Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 325

A new game tackles The Secret, the Oprah-approved Satanist manifesto of our time

Will yourself to happy. 

I Am Dolphin is a videogame about exactly what it sounds like

No, really, it is.

Explore the vibrant ghetto of 1980's Brooklyn with Living Los Sures

Walk through Williamsburg when it was a home for the disenfranchised in the 1980's.

Here are a couple of lovely, surreal GearVR games to float through

Balthazar Auxietre, creative director and CEO of Innerspace VR, has emphasized his focus on having a user be able to “feel the space” around them, a sense of spatial presence that he says is the “magic” of virtual reality.

Two of Innerspace’s current projects, The Fifth Sleep and The Cave, were demoed alongside the Samsung GearVR at IFA Berlin in September, show the non-gaming possibilities for the unit. Auxietre wants to create this “magic” by making his virtual reality worlds feel like they have substance; that you can “feel” them and interact with them. The controls, or lack thereof, of both titles are similar: on-rails experiences, almost Disney World-esque, with minimal actual interaction with the game world. It’s more of a showcase for the visuals surrounding you while giving you a sense of spacial presence.

The Cave places you in prehistoric France in a search of cave paintings, while The Fifth Sleep has you take the form of Proteus, a nanorobot camera injected inside the human bloodstream, attempting to wake a patient up from a coma. Both games are short, around 5 to 15 minutes, but Innerspace plans on developing an hour-long episode series based on the same theme as The Fifth Sleep.

A third upcoming project, Playhead, looks to be their first dive into a world that you don’t just look at, but one that you can interact with and control. This musical interactive title allows players to directly influence the world around them, and in virtual reality, this could be the “magic” that Auxietre is talking about.

As we’ve mentioned previously, the Galaxy Note 4 powered GearVR has some impressive-looking titles in the works, considering the hardware behind it. But with Innerspace, the antiquated Epcot experiences of yore make their way to the living room, crossing the divide.

Shadow of Mordor shines, despite its Tolkien skin

Let the nemesis free.

Brother, groove with me in this VW van for a minute

Half a year ago, Brazilian animator Antonio Vicentini turned multi-instrumentalist and musical director Fernando Barba's song "Cheiro Verde" into a psychedelic animation following the magical trip of a morphing Volkswagen Bus (sometimes referred to as the "hippie wagon").

The song has an organic sound to it, containing the excitement of a naturalistic acoustic production; all mouth-clicks, hums, and claps. This gives it a fresh, almost spontaneous rhythm that changes and stops irregularly. Its textural bandwidth increases over time too, building towards its crescendo, with new voices and slapping sounds added gradually.

the VW Bus stretches its chassis and engorges its tires in dance 

Vincentini's animation, entitled "The Trip", personifies each of these new sounds as popping eyeballs and watchful tree-dwelling monsters, while also adding visible layers of bright color to the animation as the song's complexity increases. He also uses absurd movement to capture the song's energy: the VW Bus stretches its chassis and engorges its tires in dance, while a later scene sees several of the vehicle twirling up and down between a number of naked singing women.

Given the vivacity of the animation, matching Babar's eclectic sounds, it's no wonder why it became a Vimeo Staff Pick. It's also this liveliness, creativity, and all of it being framed as a multi-part trip in a magical VW Bus, that apparently made it ripe for being turned into a videogame.

Henry Gosuen's iOS and Android game The Trip isn't just based on Vincentini's animation, the animator himself has supplied all of in-game art. The result is an endless runner (or an endless driver?) in which you try to drive the VW Bus as far as you can. You do this by tapping your screen at the right time to make the VW Bus perform an utterly ridiculous series of somersaults into the air, neatly dodging other VW Buses and annoying eyeballs that can only sit and blink at you.

 

On the way, you'll also collect some shapes that morph the VW Bus, just like in the animation. So you'll grow wings and find stretched and distorted versions of the VW Bus blocking your air space. The other possibility is the VW Bus suddenly being on hydraulic stilts that you need to operate to dodge parked vehicles.

The videogame looks nearly exactly the same as the original animation, with the only caveat being that you have to perform well in order to see the more wacky material. It starts off tame, but soon you'll meet rainbow-colored jellyfish and the unmissable monsters that peek out from behind the trees. 

The Trip is quite the eccentric ride, then. It probably won't last you long, but it's significant if only for the multimedia transformation it has seen; from song, to animation, and now to videogame.

You can download The Trip for free on the App Store and Google Play.

What can Civilization V teach us about history?

Playing around with, you know, the story of humanity.

Five games that will look great on your iPhone 6

eBay is so sure your phone will sell, if it doesn’t sell, you will receive an $100 eBay coupon.

Mecca 3D allows Muslims to make a pilgrimage using VR

The hajj is one of the Five Pillars of Islam; it demands that all able Muslims make pilgrimage to Mecca at least once before they die.

That's kind of a lot to ask, I imagine, especially if you find yourself without the means. But what other choice does a devotee have?

Well, there's Mecca 3D, an app that aims to deliver "a virtual world of knowledge" about Mecca and Islamic history. You can hang around the Haram—the world's largest mosque—and interact with other worshippers, or "go back in time" to see how Muhammad and other prophets lived. And, of course, you can do it all via the Oculus Rift as well.

This is causing some controversy. While the developers at Brainseed Factory are nothing but earnest in their efforts, no one is really sure how to classify experiences of virtual worship. 

We've written before about spiritual experiences in World of Warcraft, when cognitive anthropologist Ryan Hornbeck cataloged a startling number of testimonies to the effect that WoW provides something like religious fulfillment for its most devout players. But WoW, of course, isn't Islam; it hasn't been around for 1500 years (yet).

It does, however, point to the capacity for transcendence in virtual experiences. Art in general is understood to have spiritual effects. The Stendhal syndrome (not that one) is essentially when an observer's emotional floodgates are opened before an artwork and they feel faint, confused, even experience hallucinations. 

Is it such a stretch to transpose that to a videogame—a form which incorporates so many other media into itself?

If that's too heady a justification, consider this: Mecca 3D and its ilk could allow non-able Muslims to make pilgrimage via virtual means. For anyone else, it provides a preparatory text for hajj and a tool for exploring Muslim history.

Here's everything you could ever want to know about Destiny's hair

Destiny was a beautiful game. I do not use the term lightly. In every tiny little way possible, the game was maximized for audio-visual spectacle. One of its most sumptuous details, though, was its attention on hair—which is not visible in the campaign, or in multiplayer, or on the pause screen, but exclusively at the Tower, the city-like hub that players sprint through, cashing in bounties and gearing up in the game's endless grind. 

But, hold on—let's not talk about the grind, let's talk about the hair, which is emblematic of all the things Destiny did right. They're ostentatious, wonderful hair designs, in a kaleidoscope of post-Katy Perry hues. 

And now here's a glimpse behind the curtain at the hairdresser at work: a 61-page document called "Hair in Destiny" by Bungie's character technical artist Natalie Burke. 

It starts off with the eternal question: 

Then we see the differences between generations of hair. At first it just seems like slightly more sheen, I guess:

But when the document gets more granular, we see that it's not just shininess that makes that hair look better, platform to platform.

Then it gets into a bunch of stuff about vertex movements, which is obviously not super exciting, but at some point in that span there's this slide, which makes it all worthwhile:

Then there's this slide, which I don't understand but I just enjoy the general attitude of:

And finally this tantalizing hint at the future of Destiny hair design:

Shine on, you crazy diamonds at Bungie, shine on.