Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 369

The blood you’ll never see in a game

Bioshock’s troubled view on what makes a woman.

Cortana is pretty good at predicting World Cup winners

Cortana—everyone's favorite blue-skinned malfunctioning AI buddy from the Halo games—has a knack for predicting World Cup soccer matches, it seems. Since Microsoft has adopted her voice as the equivalent of Siri for Windows phones, she’s carrying out all kinds of non-shooting-oriented voice commands. As of the latest update, this past weekend, she’ll even tell you who will win soccer games. 

So far her record is immaculate, picking Colombia, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Costa Rica to all win, as they did, with matches coming up later today that will put her number-crunching mettle. The numbers are culled from Microsoft’s Bing predictions engine, so she’ll probably be wrong sooner than later, as that algorithm currently has only a 60 percent success rate, with 29 current predictions and 19 misses. 

Let’s hope her first fail comes when the US plays Belgium tomorrow, as she’s currently saying the European club to win. That is unless you’re from Belgium, of course, in which case, best of luck.

Apparently Nicolas Winding Refn, Guillermo Del Toro and Chan-wook Park really love MGS

Over on the Metal Gear Solid 5 product page, a trio of acclaimed film directors are fawning all over Hideo Kojima. Guillermo del Toro (Pacific Rim, Pan’s Labyrinth), Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, Only God Forgives), and Chan-wook Park (Oldboy) are heaping Homeric levels of praise on the Metal Gear creator’s oeuvre, but specifically his latest trailer for Metal Gear Solid 5. And you thought Kojima had a massive ego already. 

It’s great to hear outside voices praising videogames, but some of these statements are a little too hyperbolic to take seriously. Refn’s puffery compares Kojima’s output to that of some of the greatest creative minds in history, like “Dostoyevsky, Stanley Kubrick and Caravaggio.” Um… okay?

Chan-wook Park gushes, “Metal Gear Solid games are already films, the films of the future.”

Del Toro’s statement is a little more sedate, simply saying Kojima is a major influence of his, and I think that’s what all these directors are trying to say in their cinematographic way.

Image via Collider

In-game psychos are actually outstanding human beings, study shows

All those morally bankrupt deeds we see in games, like being a total creep in DayZ, could actually make players more emotionally intelligent human being, believe it our not. This is according to a new study from researchers at the University at Buffalo, which shows that performing dick moves in virtual environments of games increases one’s moral sensitivity. 

Simply put, because you’re ruminating on bad deeds, you may be less likely to do them in reality. Surprisingly, subjects felt guiltier about immoral behavior after having played a shooter in which they behaved in ways that violated cultural norms regarding fairness, loyalty, respect for authority, sanctity, and doing harmful things to others. 

Here, guilt is a good thing, because other research has shown that people who experience higher degrees of guilt are more likely to do good deeds. The brain doesn’t seem to differentiate between guilt experienced in real-life and in-game, as shown in guilt tests taken by players after their gaming session. “Rather than leading players to become less moral, violent video-game play may provoke players to engage in voluntary behavior that benefits others,” the study lead Matthew Grizzard claims.  

This supports the idea of videogames as possibility spaces, where we can try own different emotions, and explore the dark side of human nature vicariously, as Kentucky Route Zero’s Jake Elliott has talked about. So maybe it’s not so bad to get in a shootout with the cops in GTA. 

Rock Simulator 2014 and the persistence of the anti-game

Or: Do we need this? 

Double Hitler is Octodad for Nazis

As hilarious as that might be!

Austrian design collective builds play structure to take strings to new heights

Numen builds a free-form climbing gym

Here's how Shovel Knight devs made the first modern NES game

The discourse around Shovel Knight, the chivalrous and retrofitted platformer released earlier in the week for Wii U, 3DS, and Steam, is that it’s a NES game developed a few decades after the fact—very reminiscent of blasting renegade robots with Mega Man or pogo-hopping on a cane with Scrooge McDuck. 

But in a really fun postmortem on the game at Gamasutra, David D'Angelo of the dev team explains that this is not merely a rehash of the old. The design is result of a thoroughly investigated vision of how games for the classic NES would look today if its predecessor, the Super NES, had not come to be.

It’s like a time capsule from an alternate history where we all just went on playing NES games perpetually. 

D'Angelo explains that, because of chip advancements, the NES would have gradually overcome limitations, going into great detail about sprite flickering (which happened when too many bad guys were on the screen), parallax scrolling (when background layers of scenery move at different speeds), and expanded color palettes (which makes your knight look shiny). The research that went into this is truly inspiring.  

It’s a fairly technical read, which isn’t necessarily our thing, but if you love the NES, or are excited about Shovel Knight (and you should be), it’s worth your clicks.  

Behind The Road Not Taken, Spry Fox’s labyrinthine successor to Triple Town

Cheat to win.

It's time for us to stop calling games "indie"

A brave new world awaits.