year's Evo either. Professional Guilty Gear Xrd player Woshige celebrated a second round comeback of a best-of-three match too early by jumping up out of his seat to reap the cheers of the crowd. "What are you standing up for?!" the commentator screams. And he's right to. As in doing so, Woshige was late to the start of the third round in which his opponent, Owaga, took an easy win. 

Crowds have always been a major element of traditional, physical sports, but the concept of an audience has only recently become as significant to digital games in the way we know it today. Even single-player games can become social events with livestreaming and Let's Plays where the role of spectators is as important as both the player and the game themselves.

This has spawned everything from full-time streamers to bizarre social experiments like Twitch Plays Pokémon, and even games built entirely for the purpose of player-audience interaction like the livestreamed griefing sim Choice Chamber.

As complex as the impact and growing significance of the audience in eSports can get, though, it's still funny to see its dynamic manifest in something as simple as this: a good old-fashioned mix of backseat gaming, peer pressure, and maybe a bit of miscalculated confidence.