Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 372

Okay our actual favorite story ever: Notch pays $46k for rare Aphex Twin album

Notch is just awesome. The creator of Minecraft has paid an outlandish sum of $46,300 at auction for an extremely rare, unreleased pressing of an album by electronic music pioneer Aphex Twin.

The album first had emerged on an online auction site. The Internet freaked out because it was never-before-heard music during a peak period of creativity for Aphex Twin falling into the hands of a private collector. Fans convinced the seller to host a Kickstarter campaign to sell digital copies of the album before he sold the original artifact. And then Notch swooped in and bought the original vinyl copy, because, really, what's half a hundred grand to Notch.

Aphex Twin, also known as Richard D. James, cut the unreleased double LP Caustic Window, believed to be one of four in existence, in 1994, around the same time he released Selected Ambient Works Volume II, ...I Care Because You Do, and Richard D. James Album. And Markus "Notch" Persson has sold over 35 million copies of Minecraft—not to mention all that Creeper merchandising you see upon entering a Books-A-Million. And he’s known for throwing a rave or two. So it’s understandable that he has the cash to burn on something like this.

As he tweeted yesterday: “So I kinda paid a lot for a double LP from the ’90s." 

You can listen to Caustic Window here, sans the sticker shock.

On learning to play Ultra Street Fighter IV

Blind yourself.

Classic parlor game Werewolf gets rebooted to tear more friends, marriages apart

How to rebrand the most morally bankrupt human activity.

Placing faith in The Last Cargo’s atheist allegory

Life beyond the altar.

The Thing From the Future will make you into Isaac Asimov

"Trying to predict the future is a discouraging and hazardous occupation," wrote British sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke. The author of 2001: A Space Odyssey would know a thing or two about what's to come, seeing as he literally wrote a book called Profiles of the Future. And yet Stuart Candy and Jeff Watson, heads of the Situation Lab and professors at OCAD University in Toronto beckoned their students to do exactly that.

The Thing From the Future is an "imagination game" that places players in the role of prognosticators attempting to dream of those realities yet to come. There are arc cards that create particular scenarios such as "collapse 7 years from now," terrain cards to define context, object areas that pick an item such as a postcard, and mood cards to, well, set the mood. Winners are decided by consensus.

What ensues—players "competing" to devise whatever they can—is as much jazz improvisation sessions as it is game. One possible outcome was an artifact, called the Child Share Information Kit (tagline: "Because 52 parents are better than two") which was an information packet for timesharing child-rearing. Another one was a receptacle for trash that let users find out how they're feeling.

Both Candy and Watson come at games from unorthodox perspectives. Candy is known for his design fiction and serves as a research fellow at the Long Now Foundation. (That's the same foundation that's putting a clock that will run on a 10,000-year time scale in an underground facility in West Texas.) Watson is a game designer and recently delivered an apropos definition of games at this year's Different Games: “Games are semi-regulated situations that unfold over time and resolve based on the creative participation of one or more players.” The "creative participation" is the raison d'etre of The Thing From the Future and gives players enough guidelines to invent freely on their own.

"We're saying to people, there are a million different possible prompts in this deck," Candy said. "And you can take any one of them and run with it and delight and desire and provoke and dismay people with it."

The Thing from the Future is available for $40 CAD from the Situation Lab website.

Atlus's surreal sleeper masterpiece is coming to PSN this week

Now that Atlus is re-releasing Devil Summoner 2: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon on PSN later this week, I can finally put my PS2 to bed.

A sequel to a mediocre game which sported a super-long, unwieldy name, Devil Summoner 2 was overlooked by nearly everyone when it released for the PS2 well into the PS3’s lifecycle. But this sleeper from the creators of Persona is tops in my book, as you can glean from my writer’s bio.

So allow me to wax for a moment about how outstanding it is. For one, the systems were pitch-perfect. The action-oriented battling was so varied—with all the pagan demons and goddesses you summoned to fight alongside you—that I never grew bored in whatever ludicrous number of hours I dumped into it. Also, the game utilizes Atlus’s bread-and-butter fusion system, also found in the Persona games, which allows you to trade two unhelpful sidekicks for one awesome one. 

But what really surprised and impressed me was the storytelling—a period piece set in a rapidly Westernizing Tokyo about how modernization was causing a brooding, toxic depression among the people of Japan. The game's surreality brought to mind Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo, diverging into the story of a tribe of freaks who had been exiled to a cave in a mountainside for their hideous appearance. 

There is one negative with buying this digitally though: you don’t get the detective-pixie plushie that came bundled with each retail copy. But that will forever be immortalized in my closet.

Check out these strange, fascinating indie prototypes from Nintendo

Japan doesn't get much street cred for developing small independent games. (Of course, there are some notable exceptions.) However, in recent years, Nintendo of Japan has been hosting a Game Seminar to foster independent talent. 

At the most recent event, they invited young creators to grow and create under the wing of Nintendo talent. This time around, Takashi Tezuka, director of all-time greats like Super Mario World and A Link to the Past, served as headmaster. For a young game maker, it doesn't get much better than that.

The footage of the recent crop of resulting games looks strange, very pretty, and far more experimental than we typically see coming out of the house of Mario. There’s no telling if these titles will see the light of day outside Japan, so for the time being you will have to press your face against your monitor like a child gazing at puppies in the pet store. 

Doing it wrong: World of Warcraft player grinds to max level by picking herbs in training level

After spending two years in exile in The Wandering Isles, the opening area in World of Warcraft, which is pretty much intended to introduce players to the game, WoW player Doubleagent has reached level 90, the maximum character stat in the dragon-dueling MMO, which is patently insane.

You might not realize how big and strange of an achievement this actually is. Yes, WoW is an expansive world, with plenty of giant rats and things to slay and level up from, but in the opening zone, there’s little at all to kill, except in a handful of rookie missions. This means that, for most of the excruciatingly long grind, the ever-devoted Doubleagent had to play the role of a pacifist, getting by on mining and picking herbs. 

On the inevitable question of "Didn’t this suck royally?" Doubleagent says, “At times I can find it relaxing, a change from the normal. Plus it's pretty easy to do when I have TV shows or movies that I need to catch up on, more so than trying to do that during a battleground or raid.”

What drives one to perform such an impossible, monotonous feat? On the battle.net forums, he writes that he did it on a lark. It seems a friend had bet him that he couldn’t reach the level cap while remaining “neutral,” i.e. without choosing to side with either the Alliance or the Horde, which the player is forced to do after the introductory area. I don’t know if this speaks to the undying will of the human spirit, or is just someone who had two years of his life to kill. 

Here are the final 45 minutes of his ascension in all its glory:

Vane is as gorgeous and desolate as you'd expect, coming from ex-Last Guardian devs

Vane is a jaw-dropping game about exploring dangerous old ruins in desolate nature, and boy does it have pedigree. 

It’s coming to us from some self-described devilishly handsome ex-members of The Last Guardian team—that’s Fumito Ueda’s long en absentia, man-eating yet puppy-eyed monster game for PlayStation 3, or 4, or 5, possibly. They grew tired of the daily grind of big game development and decided to go do what they love at their own independent game studio, Friend & Foe.

And apparently what they love is Fumito Ueda’s former games. Looking at the gorgeously picturesque panoramas that have been released, this one has an uncanny resemblance to them, as you maneuver a child through the desert with ruinous landmarks hanging in the horizon. They look a bit far to hoof it on foot, but the game is still in the early going, so maybe that giant hawk will give you a lift… or possibly just kill you.

The devastating Bottle Rockets proves that you can't speed-run through life

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