Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 274

Kirby creators try a new shape in BoxBoy

Along the way, they evoke Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times.

AUX B makes a puzzle out of our electric wire-infested lives

Behind my television is a snake nest of electronic cables. I put it there. These coiling black and gray wires feeding the sockets in my wall, powering the appliances deemed necessary in my life; an unkempt pile of synergized technology. Likewise, the innards of my PC that I precariously clasped and inserted is a tiny metropolis of circuitry and overlapping leads. I have to maintain all of these cables, remember what goes where, all in order to keep it functioning.  

This is not unusual. I am not an engineer with years of training operating a space station. We're all used to this by now. As the snail that transports its shell around with it, we bag and bundle our electronics and all their interstitial media every time we move home. Intrinsic to this is going through that hellish, fiddly process of plugging everything back in. How many times have you had to rewire your possessions? Ugh.

"a labyrinth...Not of walls, but of cables." 

It's this that Christian Schnellmann's iOS and Android puzzle game AUX B emulates. He drew from the challenges that face the audio engineers at the B-Sides Music Festival, held every June in Lucerne, Switzerland. As with most music festivals, they have tons of equipment to set-up, all of it connected by cables. If any one of these isn't plugged in correctly then the loudspeakers remain silent. The festival would be as good as dead—its ignition relies upon all the laborious untangling and solving the puzzle of wires that follows it.

In AUX B, Schnellmann pares this down to a single speaker. You have to use audio jacks to connect the socket at the top of the screen to the one at the bottom. In between is a grid of holes, all of them a possibility as you try to configure a path downwards, transferring power from one section to the next. "It's a labyrinth," Schnellmann says. "Not of walls, but of cables." Sometimes, after minutes of head-scratching, you get close to completion, perhaps one connection out, then you realize you've ran into a dead end and have to unplug everything to start over.

(B-Sides Music Festival 2014, photos from Instagram)

It's not as dejecting as it may sound. When you draw the wires with your finger, from one socket to the next, it appears as if by magic like a thick rubber snake. And if you take one end out its home the body flops around with a delightful droop. Then there's the satisfaction of figuring out the correct arrangement of interlaced wires, triggering the speaker to belt out the music you've facilitated.

If the promise of an energetic tune isn't enough to pull you through all 80 of AUX B's levels, then there is another incentive. Schnellmann is actually working with the organizers of the B-Sides Music Festival to give away three 3-day tickets to any one who completes the game before May 15th 2015. So if you're free from June 11-13, and call yourself a music lover, consider giving this smartphone puzzle game a shot.

You can download AUX B for free on the iOS App Store and Google Play. You can find out more about the B-Sides Music Festival on its website.

Republicans conquer the White House, at least, in The Sims they do

The creepy worlds of politicians and The Sims united.

Magic Shot brings the chaos of the computer glitch to French billiards

Shooting with the clarity of a drunk pissing into the brown-green water of a night club's toilet bowl, my pool game has always been effervescent. While my friends seem to play on a smooth cloth-covered table, one primed for cue sports, when it comes to my single turn (for I will rarely, if ever, bring ball to pocket), it is as if I am trying to trail Noah's Ark across the cataclysmic seas that churned up the Earth and all its beings. Balls are spat from the table's perimeters at the end of my cue as if it were a magician's wand. A friend brought his goalkeeper gloves to one of our pool games once. It was a mocking joke at my expense but the gesture wasn't out of place.

Nerial, the London-based team that created Magic Shot, must be out of their minds, then. To offer me a go at their wild take on French billiards, which warps the edges of the table into splats and distressed polygons while you play, is to put dynamite in a room with nitroglycerin and light the fuse.

the outline fidgets, or wriggles, or stretches 

As with any game of French (or carom) billiards, the idea is to strike the white cue ball so that it makes contact with both the red and yellow ball. It's a game of pared-down challenges; trick shots, perhaps. Doing this typically requires that you rely on the angles that the table's cushioned edges provide upon rebounding the ball. Magic Shot, quite simply, allows the table to relax its strict, rectangular form as you make your shots.

With each successive shot you make—a tune of two beats with each ball hit—the outline fidgets, or wriggles, or stretches its perpendiculars into curly squiggles. The colors around the sprawled, violent geometry also flips to give a better sense of change and progression. The cherry on top is that each one of these new shapes is assigned a city's name, such as Swindon, or Brazzaville. These are there, it would seem, to suggest that you're on a journey. Your vehicle is billiards, and with it you are moving between abstract top-down views of metropolitan areas, fueled by each clinking ball-to-ball marriage.

This, however, is only the beginning. More specifically, it's a description of Magic Shot's "Meditation" mode. Yes, this is supposed to be relaxing. To Nerial's credit, it kinda is: there's no restrictions on your shots, no score to chase, you only move through the levels and at your own pace. With 2763 levels in the Meditation mode alone, it bears some of the same qualities (and appeal) that last year's Desert Golfing does. It's a clean, consistent, and simple take on a sport; all that needs change from level-to-level is the terrain and the position of the goal. And you can play it in short or long sessions, over a period of time, it becoming a regular habit integrated into the rest of your busy life.

it plummets into the noise. 

