Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 374

Videogames can change the way we think about mental illness

The developers of Ether and Actual Sunlight talk to us about the power of interactivity.

The ghost towns and metropolises of Everquest, fifteen years later

What keeps an aging MMO alive?

A quaint game about raising a family… in the nuclear apocalypse

Sheltered, a cool-looking management sim on Kickstarter, has all the down-to-earth trials and tribulations of daily family life. You provide food and shelter for your loved ones, repair home appliances, make a quick run to the store, take care of the pets, and, uh, defend your fallout bunker from the ambush of post-nuclear war vagabonds. We’ve all been through that, right? 

There sure does seem to be an abundance of games about people going through hard times of late. This one gives me a Papers, Please meets Jason Rohrer’s The Castle Doctrine vibe—maybe there’s a hint of Oregon Trail in there as well. It looks to be one of those games that keeps putting demands on you until you screw up and your 8-bit son or daughter pays the price. But look on the bright side. It’s one less mouth to feed.

These doomed classic cars reveal the Jetsons-esque future we never knew

Back in the 50s and 60s, people thought that by now we’d be living in a bright, shiny future with a bunch of really beautiful, silver rocket cars. This was sadly not to be, so now The High Mueseum in Atlanta is displaying many prototypes of these failed futuristic rides in its Dream Cars exhibit, running now through Sept. 7th. 

Some of the designs are really unearthly, like the needle-nosed Firebird XP-21 (pictured above), which looks like a jet crossed with a roadster, ad would likely kill anyone who got in a fender-bender while driving it. Another, the L'Œuf électrique, looks like a Volkswagen Beetle copulated with a golf cart. I wonder if 30 or 40 years we will be having "wondrous game consoles that never were" exhibits, and will it include the SteamBoy. 

There are many more fascinating cars on their website, or check them out firsthand if you’re down South.

13 years in the making, an indie game that's justified for looking like an old platformer

Thirteen years in the making, this indie game is justified for looking like an old platformer. The story of Tobias and the Dark Sceptres is one of obsession, devotion, and futility, but most of all shareware. Adam Butcher started creating the game for the Multimedia Fusion game creation tool in 2001 before there was even a concept of “indie” games. And he kept at it until recently when he released for free (get it here) the game his 14-year-old self envisioned, although the rest of the game-making community he was originally a part of long moved to another address. 

The game looks like what you’d expect: a sword-fighting 16-bit platformer where ambition outweighs talent. As part of his victory lap, Butcher has released a pretty funny YouTube video documenting the whole thing. It’s one part postmortem, one part catharsis, one part reminder that we may all be wasting our lives. 

Behold, a levitating chessboard

It may be a bit impractical, but it’s hard to deny the coolness factor of playing chess on a board that’s levitating in midair. This is not an optical illusion, but some very impressive tech from the levitation design firm Crealev. Seriously, their motto is: We Make Things Float.

They’re tight-lipped on how their technology works but it seems to involve bursts of wind originating from an octagonal electronic board. The objects they stably suspend in air go beyond boardgames and are quite broad and impressive, including much heavier objects such as bricks and rocks. After watching the video below, I'm wondering what else this thing could suspend. 

Via Prosthetic Knowledge

The Moon Sliver is a chilling investigation into our greatest enemy

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FTL proposal is the sweetest thing you'll ever see in a roguelike

Maybe I just have a soft spot for love letters and roguelikes, but this proposal in FTL: Faster Than Light is kind of beautiful. A Redditer going by the name oft_wears_hats is now a happy fiancé after patching his girlfriend’s copy of the game with a dialogue tree in which a the man of her dreams boards her ship and asks her to marry him. She said yes, of course, or else this story would be sad and we’d not be posting it: Man gets rejected in FTL just doesn’t have the same ring. 

We’ve seen sweethearts popping the question in games before. There was this one in the mobile puzzler Dots. And we have a great feature about when Mike Mika, the designer of the Game Boy Color version of Klax, hid a proposal in that game. But we rarely see such a thing in a demanding and complex game like FTL. We give both of them props.

You can read the entire proposal here, and I suggest that you do.

The Westport Independent plans to pick up where Papers, Please left off

Digging through game jam games is hard work, so thanks to those who mined The Westport Independent from the veritable pile of games that Ludum Dare consistently produces. Instantly visually and thematically similar to Lucas Pope's Papers, Please and his earlier title The Republica Times, The Westport Independent proposes to take us a step further, setting the game inside the borders of a totalitarian state that has set out to dissolve any independent entities—and, especially, your publication.

As you are sent articles each day, you choose what will or won't be censored from the each week's issue, your choices gathering either loyalist suspicion or rebel support. What's interesting is that there currently doesn't seem to be a reason not to support the government should you choose to (though the game is also in early alpha/testing phase), which means that currently you decide what your paper should represent—an interesting proposition in light of many "rebels are good" narrative in videogames.

Planned features include actual management options, potential for taking or receiving bribes, and controlling how much you print each issue (the biggest Rebublica similarity), in addition to others that the developers aren't currently speaking about. Papers, Please demonstrated how seemingly mindless obedience can arise in times of mass oppression better than many books or movies, so I have hope that Westport too may exhibit some of that chilling power. 

Here's something nice. Virtual reality is helping medics in the UK train to save lives

The Oculus Rift is foremost thought of a fun, future-y head-mounted videogame device, but it has many applications outside of that, like training medics to save soldiers in the line of fire. The training program is being used by he United Kingdom’s army to teach rookies how to prioritize life-and-death decisions on the battlefield. 

The setup looks similar to something you’d find in a first-person shooter—a taupe, war-ravished desert with dilapidated buildings and downed allies—except instead of bullets trainees have a healing hand. This type of “moulage” training outside of the virtual reality mask consists of bandaging up live-actors with painted battle wounds, but the simulation can increase the duress by recreating an actual wartime scenario. 

It’s nice to see VR and FPS technology doing some good out in the world.