Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 260

The Assembly wants to be your first VR experience

There are a lot of pieces involved with VR—most are moving, and not all fit.

Miyamoto explains how he turned his love for a Japanese shrine into a videogame

"When there's an arch you want to go under it, right? That's the kind of game I wanted to make." When Shigeru Miyamoto delivers lines like that no one knows what he means. Not at first. He may be the famed designer of many of Nintendo's most successful videogames from the past 35 years but Miyamoto is still lost inside the playful world he charted as a child. He continuously pulls ideas from it, getting on all-fours to demonstrate how he wants cat Mario to move, or holding pretend controllers in his hand to emulate the glee he supposes people will get from his games.

Miyamoto's affinity with these seminal places. 

The stories of how Miyamoto has—even now as a sexagenarian—piped his natural curiosity of the world into videogames are known. The Legend of Zelda is a result of his trip inside the caves around the Kyoto countryside in his youth. A dog near his home, chained-up and relentlessly barking, was transformed into the Chain Chomp enemy in Super Mario Bros 3. Love for the British TV puppet show Thunderbirds back in the 1960s informed the crew of fighter pilots in StarFox.

But what isn't captured in the retelling of these stories is any image, moving or still, of Miyamoto's affinity with these seminal places. Except, amid the hotbed of tech worship and videogame fandom that is E3, Nintendo shared a video during its digital conference this year that did just that. Miyamoto had a new game to present called StarFox Zero, and so Nintendo let him out from behind its walls of secrecy to talk about arches for five minutes.

In the video above we see Miyamoto walking through the red arches at the Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto, right next to where he grew up. The camera captures his upturned face, peering through the small gaps that separate the arches, the sunlight barely breaking through. In slow-motion, Miyamoto is shot from afar, stepping forward with a hand on his hip as a gesture of comfort and satisfaction. It's this feeling that he wanted to instill in the players of the original StarFox back in 1993, and as it was Nintendo's first game to use 3D polygons, he was able to put arches in the game that had a proper sense of depth in the virtual space. These arches encouraged you to fly under and through them as a playful diversion from the open sky, as Miyamoto wanted, but also showed off the new 3D tech.

a starship flying through the torii 

But StarFox owes more to these arches than that. For starters, the proper word for the arches that Miyamoto talks about so lovingly is torii. These are traditional Japanese gates comprised of two pillars resting on a white stone, topped by a horizontal beam that curves upwards at its ends. There are also wedges that hold the wood in place, while some have a decorative ring called daiwa at the top of each pillar—the finer details of each torii differ. You'll typically find torii at the entrance of a shrine in service of Japan's largest religion Shinto, but they're also found at Buddhist temples.

In Shinto (which is translated to "way of the gods"), followers carry out rituals that devote themselves to the religion's many kami, which are spirits or gods. These gods are worshipped in groups, with one of them being the Inari, which is the kami of foxes, rice, and business (among other things). The Fushimi Inari shrine that we see Miyamoto waltzing around is the head shrine of Inari. It's why the shrine famously has so many torii with each of them being a donation from a Japanese business looking for the gods' favor. It's also why we see Miyamoto looking up at statues of foxes found at the shrine. The foxes are considered to be the messengers, and when depicted are shown holding a key for a rice granary in their mouths. They are symbolic of Inari and its head shrine.

And so we see the origins of StarFox right there in and around that shrine. We can't see what Miyamoto's imagination projects onto the place in the video—though his awed expression offers suggestion—but at some point he must have pictured himself as a starship flying through the torii while Fox McCloud looked over him from a stony perch nearby. It's in making that connection between play and place that Miyamoto's videogames have emerged and is partly why they have enthused so many people over the years.

The hope and hopelessness of finding a new planet to call home

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Planetarium (PC) 
BY DANIEL LINSSEN 

Since the beginning of time, human beings have looked up at the stars and wondered about the possibilities. With Planetarium, Daniel Linssen has taken this dream a step further—maintaining the mystery of the unknowable universe while also giving us glances beyond it. You visit different planets by entering certain words or letter combinations into a planet-generator. There's over a hundred and fifty possibilities, each planet telling its own tale as it spins on outside your control or even influence. An entire subreddit has been sparked by the mystery of Planetarium, with players exploring the galaxy's limited yet expansive potential. Planetarium reverses our role as an observer of outer space. So instead of looking outward from the inside, we're on the outside, and must face how truly tiny each individual planet seems in comparison to the rest of the universe.

Perfect for: Carl Sagan, Discovery Channel addicts, wannabe astronauts.
  

Playtime: Time-space subject to gravitational alterations.

Fullbright launches into the void with Tacoma

The creator's of Gone Home on how to stay grounded in space.

In DotCity, the monster to your futuristic mega city will be an unceasing population

Allegedly there are projects on Kickstarter other than Shenmue 3. Allegedly DotCity is one of those projects. 

