Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 258

Watch all six Star Wars movies at once because you don't care and the internet killed you

This Star Wars supercut mirrors the Internet's panic-attack hell of over-saturation. 

The creator of Entropy talks about his formative acid trip in the woods

"I've always felt like acid is a roller coaster on the edge of sanity."

You must read this review of You Must Build A Boat

You must click on this link to a review of You Must Build A Boat.

Photo series captures the "existential despair" of GTA V

Grand Theft Auto V is an ugly mirror held up to modern-day America, and it's plenty dark as it is, thanks. But Danish photographer Morten Rockford Ravn has taken to capturing the game's inherent "existential despair" in striking black-and-white snapshots with the in-game camera phone. It's an ongoing series of virtual photography that he's calling "Fear and Loathing in GTA V." 

Ravn further explained to The Creator's Project that what he's trying to bring out with his photos is the "darker side of virtual reality." He describes how he drives around on a motorbike as if Jake Gyllenhaal's morbid go-get-'em reporter in Nightcrawler, searching for the social critique that development house Rockstar baked into the game.

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This may be an image as simple as an upturned shopping cart on the concrete. Ravn's photo of just that seems to pose us questions: What does this say about consumerism? Or of America's shopping mall culture? Many of the photos turn their subjects into zombies as they stare wild-eyed and bloodied at the camera, some of them topless, others wearing uniforms and brandishing a gun. Bodies of women in dresses lay in the streets. A man sits between strippers. A homeless person tries to get comfy on a flattened cardboard box.

Many of the faces that Ravn shows us are contorted into a picture of rage, or sit flat on the skull, dull and hazed (probably by drugs). The most terrifying have a thousand mile stare that speaks volumes about the battleground of their daily lives. People run away from each other in fear, through alley ways, across empty airports, into the arms of the law. Others dress up in silly costumes and scary masks as they try to forget the angst in favor of pursuing a purpose: joining a gang, being an astronaut, starting a family. Many of them are turned away from us in limp postures while weeping.

"fiction is often the best fact." 

Ravn's allusion to Hunter S. Thompson's novel-long recount of a drug-washed trip across 1970s southern California in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas through the title of his series is appropriate. Thompson famously dropped pockets of surrealism in among the truth as he led an early critique of the 1960s counter culture and the pursuit of the American dream, reasoning that "fiction is often the best fact." While an absurd notion, Thompson's idea was to tell it like it is with the facts, but to then drive the point home with a satirical uppercut of fiction.

This is a model that GTA V has always resembled. It's a sandbox that mixes in reworked events and characters from reality into its virtual satire. Ravn does nothing special other than let it all play out in front of him, having his in-game character periodically point a camera at the the most desperate scenes, taking a snapshot, itself an act that reflects our obsession with recording what happens in our lives and everyone else around us.

You can see Fear and Loathing in GTA V and all its snapshots on its website. 

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Rust not only randomly generates your race, but your penis size too

Does the size of your virtual penis matter?

Fallout Shelter is a small, cynical game

Like its siblings, Fallout Shelter nestles into your mind. But it is not welcome.

Virtual reality is all fun and games until it asks you to walk a high wire

Why is Batman great? He has the best villains

The secret to any Batman game is an embrace of the rogue’s gallery.

This is sad: Tale of Tales is done making videogames

But their games live on as cultural touchstones.

SUPERHYPERCUBE is bringing telekinetic tetris to virtual reality

Very few games are telekinesis-friendly. Sure, you use your mind to move objects, but there is always a visible intermediary. Even the illusion of psychic ability cannot survive in most games. 

SUPERHYPERCUBE, which has been in development since 2008, offers the promise of telekinetic Tetris. Since its original version, the game has promised to use 3D-depth to maximize and enliven the challenge of fitting blocks into walls. In earlier iterations, this was to be achieved through more traditional stereoscopy—the blue and red glasses variety. With the rise of virtual reality (VR), the game appears to have plumbed new depths, and in a good way. In a trailer and accompanying blog post released for E3, SUPERHYPERCUBE’s creators revealed that the game is now headed for PlayStation’s Morpheus VR headset, which will allow players to view puzzles from different angles simply by moving their head.

The problem with stereoscopy, as it is often derided for, is that it's a means of dimming otherwise compelling images. (Here’s looking at you, Mark Kermode.) Indeed, an earlier version of SUPERHYPERCUBE was rendered in grey-scale and that's when it apparently achieved the “best and ... cleanest 3D effect." While that may be true, in PlayStation’s blog post, Nick Suttner claims that the move to the Morpheus has allowed SUPERHYPERCUBE’s developers to bring back the color. Indeed, the preview images and video are rendered in bright neons. If everything works as promised—this is always a big "if" with 3D—SUPERHYPERCUBE will be as if a brighter, psychedelic version of Last Voyage.

There’s an added level of absurdity to trailers for VR games. 

Speaking of that "if", what is there to be made of SUPERHYPERCUBE’s trailer, or any VR trailer for that matter? Trailers always obscure functionality, but there’s an added level of absurdity to trailers for VR games. The real question here is not aesthetic, but whether the spatial orientation and precision the game promises is real. That is a question no YouTube video can answer. SUPERHYPERCUBE is slated to come out next year. Until someone gets a chance to try it with Morpheus, all that can be said is that it certainly looks appealing.