Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 327

The corridor and the corner

P.T.'s greatest trick. 

Now seems like a good time to rewatch that 8-bit Twin Peaks intro

“...Every day, once a day, give yourself a present.”

Here sprawls Izle, which is some sort of fantasy No Man's Sky

Look, I think No Man's Sky looks great. I do. But I'm also a bit flabbergasted by it: I have never seen a game capture the popular imagination the way that one has. It comes up unbidden in most casual conversations I have with people about videogames. A big part of this, of course, is potential: there are a lot of sandbox-style games in the world, but few that so aggressively suggest that that sandbox in fact goes on forever. I think another huge part of it, though, is color. We want that world to go on forever; we want to believe that those arrangements of sky and flora and fauna will remain so vibrantly juxtaposed, on and on, forever.

The Parisian game Izle, due out next year, taps into both of those qualities, only with a fantasy veneer. Players hop from procedurally generated island to procedurally generated island, sussing out quests. Success means more and more "terraforming powers," leading to more islands to explore and modify and conquer. Eventually, just like No Man's Sky, players will interact with others, but that seems to be a minor part of a much larger universe.

And, most importantly, it's colorful but confident, at least in its early screens. Check'em out below, or over on the team's website. 

Rain World explodes with more slugcat .gifs

Rain World is part of an explosion over the past few years of games that express, through their pixel art, a very personal sort of fantasy. Along with Hyper Light Drifter, Witchmarsh, The Deer God, and Titan Souls, it sees pixel art not as cute but as ready for subversion, and an excuse to lavishly animate the living shit out of all on-screen characters.

All of which does not mean that Rain World isn't still also very cute, because: it is. I mean, these slugcats are pretty much made to be turned into plush dolls, which is good, because they are also actually being turned into plush dolls.

In the meantime, the game's designers have unleashed a flood of new .gifs of the game, documenting its development. Most notably, we have bats.

Lots and lots of bats. 

The update talks a lot about the game's transition out of Game Maker, which leads to more lovely, fluid animations. Like this'n:

The update also goes on to document a bunch of behavioral and level design progress they've made. One thing all of the games I listed up top have in common is that they're not released yet, so where this explosion goes remains to be seen. The revolution, at the very least, will be .giffed. You can check the rest of them out here.

Wrack evokes the greatness of shooters past

You have to keep moving and shooting, always.

Four Things I Learned While Writing a Book about Super Mario Bros. 2

Lessons from the frontline of Nintendo lore. 

Inside the cut-throat economy of Eve Online

All’s fair in love and space war.

Panzer Dragoon Saga: A Personal History

Exploring a world of shade.

Un Chien Andalou's eye-slicing scene becomes a videogame

"The goal is to give [the] player this short and strong experience of cutting [an] eye."

Recreate a 20-year-old joke in virtual reality, feel dead inside immediately afterward

A Night at the Roculus lets you slide a $350 virtual reality headset on and recreate that head-knocking Chris Kattan joke from mid-90s Saturday Night Live. It counts your "nods" and "pecks" as you jerk your head to the beat of the immortally corny track "What Is Love" by Haddaway. As Chris Kattan, et al, did 20 years ago. [Exuent readers.]

I mean, that's it. Yucks like this are as good as they are bad. On one hand, VR ought to be fun, and funny, and absurd; it ought to catch people's attention. And inasmuch as this encourages people to jerk their heads around while wearing a fetishized piece of equipment, risking breaking it, and flagrantly disregards the fact that moving your head around while in VR creates nausea, this is in fact funny. Because fuck the paradigm, right? On the other hand, of course, if VR is to succeed as a new medium, gimmicky stuff won't put up the best public face. Rather than doing something new with the technology, it laughs at the equipment. 

In the meantime, if you are the owner of several DK2 Oculus Rifts and are putting on an event in a public space, there are worse focal points for said event than this free game.