DotCity, which was created by Nathan Irondot, is a city simulator that challenges you to manage resources and guide your metropolis out of the industrial revolution and far into the future. You start with an empty two-dimensional plane. There are a few dots on the plane. Those dots are people. You can build up, or out, or both using currency and construction materials. The real challenge here is how to design a city that can accommodate—and thrive under—the demographic transitions that are unlocked by technological revolutions.

look down on those dots and care 

“Look down there,” Orson Welles implores in his most famous scene from The Third Man. “Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?”

DotCity challenges you to look down on those dots and care about their survival. This is a limited conception of generosity, one based on life and death more than subjective quality of life, but it is something. Moreover, the aesthetics of DotCity are more appealing than a mere survivalist colony. Buildings have distinct architectural characteristics but are rendered as simple geometrical forms, usually in white. This is 3DS MAX’s Greeble modifier on steroids.

You can support DotCity on Kickstarter.

A stroll and a conversation with a man named Cash, the Ubisoft D.J.

Our man in Los Angeles grabs a beer. 

Let us now consider the menswear at E3

A dadbod and promo shirt evaluation.

Day two of E3 has come and gone, and Nathan Drake still hasn't moved

Hey look, a chihuahua-griffin! 

Eitr will give us a reason to get mad at Norse gods and clean house

Eitr's red-headed Shield Maiden is justifiably pissed off after having her destiny figuratively scribbled over in crayon by the mischievous god Loki. He's a trickster god, a god of infant-worthy trouble, and Loki is the easiest of the Norse gods to hate. He gives birth to eight-legged horses and fathers wolves while pestering the other gods for the lulz. Plainly put, Loki is an asshole.

this world of darkness, death, and misery 

That there are gods such as Loki in Norse mythology is proof of its appeal. These are not the epitome of virtue and zen as other gods are. Norse gods make mistakes and have no problem letting them go with a shrug of the shoulders. Some are tempted by risk and lust and sometimes they give in. They're all-powerful but simultaneously as prone to the whim of their prescribed personalities as any of the piles of flesh that they look over.

This is why it's absolutely fine and completely plausible that the Shield Maiden should raise a sword to the gods in anger in Eitr. The new E3 trailer for the game shows her on the way to reclaiming her fate, swooping around the sluggishly thrust blades of the lurching Jotunn with the agility of a small bird, and picking off a horde of surrounding skeletons with a plucky bow and arrow. At one extreme she faces gigantic foe that crash huge shields to the ground in frustrated grunts as she stabs their ankles. While at the other end of the scale are the unwise sewer rats that scuttle at her wearing a fresh coat of scabs.

But in between the meticulous precision of these battles—requiring command of movement and stamina—there is respite. The Shield Maiden can only fully recover while sat at the glow of a bonfire. And other warriors join her for the rest, coming in all shapes and sizes, all probably as angry at the gods for letting Loki plunge them into this world of darkness, death, and misery as part of his laddish tear across the mortal realm.

In its debut trailer, Eitr appears to us as a game of starts and stops. You push a skeleton over here and pull a sword out of a leather boot over there. Essentially, you're doing the dishes and feeding the cats because your parent-gods are too busy getting mad-drunk on the town and the babysitter is trying to blow up the kitchen. It's time to wreck house and then clean it all up with blade and bow.

Eitr will be heading to PlayStation 4 and PC in 2016. Check out its website for more info.

New SUPERHOT trailer is quite literally off the chain

Artistic violence is so in right now. Particularly for those who gazed upon the dirtied, bloodied face of Mad Max and found themselves thinking "Ooooo preeeetty!" instead of "Yuck! Death and destruction!"

you can practically hear the sharp edge dividing the air. 

The latest SUPERHOT trailer comes at an opportune moment, then, while people are still happily riding this beautiful wave of bloodshed. SUPERHOT is—and always has been—the little first-person shooter jam game that could. After the free jam build went viral two years ago, the team behind this The Matrix-esque simulator took to Kickstarter and raised a whopping $250,000 when all was said and done.

The new E3 trailer shows off more of the game's deliberate yet action-packed play. For some reason, a metallic chain hangs suspended in the mostly white arena: a dividing line between you and your foes. Your targets, represented as nondescript red glass figures, raise their hands toward you—poised to take the fatal shot. As a first person shooter that, of course, focuses on shooting, probably the biggest twist appears in the form of a samurai sword. The blade passes inches from your camera and you can practically hear the sharp edge dividing the air.

Because the set pieces in each level only move when the player does, the SUPERHOT team needed to find a way to make the often motionless and silent moments of pause feel more active. Distorted and distinct ambient noise appears to have been their solution. The diegetic sounds from the chain clink and clank in slow-motion, like water rippling through a fast stream. 

Although SUPERHOT consists of forty short levels best understood as time-manipulation puzzles, creator Patrick Iwanicki recently described it to Polygon as first and foremost "an action game that waits for you, that allows you to move at your own pace. It's a ballet of moving, shooting, grabbing weapons, dying and starting again. It can be a very fast game, if you want it to be, or you can move through it as you like."

You can expect SUPERHOT in the next year, on both PC and Xbox One.