Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 289

Let the inky dread of Renoir wash over you in its first trailer

Renoir is a bleak, brooding puzzle-platformer from the recently formed Czech studio, Soulbound Games. No, the name is not a reference to the French impressionist painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, nor his lush, saturated style. Nor is it a reference to his son, Jean Renoir, whose film La Règle du jeu the British Film Institute considers to be the fourth best of all time, and whose film La Bête Humaine is a cornerstone of the film noir style, to which the game clearly owes a lot.

Instead, the developer tells me, it’s both the name of the game’s gritty detective protagonist and a play on words (re-noir). They hinted at a few more possible meanings, but said those will have to remain hidden for the time being. Soulbound Games plans on launching a Kickstarter for their project later in the spring, at which time there’ll be more information no doubt. Until then, feel free to soak in the foreboding cityscape and gravelly voice over of the game’s first trailer.

homo synthetica talks human struggle with a sci-fi story

Insubordination in progress.

The virtual Batcave looks good—maybe even too good

When Batman: The Animated Series first aired on Fox, the only way for me to explore the Gotham City it displayed on my TV was with my imagination. Minutes after each episode ended, I’d run outside with a cardboard shield covered in aluminum foil and a bat insignia I’d cut from black and yellow construction paper. God knows what possessed me to run around my backyard flailing at invisible foes, but six-year-old me thought it was amazing. Had I been born twenty years later, none of this would have been necessary.

Rendering a child’s imagination quaint by comparison, Batman: The Animated Series is being adapted into an impressive virtual reality experience. Born of a collaboration between DC Entertainment, Blue Ribbon Content, and the cloud rendering company, OTOY, the project, “Will allow fans to explore a detailed adaptation of the original 1992 designs envisioned by series producer Bruce Timm,” and is being developed for the Oculus Rift and Samsung Galaxy Gear VR.

OTOY recently gave a preview of the adaptation at an event hosted by Stanford University, where Sam Register, President of Blue Ribbon Content, Warner Bros. short-form digital studio, said that “to experience that world as if you’re living in it” was “absolutely incredible” and that the demonstration helped validated the storytelling potential of VR technology. OTOY’s rendering of the Batcave apparently spans a million cubic meters (the approximate volume of a football field-sized box) and will feature voice work by Kevin Conroy, whose performances in the cartoon and Arkham series have come to define the character of Batman for an entire generation.

For six-year-old me, who only had Konami's The Adventures of Batman & Robin to explore the dark knight's world with, escaping to a VR re-creation of the show’s Batcave was literally the stuff of daydreams. But the true test will be in how well the project will be able to capture the iconic look of the show developed by producer Eric Radomski, translating it from 2D stills into a large, sweeping 3D space. The dark, noir-inspired backgrounds overlaid with the vibrant colors of a superhero comic book were an essential part of what made Batman: The Animated Series so striking to begin with, an effect that’s hard to recreate with the polish of new technology.

FLOMM! is the videogame modern artists wish they could've made

The war between modern artists and traditionalists gets a videogame.

An unusual Grand Rapids coffeeshop gets a videogame tribute

There's a building that has sat at the west end of Grand Rapids, Michigan for over a century. It used to be a bank but has since been transformed into a coffee shop called The Bitter End. It sells loose leaf teas, Ghirardelli mochas, and something called a "bulletproof Tibetan coffee." Its menu is trying to be chic as is the case with most modern coffee shops. But the shell of the building that houses all of these trade goods hasn't lost its history.

During the renovation, the owners dressed up those old bricks to fit the Neoclassical styling they would have worn when erected back in the 19th century. Walk inside and you're greeted with tin ceilings, porcelain tile floors, oak woodwork, and leaded glass windows. The intention, according to the shop's dated website, is to evoke a European ambiance: "dark and comfortable, the walls covered with distinctive and unusual artwork with a background of jazz, blues and folk."

Space Invaders realized inside a weird coffee shop. 

