Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 342

A robot as a coworker isn't actually as terrifying as it may seem

robots are our friends!

Here comes a touch-screen Super Meat Boy

On August 19th, wunderkind duo Team Meat announced they would be unveiling a new game at PAX Prime 2014 called A Voyeur for September. This was surprising for two reasons: first, everyone assumed Team Meat would be showing up with Mew-Genics, their mad scientist/cat lady simulator. Second, this new project claimed to be a “live-action stealth game,” its announcement accompanied by a 55 second video that looked like it took even less time to shoot and edit.

Immediately after the teaser was released, the internet figured out that A Voyeur for September was an anagram for Super Meat Boy Forever. And while reactionary gaming rumors are largely bunk, this one was on the money.

Just outside the Indie Megabooth at PAX Prime, Team Meat is currently showing off Super Meat Boy Forever, a sequel to the seminal 2010 hit Super Meat Boy. The sequel brings back all the now-classic tropes of the Meat Boy universe. The most important difference is that Forever is being developed primarily for tablets. (It'll also appear on Steam.)

“In two ways it’s a challenge,” says Tommy Refenes of Team Meat. “Can we make Meat Boy on a tablet? And can we make a game on a tablet that feels like a full game, not a one-off app that you download for free and forget about.”

What’s most striking about playing Super Meat Boy Forever on a tablet is how clean and organic it feels. 

For Refenes and co-developer Edmund McMillen, meeting that challenge meant maintaining the mechanics and aesthetic that made Super Meat Boy so addictive, while taking advantage of gameplay only a tablet can offer. In other words: a game that flows like a one-button Super Meat Boy.

The result looks to be exactly that. The two levels made available on the PAX floor (one Light World, one Dark World) show off the new side scrolling, endless runner in the vein of Bit.Trip Run and Temple Run. Players touch and swipe their way over and under buzzsaws, up vertical shafts, and across giant chasms. Even though moving to tablets promises a wider audience, one potentially comprised of players both younger and older than the average Super Meat Boy pro, Team Meat definitely didn’t soften up the difficulty. I probably died 50 times before giving up on the first level.

What’s most striking about playing Super Meat Boy Forever on a tablet is how clean and organic it feels. There are no buttons on the screen to mash, no busy map or score counter. The primary colors of the Super Meat Boy universe really pop. It’s almost as if it was meant to be played on touchscreen.

“My personal problem with a lot of iOS games is you’re trying to smash a square peg into a round hole,” says Refenes. “You should design for the platform. You should design to the strengths of what you’re making.

In terms of size, Team Meat plans to make SMBF comparable to the original, with expected features such as daily challenges “to keep people coming back.” No official release date has been announced yet.

The robots know what we're feeling now

Robots can now read frowny faces.

Harmonix envisions a 1990s futurescape in A City Sleeps

I envision a short-hair-era Angelina Jolie gliding in on a hoverboard, clad in Chemical Brothers-orange cargo pants, to deliver this idea to the minds of Harmonix Studios. Their surprise announcement of A City Sleeps is a gnarly throwback to all things '90s: Treasure-style shooters, a character named Poe, an Aeon Flux ink style, the notion of electronic music as a sci-fi savior. There's nothing coy or winking about their evocation of the Wipeout era, which is what sells it, or, really, any other "retro" styled thing. 

Due out this October, the game has you entering the dreams of a city's inhabitants to make hot beats, or something. The Steam page warns that a "Microsoft Xbox 360® Controller for Windows® (or equivalent) is strongly recommended," which, along with the trailer, seems to warn of some real bullet-hell shit.

Can I fit a Toonami reference into this thing? You can preorder it on Steam now. 

Awesome scientists trying to figure out if we live in a hologram

Most people will not argue with you when you say that we live in a digital society. But the world we live in might actually be a lot more digital than we know. It might be digital to the point where the whole thing is actually just a really complicated hologram. That’s not a very complicated and unnecessary retelling of the allegory of the cave: We might live in a world where our reality is composed of tiny bits that’s sort of projected onto something else.

A new experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory aims to figure this out. Led by theoretical physicist Craig Hogan, the director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, the project will attempt to discover the limits of how much information is actually stored by the universe. Using Fermilab’s Holometer, a holographic interferometer, to measure “quantum jitter,” Hogan hopes to learn whether or not there is fundamental background noise in our reality, something that is simply a fact of space time.

Finding such a noise would be the first step towards proving something known as the “holographic principle,” which is the belief that our world is sort of “printed” onto sheets of light, just as the monitor you are currently reading this on uses pixels to create an image. Currently. the prevailing notion is that any background noise is the product of subatomic particles bouncing around. Hogan hopes that the Holometer, the most advanced such device in existence, will give researchers proof of an intrinsic universal jitter and a new avenue for thinking about the universe itself.

Images via Fermilab

Think daytime TV is weird? Try flicking through Lullaby's channels

An eternal question, answered: "what's on the other channel?"

Watch this augmented reality game make London's Barbican Estate an epic playspace

Can games help re-appropriate underused urban spaces?

It’s time to reconsider Alpha Protocol

Diving back into Obisidan’s ethical black hole.

Here comes Miegakure to explain the 4th dimension

Miegakure is one of those magical games that seems to come out from the ether and pierce the veil of our mundane existences. That’s not an exaggeration: Miegakure looks that good. It’s even less of an exaggeration when you consider that one of the main appeals to the game is that you can actually pierce the veil of your mundane existence by taking a short stroll into the 4th dimension.

Creator Marc Ten Bosch explains in this new video:

Bosch does a fantastic job of downplaying how incredibly awesome “taking a few steps along the fourth dimension” actually is. What he’s talking about is walking not through any physical space we can actually perceive with our silly three dimension seeing eyes but a extra space that moves us not “where” but “when.” This is the reason that the desert world is parallel to the verdant one: even though they are the same where, but not the same when, they can both exist simultaneously. While Bosch might not be blazing any trails in terms of explosions per second or how 1080p his dubsteps are, he is certainly blazing a fiery trail into head-spinning, time-bending, wibbly wobbly, fourth dimensionality. He's been hard at work on the game for four years, which, I suppose, only feels like a long time. 

Heartwarming 50s television spot explains why games are good for you

The evidence is in.