Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 314

7DFPS takes the "shooter" out of first-person shooter

"S can stand for a whole variety of things..." Pietro Righi Riva, creator of Mirrormoon EP, proposes in the 7DFPS keynote. He's referring to the "myth" that the 'S' in FPS (typically, first-person shooter) stands for "shooter," and only that. 

"...like First Person Shopping, or First Person Snokelling. First Person Soldering. First Person Space travelling. First Person Scissoring?" Righi Riva continues.

swap the 'S' in FPS for another word. 

Whether or not any of those who participated in 7DFPS this year took Righi Riva's proposition into consideration when creating there entries is unknown. However, if you were to play some of these first-person games you'll find many that consciously swap the 'S' in FPS for another word.

Below is the second part of our 7DFPS roundup. Most of which do without shooting and, instead, employ surfing or sailing, or another 'S' word instead, and to a commendable result. Once you've played through these, see what else you can find in the rest of the 7DFPS 2014 games.

Frail Shells

I know what you're thinking. And no, I haven't tripped at the first hurdle. Sure, that's a screenshot of Frail Shells that contains enemies with guns shooting at a player who also holds a gun. It looks just like any other first-person shooter out there. I feel you.

But this isn't what it looks like. I'm going to save myself by saying that Frail Shells is best described as first-person shellshock. It starts off with you being dropped off into a war zone by yourself, against dozens of enemy soldiers. When you eventually pick enough of them off, you can find your friend that you came to save, standing on a sandbank with a machine gun, recreating many a scene in Schwarzenegger's many action movies.  

But then the game switches gears entirely. You're in bed, your alarm clock beeping you awake, and the noise of bullets and death is absent. It seems you've left the war zone to the past, your memories. But as you eat breakfast and go to work, the rifle comes back to haunt you, until...well, you can find that out yourself.

S for Surfing

First-person surfing? First-person surfing! Why not? This is no seaside simulator, though. S for Surfing places you inside a Hawaii-printed vertical tunnel realized in sky blues and sunshine yellows. At its bottom is a pink pool infested with sparkling blue dolphins. A supersaturated, shimmering tune with a distinctly Japanese summertime twinkle to it brings sonic happiness to the scene.

Your goal here is to perform tricks to amass a numbered score. But there's no insistence on adhering to this mission and no end. So you focus on creating waves by pointing a finger at the rosy waters, using your other hand to attract hoops and seaside icons to your board, bumping you up further into the air.

Before long you're wrapped up in the saccharine feel of it all. Perhaps too much: if you spin and flip enough, bouncing higher and higher, you move through the borders of the tunnel and into the void. But the tunnel has a magnetic pull, yo-yo'ing you up and down in the fray, uncaring for boundaries and rules. You're out of control and it feels great. That's what surfing is all about, isn't it? 

Ocean Highway Patrol

You and a buddy (or you can play it solo) are sea cops in Ocean Highway Patrol. You are looking for speeders, that is, people who are breaking the speed limit in their speed boats.

On the left, one of you has control of your boat with a wheel and accelerator. On the right, the other has a speed tracker and a gun. That's all you need. You begin by finding the population of boaters for this day, presumably lured by the turquoise, pink, and green filter of this place. Once found, you watch them like a hawk, begging them to give you a reason to give chase as if your name was Dirty Harry.  

Then, one of them does. The tracker reads "44" and your sirens instantly kick into action. You have no way to arrest this law breaker, and the only tool to hand is a gun. BANG, BANG, BANG. You shot the boat until it blew up. "Now," you say, "who else wants to speed on these waters today?"

BLADBLAZERS

There are times in a typically mundane life when the opportunity to pretend you have a gun in your hand arises. One of those times is when you find yourself armed with a leaf blower with a whole army of leaves to blow away at your foot. In that moment, you can snatch the opportunity and become a war hero worthy of a whole chest of medals.

So you two-hand the leaf blower, start it up, and point its barrel to the ground. The leaves have no idea what they're in for. 

This is where BLADBLAZERS picks up. You're given waves of leaves to clear from your lawn. Every now and then, just when you think you've cleared a decent hole between the autumnal colors, trash cans throw more on to the pile. If you're the type of person who has to clean everything they see, perhaps even obsessive with it, this will scratch an itch over and over. 