It comes as no surprise to me that artist, musician, and videogame creator Amon26 (aka Benjamin Braden) loves it there. The Bitter End is right up his alley. He's known in small circles for giving life to the creatures of his recurrent nightmares inside his games. Most of which share an interest in a rich, antique type of horror: snarling beasts and demons, the end of the world, visions of hell, unimaginable tortures. He patches it together with pixels that share palettes and themes with the hellish paintings of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Gustave Doré, and Francisco de Goya, all of who worked in and around the Neoclassicism movements that The Bitter End elicits.

"It's Jack Kerouac, it's James Dean, it's GG Allin and it's unlike any other place I have ever been," says Amon26 about the coffee shop, "and is filled with character, charm, and strangeness." It's also the inspiration and centerpiece for Amon26's latest game. Titled Mud Slinger, you play a woman called Annie who has just started working at The Bitter End. It's about the daily work of a barista, the endless parade of weird people at your cash register and their odd requests, as well as the rabid badgers that run rampant inside cafes.

Yeah, Mud Slinger isn't exactly a simulator. Instead, it's Amon26's spin on the peculiar character that The Bitter End embodies. This extends to the odd customers, which include robots that want their coffee like oil, and sharks out of water gasping for anything wet. You play it like you would an arcade shoot 'em up. So, shooting coffee at the customers as they snake their way from the front door to your position at the bottom of the screen behind the counter. They approach you staggered, dancing from left-to-right in rows that steadily increase in speed. Essentially, it's Space Invaders realized inside a weird coffee shop.

fling coffees rapidly as if your arms were machine guns. 

The power-ups that fall through the door are thrown out of car windows that speed along the road outside. There's a bag of cash that clears the room, what seems to be a knife you must avoid, and the badgers that bounce around like pinballs tearing people up. You also have a "BullShot" meter that fills up when you shoot customers. When it's full, you fling coffees rapidly as if your arms were machine guns. Apparently, the BullShot is one of The Bitter End's unique blends of coffee. "Yes, they do exist and yes, they are horrible," writes Amon26.

I have to wonder if the owners of The Bitter End will ever find out about this little videogame tribute to their quirky coffee shop. Mind you, judging by how outdated their website is they probably aren't too computer-savvy. Perhaps it's for the best that they avoid throwing virtual coffees at their customers, instead sticking to selling real espresso with a crusty bagel among the peculiar décor of that endearing old building.

You can purchase Mud Slinger for $1 on itch.io.

Dragon Age’s post-racial (high) fantasy

How Inquisition takes the politics out of race.

MIT is designing furniture that's smarter than we are

The new project at MIT's Self-Assembly Lab is a miniature chair that constructs itself.

Torrent culture realized as a terrifying cinematic mashup

"Omnipresent telecommunications surveillance gains a global face."

Westport Independent's latest trailer hints at the corruptability of media

"By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise." -Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

The Westport Independent, a censorship simulator about the power of press, recently got a new trailer that crackles with the corruption of old timey propaganda. An announcer boasts of the Loyalist government's soaring successes, spreading happiness to all "civilized" citizens of Westport. But by the end, the film implodes on itself, the simplistic world its propaganda spins going up in smoke along with it.

The game casts you as the editor of the last independent newspaper during a totalitarian post-war government. Using editorial tone, you can sway the public's opinion on both the Loyalist government and the rebel group. But whichever truth you print, your actions always come with dire consequences, for both for the city and your own journalists.

The latest trailer reads like a meta-commentary on the corruptibility of media as a whole. When film rose to become the twentieth century's first "mass medium," governments across the world quickly learned to utilize it as a form of crowd control. The new medium proved an ideal propaganda tool, already adept at spinning spellbinding illusions of reality to a public that hardly knew how to question its messages.

Though Westport Independent explores the transformative power of the press, it also warns that truth is never absolute, especially when it comes to the messages implicit in a medium itself.

The Westport Independent is slated for a 2015 Steam release, and will be available on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android. You can follow development through Double Zero One Zero's Twitter.

Sunless Sea is Heart of Darkness as written by H.P. Lovecraft

A chronicle of tragedies on the high seas.