Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 309

Finally, comeuppance for zoning out on mass transportation

Hereafter referred to as the tube. 

An interview with the late Ralph Baer, the father of modern videogames

Ralph Baer, the father of modern videogames, has a lot on his mind.

Introducing Aviary Attorney, a game about a bird lawyer

Hatoful Boyfriend goes to court. 

The triumphant return of 5734L3R, one of the most beautiful pieces of vaporware ever

Cyberpunk as a texture.

This glitch art recreates the hell of cubicle work

Glitch art comes in all shapes and sizes, and much of it is very, very bad. (Google it and you'll see a lot of low-rent ghost imagery and, um, that one dreamy picture of Kurt Cobain?) The work of Wayne Edson Bryan cuts a different figure, though. It starts with process: Bryan actually hand-makes the artwork, printing off paper, cutting and reassembling it back into sharply geometric, almost Mondrian-esque compositions. They're richly textured, evoking blown-out dot matrix printing and cathode-ray feedback in equal measure. 

While this inspires images of immense, three-dimensional collages, the actual works are only presented as digital replications of these montages. In other words: he makes these huge cut-and-paste "glitch" works, but all you'll ever see are pictures of them. Parsing the glitch-inspiration-to-real-world-construction-to-digital-presentation requires roughly four conceptual leaps, which I have not had the coffee for, but the method of their production is nevertheless like a panic-nightmare of a cubicle-job: all the printers aren't working, the keyboards aren't showing normal letters, and there's fucking glue all over the place. Still, the final works lack the damaged (or "spooky") tone of so much glitch art. There's something almost Talking Heads-ish about the way they rearrange the errata of corporate life into something architecturally profound. 

You can get a primer in the video below, but I prefer spending a bit more time on the stills. You can see a bunch over on Behance. 

P/D3 Glitch Collage Studies from Wayne Edson Bryan on Vimeo.

A quick update from the uncanny valley, courtesy of this Scottish Mafioso

“Just blink if yer gettin’ this.”

Devs With Ferguson bundle joins the national chorus of protest

Nine games for nine dollars for the Ferguson Public Library.

Conquest dives into the grim side of space exploration

For those that don’t have three hours to sit through Christopher Nolan’s bombastic Interstellar, Outlands may provide an alluring Cliff’s Notes.

The brief title gives its own interpretation of the dark side of space exploration and its victims. In it, you wander a planar base, waiting for a ship to arrive with the corpse of one of those victims; you spend time exploring and finding notes and other objects, but beyond that the place is a ghost town.

The base, you find, is essentially a grave, an expedition-gone-wrong like the Lazarus mission of Interstellar. In this sense, you’re sort of playing as (spoiler) Matt Damon’s character: waiting for more humans to arrive is an exercise in futility, according to Outlands. “You and I will probably be dead by the time it reaches the cemetery,” the developer wrote on GameJolt. A ghostly synthpop soundtrack from the Berlin-based producer Burai helps make all of that solitude and anxiety at least a bit funky.

This is the first-ever title from Outlands, who released it for free on GameJolt, Itch.io and IndieDB. They have said that there are “many more” games to come.

How four art kids from Melbourne created a bizarre new sport

Push Me Pull You came at its weirdness honestly.

Infini-Quest teaches us to focus on the journey, not the destination

You've done it, haven't you?

Of course you have—you're a human being, and more than that, one who has the spoils of modern living out to entertain you at every corner. It all became a noise to you at one point, didn't it? You were lost; tragically you'd say, in the toils of a life yet to be lived. And so you desperately sought a spiritual guide to put you on a path, to give meaning to your actions, to help you break the surface of the humming vacuum of automated sentience you were desperate to escape.