Oh, and there are also rockets in this game, but you'll get to them later.

Squid Squad!

Bet you didn't think of this one: first-person squid. Yep, imagine Octodad in a first-person perspective, but instead of chores you're shooting robot schoolgirls. I can't tell you whether or not this is derived from Japanese tentacle erotica. Maybe.

This is best played with as many people, and as many computer mice or gamepads, as possible. You'll each control a single tentacle attached to the squid that you embody. These tentacles flop about weird and boneless as they should. When you've stopped staring at them out of gross fascination, you should find that you can use these tentacles to pick up the knives and guns scattered around the school.

Attacking won't be your problem once you've armed your tentacle, moving will be. It turns out that you need to press both buttons to pull your squid body around. This is why it's best to have a few of you playing it; one of you concentrating on moving, the others shooting the schoolgirls that attack you.

Nauticalith

We finish up our coverage of 7DFPS 2014 with a game that you can play forever, if you wish. There's no shooting here, only endless sailing and survival. You start where all journeys do: at home. Grab a bite to eat as you leave the door, and then leave it all behind as you hop into your own sailing boat. 

As you sail with or against the wind, which varies your speed, you'll cruise across the ocean as remote islands, arcs of rock, and empty settlements are procedurally generated. You can go wherever takes your fancy, getting lost whether you mean to or not, guided only by your curiosities.

You're not entirely carefree, though. The gulls that call out above seem to act as warnings. The sky constantly pours thick droplets from the sky. It's always gloomy here. The surroundings speak of their own harshness, preventing you from getting caught up in the pleasure of sailing on an ocean alone. And, indeed, you have to routinely stop off on land to find food and, hopefully, shelter for the night. 

LittleBigPlanet 3 is full of toys and joy

Media Molecule moves beyond floatiness.

The Blue Flamingo is a diorama come to life

In the seventh grade, I had to make a diorama for a class project, and being on a complete kick of Crimson Skies: High Road To Revenge, I opted to craft something that involved lots and lots of fighter planes.

Might and Delight seems to have been on the same wavelength with diorama-incarnate The Blue Flamingo, except with a professional touch and a lack of amateurish glue marks, and that they made a videogame out of it. The Swedish developer is known for their artistic touch and physical-meets-digital aspect of design, with the concept of Pid coming from paper cutouts. This time around though, the physical element is the star.

This aviation shoot-em-up delights in showing the method of its creation: handcrafted models make up the majority of the graphics, and the effects, such as explosions, were created with various pyrotechnics like firecrackers.

The human touch warms up the game’s look, as it did in LittleBigPlanet, the upcoming Lumino City, or the recent Swapper. The juxtaposition of chaos going on in the air with the pleasant backdrops and little cars merrily going about their own carefree business on the ground makes it oddly pleasing to watch.

Check it out on Steam.

Shopping for real estate and men with Taylor Swift

Haters gonna hate. Daters gonna date.

To Azimuth is the alien abduction story you can believe in

Explore the human aspect of an alien abduction in a sleepy Alabama town.

The violent, lonely minds of Grand Theft Auto 5

Notes from the bleeding edge of reality. 

This is the Battle Against Ebola Simulator 2014

Seattle-based med-tech startup Shift Labs held a hackathon last month where a mix of 40 game designers and clinicians collaborated on a simulation that replicates an ebola treatment center in Liberia. The WHO-endorsed simulation could be used to prepare health workers for the rigorous procedural stressors they would face in West Africa, where every action has to be appropriately measured to avoid infection, right down to removing a hazard suit’s gloves (Of which there are two layered sets that both need to be cleaned and purified in chlorine.)

The simulation is less geared toward mental and emotional preparedness, which it could never achieve, than technical preparedness, which it very well could achieve. As players walk through a roughly-textured triage ward, they are warned of various health code violations that could result in transmission of the virus. The extent of the cautionary measures that these medical professionals must operate under is unthinkable. Something as simple as sitting on the edge of a previously-occupied bed is a cause for alarm, as viral particles on a mattress can be carried on a protective suit’s plastic and infect the wearer upon removal.

