Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 318
November 6, 2014
Passing the time in This War of Mine
A harrowing game of war charts out a life of mundanity.
November 5, 2014
Another week, another Playlist roundup
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Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section.
WOAH DAVE! (iOS, PC/MAC, ANDROID, NINTENDO 3DS, PS4 & PS VITA)
BY CHOICE PROVISIONS
Meet Dave. Our hero is fending off aliens by throwing their eggs and glowing skulls. One day, he ... well, that's all there is in terms of story. Woah Dave! recalls the neon pulse of the arcade, with 8-bit graphics and a compulsive "one more turn" modus operandi. It also has a thing called "Bonkers Mode," which is hard to argue with. Eventually, you'll be saying "woah," too.
Perfect for: Those gifted with technicolor vision and lacking the coins to play arcade games all night.
Playtime: A few minutes at a time or all of the late 1980s.
DEPTH (PC)
BY DIGITAL CONFECTIONERS
Is there nothing scarier than deep sea diving with a 20-foot Great White? Maybe not if you’re armed with underwater assault rifles and explosive sea mines. Depth is a visceral, action-packed adventure that happens below sea level. Play as a treasure-hunting diver or a menacing Great White Shark—yes, you get to be the motherf***ing shark. It’s almost as horrific as Ecco the Dolphin.
Perfect for: Thrill-seekers, real-life divers, wannabe divers, anyone who has ever sympathized with the shark in Jaws.
Playtime: Long enough to kill or be killed.
DRIFT'N'DRIVE (iOS)
BY KIMMO LAHTINEN
Drift'n'Drive's title is succinct, but misleading: sure, you just drift and drive (and hit turbo), but how does that drifting and driving feel? The game's loose interpretation of physics rules the day. Slippery tires, destructible cars and fields of up to 32 drifting, driving, turboing opponents ensure consistent chaos, such that that simple title begins to feel like a sick joke.
Perfect for: Arcade racing fans, Initial D enthusiasts, people who had car carpet city as a child.
Playtime: Best in short spurts.
This videogame shows the beauty of disregarding photorealism
The only thing better than realism is surrealism.
When You're Gone, the game about breakup-purgatory
Or as we like to call it, Assassin's Creed: The Breakup.
This new art exhibit puts a human face on hard steel
The Barbican Centre, located on Silk Street in the City of London, is one of the largest performing arts centers in Europe. (The smallest is Captain Franko’s Fantabulous Flea Circus in Covent Garden.) Until January 11th, 2015, the venue is hosting an exhibit called “Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age” which, through over 250 works by 18 celebrated artists, seeks to explore the relationships that buildings develop with their surroundings, separate from the hyperfocused spreads of traditional architectural photography.
Constructing Worlds removes the architect’s ego
The display has been designed to communicate to people, not architects. In it buildings are portrayed in situ, not removed from life. Here’s an example from a fellow human being to ground the idea: In college I once attended a lecture given by a famous sculptor. His pieces were large public works, meant for community engagement, but not one of the 30+ slides we were shown depicted someone interacting with or even moving through the installations. Framing the works this way cloistered them in thought from their intended purpose.
The “Constructing Worlds” exhibit aims to address this issue in regard to infrastructure. Instead of shots that are cold and calculated and meant to sell you on a building conceptually, “Constructing Worlds” removes the architect’s ego and lets the world claim the work. The photographs capture the residual energy a building soaks in in the long-drawn presence of people. The exhibit does to concrete monoliths what your grandfather has done to his weathered recliner: Given it a human groove. With millions of people worldwide working in purposefully impersonal spaces, spending hundreds of hours a year in cubicles, maybe it’s time the skyscraper showed a little compassion.
More information and a list of the contributing photographers can be found on the Barbican Centre’s official site.
November 4, 2014
On Nintendo's new sleep monitor
Or: Does Mario dream of electric cheep-cheeps?
This thread devoted to videogame scanlines is a reason to wake up in the morning
"Scanline screenshot thread. Because 240p is all the p's I need."
Thus begins NeoGAFfer Peltz's thread devoted to capturing pre-HD games using pre-HD equipment. Now at 6 pages and over 250 posts, scanning through is a coffee-break-long crash course in the ongoing defetishization of high-definition equipment and resolution.
Like learning German to read Nietzsche's pure, unfiltered thoughts, this can all seem a bit ridiculous: finding beefy old cathode-ray-tube TVs and RGB cables in order to play games at a significantly less crisp image quality. But—like, say, learning German to read Nietzsche's pure, unfiltered thoughts—it's hard to argue with the logic that this is the way the games' original artists intended them to be viewed. As NeoGAF's OP Peltz puts it: "The scanlines add dimension and texture to the image that was intended to be there and which goes away when simply viewing raw pixel art in HD without them." Or, as our own Gareth Damian Martin put it: "That is beautiful, like an anti-Dead End Thrills."
The thread runs the gamut, starting with Super Metroid and Street Fighter and moving out through Chrono Cross, Snatcher, a whole lot of Castlevania, and so on. (Be forewarned that, as with most forum threads, the language and humor is occasionally puerile.) When you're done there, continue exploring the beauties of standard-defnition in our articles on this vintage "television for gamers" and the resolution wars over Silent Hill 2.
Sunset Overdrive thinks punk rock began with Blink-182
A Hot Topic universe.
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