Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 303

One chart shows why Dota 2 remains so popular

Droning on about the intricacies of Dota 2 is a sure-fire way to put the people around you to sleep. Sort of like listening to audiophiles argue over proprietary music formats, the way fans of Dota talk about Dota is is part of what makes the game seem impenetrable to outsiders. The patch notes for updates might as well be written in an alien language.

Thankfully, data engineer Joe Kelley found a more elegant way of representing the game and how it has changed over the past two years. Using statistics from datdota.com, Kelley graphed the changing rate at which different heroes were being picked or banned from play in professional matches. With 112 characters for players to choose from, it's interesting to see how certain ones remain relevant month after month (I'm looking at you Batrider) even while others are left virtually untouched (sorry, Warlock).

Though fans will debate the merits of who is and isn't getting benched, the chart makes clear why they stay devoted: Valve’s regular shake-ups have helped keep the experience fresh. The precipitous drop-off of one crowd favorite is replaced by the renewed viability of another. Coming back to Dota after a few months off is like picking up an entirely different game, which is probably part of why its player base keeps growing. You can't ever step in the same river twice, and so it is with Dota.

Check out the full interactive chart here. 

Watch the inevitable doom of your youth and aspirations in Armageddon

When graduating college felt like the end of the world.

Okay, fine: this robot is better at videogames than any of us

This year’s Awesome Games Done Quick charity event started on Sunday, and one team has already used a bot to put Twitch into Pokémon Red, and Super Mario Bros. into Super Mario World.

Usually, a Tool-Assisted Speedrun can only be accomplished with an emulator—the button-presses have to be frame-perfect, and at 30 or 60 frames a second, that’s way too fast for regular humans. The TASBot—mounted on an R.O.B. unit, of course—is a modified Super Nintendo controller designed for accomplishing Tool-Assisted Speedruns in the real world. The bot is attached to a computer, and inputs a list of pre-written button-presses with the necessary timing.

These two hacks work by breaking into the games’ raw data and re-writing it, giving the player total control. The Super Mario World hack covers the screen in projectiles, the types and positions of which are used to rewrite the game’s internal code. Last year, the team showed off a hack that let them play Pong inside Mario, but this time, well … take a look:

The Pokémon Red hack works because the game resets its memory at some point during a save, and if the game is turned off at the exact right moment during that reset, the hack can take advantage of a memory overflow that makes the game think the player has 255 pokémon and 255 items, their values made up of the game’s data. The hack can then re-write them with normal button presses, and turn them into the data necessary to run a Python script off of the computer (here a Macbook) that’s giving the TASBot its instructions, at which point, the crowd goes wild:

AGDQ lasts from January 4th to 10th and is broadcast on Twitch here. 

Mayday! Deep Space is your harrowing weekend odyssey

Get ready to wipe your iPad down, occasionally. 

Elegy for a Dead World gets you writing, but don’t expect more than that

A shortcut to the place where stories are created.

Pippin Barr made a sound system that's only as pretty as you let it be

Pippin Barr takes on Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. The results are as noisy as you want. 

The videogame that 19th-century high-society British people would've played

Find love in Solitaire with this historial romance fiction card game.

Recapturing the low-res horror of early 3D worlds

"I feel like I've been given the tools and powers of some half-crazed architecture-goddess, and I can reify any weird dream or vision I have. And I intend to."

NO FUN HOUSE is what happens when a net artist decides to break Unity

Embracing videogame failure with Cassie McQuater.

Five games we're looking forward to in 2015

From big-budget studios to a one-woman team in Japan, next year’s games will be full of surprises.