Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 343

Human Harp lends grace to industrial spaces

Di Mainstone is an artist whose work bridges the gap between sculpture and the human body. She entwines the two, creating wearable, touchable, playable apparatuses that range from pulsing Cronenberg-style bioforms to a neck-mounted motion-based instrument that transforms its wearer into a one-woman Cremaster Cycle.

Her current project is the Human Harp, a "clip-on instrument" that places the wearer at the center of a string web, acting like the hammers of an exploded piano. Playing the thing is like a performance art version of Isabelle Adjani's legendary freakout in Possession, all writhing and bending and lunging—it's beautiful in its intense physicality. See for yourself:

The project just completed a twenty-day residency at London's Roundhouse, where it transformed the former railhouse into a series of 12 custom-fitted instruments that make use of the unique qualities of the space.

Recently, games like Fract OSC have welded music and play together in new ways. But we have yet to see anything on the order of Human Harp: a game that envisions performance on the maximalist level of Bayonetta, controlling massive mechanisms in service of sound. This is the kind of experience that would be well-served by VR, especially if you don't have a spare Brooklyn Bridge lying about the house.

Exploring the hidden worlds inside old cassette tapes

What memories do cassette tapes bring back? Prepare to enter them

"purposely scratching up the tape and then re-entering the world as it degenerates"

A new Madden ignores and confronts all the NFL’s problems

How much reality should we demand from our videogames?

The secret behind Angry Birds’ and Clash of Clans’ success

Is there something in the water in Helsinki?

Three games to play this week

Three videogames to play this week.

Amazon's Twitch purchase isn't just about games. It's about public consumption.

You are what you buy what you play.

Xenoblade Chronicles X will be five times bigger than its already-huge predecessor

To a small but very vocal group of people, 2012's Xenoblade Chronicles was like an all-you-can-eat buffet in the middle of a desert. After the JRPG's much-ululated decline in popularity and relevance, it was a sprawling, goofy, giving game, with vistas that just continued opening up, revealing new pockets and caves and skylines to take in. It was a game largely based on wandering, which rewarded you with hard-earned heart-to-hearts between characters and kept rigorous track of every tiny slime or towering woolly mammoth you felled. You jogged up mountains, into volcanoes, through the stars, each footstep felt. You grew attached to the game over time and distance, and just as your team grew attached to each other. 

So the small fact that its successor, the Wii U-exclusive Xenoblade Chronicles X, is slated to be 500% as big is as its predecessor, is something of a revelation. Much of the attention on the game so far has been on its giant robots, which also plays into that scale, according to Monolith Soft president Tetsuya Takahashi in an interview with Edge:

Vehicles are called Dolls. They are 5 Times larger than a person. So to get the same feel as Xenoblade Chronicles, the map would need to be 5 times bigger. The game world in X is in fact even bigger than that.

"Size creep" is one of the more insidious design trends in videogames—those Assassin's Creed games sure do keep, uh, growing, huh?—but when a game so masterfully played to its scale, as the first Xenoblade did, setting challenges that took all that geography to fulfill, well, it's not such a bad thing. Grand Theft Auto 5 and Skyrim, whatever their other faults, showed that enormity could still be artful. In other words: that small, vocal group of people better save up some sick days for next year. 

Sit by the fire and listen to The Lion's Song

A meditative Ludum Dare entry conjures the spirits of de Palma and von Trier. 

The lovely Moon Hunters wants to bring ritual back to modern society

"Stories in games share the oral tradition's tendency toward dynamic, action-oriented, and branching narratives."

Floppy disk portraits remind us that one day we'll be outdated and discarded too

Useless junk has feelings too!