Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 340

You can now track the universal happiness bias, from social media to classic literature

Are you actually happy, or is that just your brain lying again?

Language's positivity bias proves consist across cultures and mediums.

Beat Blox is like real-life Patatap

The intuitive, color-soaked beat-making app Patatap is something we still think you should check out. Following in its footsteps is Beat Blox, a grad project by Swedish student Per Holmquist. His piece, created at the Beckmans College of Design, takes Patatap's tactility and fuses that with the much-vaunted (by your dad, while he looms before his chrome all-tube Marantz setup) realness of vinyl: you know, the warmth. The experience.

Beat Blox, in contrast to Patatap, acts as a sort of meatspace piano roll, the grid-based system of music making you can cue up in Logic or Fruity Loops. It's essentially like stretching and placing notes in a mosaic of pitch and duration—the Blox in Beat Blox trigger a sensor, which "reads" them as different sounds.

Combine that with three turntables and some eye-catching pastels and you're 90% of the way to a Dirty Projectors cover outfit right now. What's most interesting about Holmquist's creation is that there's no indication of what placing a block in a given spot will do. Like Patatap, it's a toy that relies on your sense of discovery. It assumes you want to explore its possibilities, so the moment when you make sense of its workings tastes all the sweeter.

Ollie is the future of toys and also probably of terrifying cats

Smart toys, dumb cats. 

Boy, there sure are a bunch of good-looking games for Gear VR

Samsung's surprise headset takes mobile games wide-screen. 

Solitaire.exe recaptures the magic of Windows 95

Enjoy Windows 95 from a new perspective, then destroy it.

Hug these cloud-like lamps into any shape and size

Watch these ethereal lamps be styled through hugs.

Hunting for witches in Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

The crossover mines uneasy territory.

Three new games to play this week

Featuring birds. 

The developers behind Monument Valley are making a VR game

Fleece jacket not included.

Ninety-four cameras paint an aging actor in 3D virtual reality

London multimedia design studio Marshamallow Laser Feast does it again.