Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 330

The worldly anxieties of Sam Farmer’s Last Life

Change is coming. What are you going to do about it?

Oldboy's legendary hallway scene, de-made as an NES game

The hallway fight scene in Oldboy is the stuff of legend. Park Chan-wook's 2003 revenge opus featured a lot of memorable moments, but for me at least the real sticking point isn't the holy-shit-no twist ending but the three-minute fight scene in the middle of the movie, in which Homerically beleaguered protagonist Oh Dae-Su introduces a hammer to the body parts of a whole gang of thugs. What's noteworthy isn't the violence but the manner in which Park Chan-wook filmed it: as a single take, with a writhing sort of kinetic energy in the performances that evokes a good Shaw brothers fight. You can watch the whole movie, if you haven't, here, but the relevant fight scene is below. 

PERFECT, RIGHT. It's visual poetry, but it's also a classic of Bad Ass Cinema: Oh Dae-Su essentially gets killed at the beginning of the fight, then surges back to life to kill everyone and everything with a knife in his back. 

All of which—particularly the combination of aesthetic beauty and violence—draw analogs to the world of videogames, so it's no surprise that the scene has now been de-made into an NES-style side-scroller by DavidDraws. You can play it here. It was produced as part of the Leamington Underground Cinema Festival, which held a side-contest for videogame adaptations. 

To be fair, Hammered does not exactly recreate the glory of the filmic version, but it also doesn't exactly try to (DavidDraws notes "with apologies to Park Chan-Wook" on the game's charming title screen). The filmed version is about bodies in motion as much as it is about bodies being hurt; the game is all stop, slam, and inch forward, jerky in every way. But it does one-up Spike Lee, who remade the scene with more cuts and jazzy camera moves, by paying homage to the essential videogame-ness of the original. The camera moves silently, impassively along with the action.

In some ways, all videogames capture this one-shot glory, showing a single actor performing incredible feats without breaks. Park Chan-wook's camera, like DavidDraws' and that of many videogames, remains detached, functional only, scanning lightly across the field in an attempt only to bear witness to the action. We agonize, then, in relation to the characters' trials. Oldboy was all about this agony, and Hammered, in its way, evokes that. 

New stealth game from ex-Lionhead devs features a graphical interface for the ages

Guards in stealth games are idiots. We already know this. You can fire a couple bullets into the drones of Shadow Moses Island and they'll respond with annoyance. You can unleash hell across the Hong Kong of Deus Ex and saunter into the police station a few minutes later. This is, of course, by design—stealth games require a certain amount of predictability—but masking and tweaking this idiocy is part of the fun of the stealth genre. Few games hit the right kind of dumb. 

The guards in Marvellous Miss Take (sic) still seem dumb, in other words, but there's a new layer on top of it, at least according to the video that the Lionhead ex-pats at Wonderstruck released last weekend. And that layer is a marvelously fluid graphical interface. The cones of vision remain quite literal but respond dynamically to cut-aways, doorways, waist-high pedestals, and so on. We view the action from the top-down, but it has a Frozen Synapse-like sense of architectural variance, and when several guards are looping about, their cones have a sloshing, fluid-like rhythm. Inasmuch as any stealth game is about feeling mastery within a very specific system, this looks like a good one, full of bobs and weaves. 

New stealth game game from ex-Lionhead devs features a graphical interface for the ages

Guards in stealth games are idiots. We already know this. You can fire a couple bullets into the drones of Shadow Moses Island and they'll respond with annoyance. You can unleash hell across the Hong Kong of Deus Ex and saunter into the police station a few minutes later. This is, of course, by design—stealth games require a certain amount of predictability—but masking and tweaking this idiocy is part of the fun of the stealth genre. Few games hit the right kind of dumb. 

The guards in Marvellous Miss Take (sic) still seem dumb, in other words, but there's a new layer on top of it, at least according to the video that the Lionhead ex-pats at Wonderstruck released last weekend. And that layer is a marvelously fluid graphical interface. The cones of vision remain quite literal but respond dynamically to cut-aways, doorways, waist-high pedestals, and so on. We view the action from the top-down, but it has a Frozen Synapse-like sense of architectural variance, and when several guards are looping about, their cones have a sloshing, fluid-like rhythm. Inasmuch as any stealth game is about feeling mastery within a very specific system, this looks like a good one, full of bobs and weaves. 

Now you can explore 2001's psychedelic "Star Gate" sequence

Black Hole Interior Explorer is as the title describes: awesome.

This interactive journal envisions what we'll all be dealing with as global warming continues

Natural disasters are not more resilient than the human spirit.

Twitch is worth a billion dollars, and Pewdiepie is a force for good (no, seriously)

What the Twitch acquisition says about spectatorship, interaction and play.

Simogo further teases their cryptic Device 6 follow-up The Sailor's Dream

How much is this? This is not much. 

But it's more of the new Simogo game, so we're into it. Today the Device 6 and Year Walk devs published a blog post that essentially says, "We've been quiet for awhile; the reason for this is that we've chosen to be quiet." It is not, in short, illuminating. However, they also dropped this teaser for The Sailor's Dream, which consists of a gruff male voice, pining for a lost "she," and a brief warble of romantic music. This appears to be a love story, in other words. If it's told with anything like the delicateness and nuance of their previous work, it could be mighty powerful.

They do note that they're "very far along with the project"—to the point of "polishing, testing and squashing bugs!" (emphasis theirs). 

Desolate is a hand-painted journey about fighting your inner shadows

Prepare to feel alone and terrible about yourself.

The stunning, sparse NaissanceE comes to virtual reality

Limasse Five's empty halls creep with life again.