Perhaps the most affecting part of the simulation is the almost palpable steam that fills up the screen, something doctors who don’t work in 90 degree heat and 90 percent humidity in awkward and restrictive protective gear might not be used to.

This interview with the CEO of Shift Labs, Beth Kolko, highlights what was acheived at the hackathon and shows prototype Unity engine footage at the two minute mark.

So many of our interactions with the world are unthinking: Blinking, breathing, sitting, touching. If there’s sweater fuzz in your friend’s hair you pick it off like your simian forebears. If a loved one loses their job you offer your condolence with a warm hug. When it’s time to exchange some bodily fluids with your significant other you do so eagerly and passionately in throe, a state we prize as instinctual and of-the-moment. So often thought is secondary; we just do. An outbreak of a highly-infectious disease like ebola changes all of this. Thought must come first. Precaution must outweigh affection. You have to leave that fuzz in your friend’s hair.

More information on the Ebola Digital Training Tools can be found on Shift Labs’ blog. An open fundraiser can be found on-site.

Nintendo has ripped open a transdimensional wormhole and nothing is safe

We ponder the implications of Link in Mario Kart.

7DFPS is an essential rethinking of the first-person shooter

The mission that fuels 7DFPS (7 Day First Person Shooter) is one that desires to see what else can be achieved with the first-person shooter format. 

For most of its existence, the first-person shooter has been restricted to shooting aliens, or Nazis, or another terrifying or despised Other. This is established and engrained within the genre so deeply that, for some, it's near-impossible to imagine a first-person shooter as being anything that doesn't reflect its past. 

what else can be done with a first-person perspective and a bit of imagination 

So a bunch of creators come together, or work by themselves, for seven days to create something wild and beautiful, something different, within the first-person shooter genre. Some of the games don't even have shooting. It's shocking, I know.

Previous years have birthed titles like the gun fumbling Receiver and the slow-mo bullet-dodging SUPERHOT, so this year we're hoping to see what else can be done with a first-person perspective and a bit of imagination. Below is a revolver's number of standout games created for this year's 7DFPS, at least, out of those that we've played. Oh, and this is only Part 1; a second part is incoming.

Porapora

Imagine if, instead of being confined to an island, the magical musical woodlands of Proteus unrolled like an endless carpet as you traipsed along it in wonder. That goes some way to describing Porapora, although it also dismisses its own pleasant idiosyncrasies, such as the polka-dot tree trunks and twinkling flower bunches.

Playing it comes with the feeling of being perpetually lost, but where there might be fear (this is the woods after all), there is instead delight and surprise. This is especially true if you make an effort to bump into the trees, and to walk over the darkened piles of leaves on the ground, as nature here seems to be short-sighted, reserving its sweet sounds until its sure of your presence upob physical contact.

It's as if it knows how gorgeous its own pastel plumage is, and doesn't want any old nature stroller to hear its song, only you.

Wing || Chun

Why shoot someone when you can have a more equitable contest of fisticuffs? Yes, let's hearken to those times when disputes could be settled by messing up each other's faces with knuckle-to-nose blows, rather than getting deadly. Considering the firearm was first invented by the Chinese in 10th century AD, that means we're going back a long time. 

Wing || Chun is a bare first boxing game played in first-person. That makes it similar to Beast Boxing Turbo and Zeno Clash. Except it's more quickfire than those games, and getting the living shit beaten out of you is as disorienting as it should be here. You have to control two hands, moving them around the screen to block incoming punches (which you cannot anticipate), and throwing your own fists in at whatever angles you can find. 

It's not easy as winning comes down to blind luck. But even losing can be fun due to the psychedelic visual effects. Get punched enough and the whole screen spins into an indistinct blur, and new colors are added to the pallette, presumably due to a slipped optic disc. You'll occasionally see a fist connecting with your face during this but won't feel the impact. Not long after that it'll be lights out for you until you try again. And you will, with a teeth-gritted determination. 

You'll need a gamepad to play this one. 

Photobomb

Photobombing is one of those activities that has always been around (well, at least since cameras were invented), but the internet has since made it its own by giving it a name. The creators of Photobomb didn't make a game about jumping inconveniently into the background of other people's photos (although that might be fun). They've used it only as a pun.