Where Magic Shot deviates is in its other two game modes: Purity and Insanity. Purity is the same as Meditation except that it gives you a limited number of balls to work with. With each wasted shot you come closer to the Game Over screen. There is a score to chase here too. But Insanity mode is where it's at. This is the invisible, tumultuous form that the pool table takes when I attempt to shift spheres over its thrashing surface. But now you can see it.

There's a countdown timer that issues you 100 seconds to gain as many points as possible in the same way as in the other two game modes. Except here the challenge escalates as the game seems to rip itself apart. At the start, you'll notice that the shape of the playing space warps as before but without requiring your input. It begins its arresting dance. As the seconds fall away the screen emerges as a frenzy. The table tantrums as colors bleed into each other, its bold outlines fritz into screwed-up tangles that don't know how to stay still. By the last seconds there's nothing you can do: the entire screen is out-of-control, hitting the zenith of its angst as it shreds everything in its grasp.

Of course, it's all glorious to me. This is my playing field. This is where I swim, and eat, and play pool. The chaos eats at my fingertip as I pull back a line that will hit the cue ball at maximum power. I let it go and it plummets into the noise. I have no idea where the ball landed, or if it hit the red and yellow ones along the way, and it doesn't matter. Everything is out of bounds now. This is the point at which sport resigns itself to the wonder of magic.

You can purchase Magic Shot for $2.99 on the App Store.

Remembering the obscure PlayStation game that just wanted you to play

Where most games encourage play with open worlds, Boku no Natsuyasumi promotes it through careful structure.

Drizzify your life with a Drake-themed search engine and mobile game

Here's a Drake-themed search engine and mobile game you never knew you needed

The striking darkness and illusory light of White Night

A good mashup, but not quite a great one.

Iconic 20th century art is being turned into a series of experimental videogames

When Russian artist El Lissitzky printed his 1920 Soviet propaganda poster "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge," he had no idea it would become iconic. It was its bold symbolism that did the trick. The Russian civil war was reduced to a potent display of shape and space. The Bolsheviks were represented by a violent-red triangle that had stabbed the softer, pale circle of the anti-communist White movement. It was easily overlooked in Russia itself, but western media utilized the poster as a symbol of Russia's inner struggle, finding its simplicity and blunt imagery an effective educational tool.  

More recently, that same poster of Lissitzky's and its Suprematist form—the Russian abstract art movement it belongs to—have been re-purposed once again. This time it has been adapted into a videogame. No, really: you play as the red wedge and must recreate its violent assault on the white circle to complete each level. So, not only is it thematically identical, it also retains the look of Lissitzky's poster due to having been produced with paper cut-outs arranged in the same Suprematist style.

"explore new art production techniques using real-world artist materials" 

The game is called Lissitzky's Revenge on account of it being based on the artist's work, as well as being an adaptation of the 1982 arcade game Yars' Revenge. It starts with you having to keep the triangle within cross-hatched pieces of material that move across the screen in order to charge enough energy for a dash that will destroy the circle. During this, the circle fires Russian words at your triangle in an attempt to keep you back. In more challenging levels, you first need to reveal the position of the circle by transporting squares to its position, while simultaneously safeguarding the squares from their various vulnerabilities. 

At its surface, Lissitzky's Revenge is yet another action arcade game with a compelling conceit. But if you're aware of the context behind its imagery, and what the shapes represent, it has a deeper meaning. And this isn't a repeated case of how people have forced an interpretation of Tetris over the years, it apparently being representative of communist ideals—a game in which you try to fit irregular shapes into patterns that cuts them into equal parts of a singular mass. No, Lissitzky's Revenge is overtly political from the ground up.

However, the purpose of its creators isn't to update the 1920 Soviet propaganda it takes as its source for today's population. In fact, they state what their intention is quite clearly on the game's page: "The purpose of this project is to explore new art production techniques using real-world artist materials to determine the viability of such methods in common game production."

Lissitzky's Revenge is part of a wider ambition called the Atelier Game project, which takes its name from the "atelier" learning method by which an apprentice studies fine art under a master artist. The relevance of this name is another part of what is actually the project's three main goals. The first we've already covered. The second objective is to encourage those creators to get involved in videogame production who wouldn't usually, and without having to use traditional skills or even the tools that are typically associated with it.

a political cartoon game made with pen and ink 

The question is: if adapting the art work of 20th century artists, making it digital and interactive, is enough to make a videogame (as the Atelier Game project hopes to prove), will talents from other creative fields be more inclined to experiment with the medium? The answer is unknown right now but it will hopefully be a yes. To this end, the Atelier Game project will continue to make games in the style of Lissitzky's Revenge. The next one is already underway, in fact, it being a political cartoon game made with pen and ink, and that should be out this May.

Once all the games are finished, the plan is to then exhibit them alongside the original media they have been adapted from, so as to further push that second goal. And even if the first and second aims of the project are undetermined in their success, the third one has already been achieved. That being to "create unique art-based games." 

You can play or download Lissitzky's Revenge for free on Game Jolt. More about the Atelier Game project can be found out here.

Kawiteros to bring Mexico's iconic Huichol art and shamanism to videogames

An evolution in native Mexican art.

The unconscionably rich world of Axiom Verge

Tom Happ’s passion project is more than the sum of its influences.