In the game, it's your job as a "Media Peace Officer" to scan images posted on social media in order to find out who planted a bomb that was detonated in a busy city center. (There's the pun) While this may sound like a dream job to all you who are obsessed with crime fiction while also being a Facebook addict, it proves stressful.  

You're given a time limit to match up the photos on the left of the screen to your view within the 3D scene to the right. You've got to work fast and thoroughly to find the criminal among the crowds of people. If you don't, you'll end up killing the wrong person when the suspects are lined up for you to shoot after your time is up. 

If this sounds like an inefficient and terrifying way to resolve crimes to you then you're living in the right world. But, for the purposes of this game, this method works... just about.

GAME OF THE YEAR: 420BLAZEIT vs xxXilluminatiXxx [wow/10 #rekt edition] - Montage Parody The Game

Rather than taking the opportunity to see in what other directions the first-person shooter could be taken, Andy Sum decided to hold a mirror to what it already is with his 7DFPS entry. It throws a lasso around the hype culture, highlight kill montages, and product tie-ins that comes with, say, the Call of Duty series.

You take up your Mountain Dew Ghetto Blasta to perform "no scopes" on your enemies. To regenerate health you ingest copious amounts of Doritos and Mountain Dew. And every time you shoot an enemy to death you have hyperbolic praise of your skill thrust into your face, it ringing out in the form of a meme, gif, text, or sound bite. Usually it's all four, it taking over the screen as a cacophony of energy. Sonic the Hedgehog runs across the screen to his theme tune, the sound of a loud and excited kid taken from a video clip shouts "oh my god!" and words such as "rekt" and "u wot m8" flash up.

At one point you enter a room in slow-motion, dubstep blaring in the background with a wobbly, grouchy bassline, and everything you shoot turns into a rainbow explosion. And that's happening behind everything else that's busy telling you how great you are, and how extraordinary this experience apparently is, it all turned up to 11 by this point, perhaps beyond.

The parody here targets the overstated achievements and power fantasy of the most popular first-person shooters. It ramps up their bombastic aspirations and how their players react to them with such aggression and dramatized celebration to an absurd degree. Funny thing is that in emulating these games it finds the same appeal they satiate, even outdoing them, becoming like a drug rush that you need again and again.

IBISCVS SVNRISE

As with GAME OF THE YEAR: 420BLAZEIT above, IBISCVS SVNRISE wins most of its points on style. Rather than teenage guffaw, though, when you shoot your gold-coated revolver, pink hibiscus blossom from the sides of the screen. It's a luxurious shooter in flower pinks and velvet purples; a floral décor, giving the impression of a ritzy and glam aesthetic.

There are multi-colored pyramids in the distance, a fountain at its center, and fancy Greek pillars at its borders. Your mission is less elegant and rich: shoot the cherubs that run about the place. Some of them glitch and teleport you to god knows where. This is a deliberate effect. The others physically blow apart into fragmented angelic bodies.

More is yet to be done on IBISCVS SVNRISE but it's worth playing purely for aesthetic reasons.

Endless Express

Rather than shoot a gun, when pressing the left mouse button in Endless Express you look at the time on your wristwatch. If you wish to get back home, you'll need to keep referring back to the watch as you attempt to parse a train timetable. 

The premise is here that you've fell asleep on the train and wound up at an unknown train station, nowhere near your destination. It's one of those nightmares that frequent travellers have, as I found out earlier this year while catching trains around Europe, mostly clueless as to where I was.

Speaking of nightmares, Endless Express is, well, it isn't nightmarish as such, but it does have a dreamlike quality. I'd even go so far as to say it qualifies as magical realism. As you hop from train-to-train you'll find that each train station isn't... usual. They're in the middle of lakes, or located in the treetops of a misty forest.

Whereas Kentucky Route Zero plays tricks with secret roads, Endless Express gives train tracks and their stations a supernatural quality. Being lost is adverse to your objective but it's the most enjoyable way to blitz through the game.

Jonathan Blow "names" next title "Game 3," may take 20 years to create

"Be like Gravity's Rainbow," Blow says.