Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 375
June 19, 2014
Steel yourself for a horror-influenced new Call of Duty
Sledgehammer puts its Dead Space expertise to good use.
Why do we love to play the hero?
From Infamous to Mass Effect, we move toward good.
Lifeless Planet starts strong, but quickly runs out of oxygen
The year’s most accurate game title.
One of the leading innovators in narrative design has a fascinating new game
Game author Emily Short—together with AI architect Richard Evans and game language designer Graham Nelson—has a multidirectional, totally fictional, new 240,000 word book. Ahem, game. But because Blood & Laurels is interactive fiction, you’ll only read a fraction of it your first time through, as you follow a poet named Marcus who can commit blackmail, be murdered, engage in political intrigue, and do all the rest of the dirty dealings associated with ancient Rome. What distinguishes this one from other works of interactive fiction is that it actually generates stories with a dynamite AI language system, you know, like The Sims, but with text, rather than funneling you down the preordained branching paths of the author’s imagination. Also, it looks nice and clean like a special edition folio on the iPad screen. It’s totally worth adding to your summer reading list/backlog.
Find it here.
June 18, 2014
Watch ten minutes of Quadrilateral Cowboy’s perspective-twisting mind-jacking
Quadrilateral Cowboy has gone through quite the metamorphosis over the course of development, as we can see in this footage of Brendon Chung showing off the new body-swapping, Betamax-hacking, entering-the-Matrix gameplay.
Originally the game was due out in 2013 and was far less ambitious. It was one of those games where you theoretically learn to code through playing, like Hack ’n’ Slash and Minecraft. “It spurred players to be creative, and tapped into what I feel is a big joy of programming: empowering yourself through learning a new language …. ‘OK, what now?’” Chung told Edge. But since then the game has evolved into a heist-heavy puzzle game that involves mind-jacking the point-of-view of an ensemble of cube-headed cyber-criminals with distinct special abilities to do your dirty work. And it looks pretty great.
Robot holds "instagram interventions" for oversharers, does god's work in the process
TBT to when I didn't see pictures of your breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
New trailer for The Official has modern workforce ennui, jaggy PS1-era polygons
The Official is another game about the angst of the work force. It’s based on that familiar daydream that anyone who sits behind at desk from 9-5 has doubtlessly imagined: the one where you fall asleep on your stack of papers and awake after hours alone in a strange alternate version of your office space, which now looks eerily similar to a PlayStation game.
It seems there have been a lot of these games about people who are bored to death or otherwise hate their jobs lately: The Stanley Parable, I Get This Call Every Day, Papers, Please, potentially. Has work gotten so shitty over the past few years that they make the perfect backdrop for the strife of videogames? Watch the trailer and see.
The holy grail of Tim Burton’s filmography surfaces, and boy is it bad
Once upon a time, Tim Burton didn’t just shoot odd films starring Johnny Depp. He shot the best Batman movie (that’s an objective fact), and, before that, in 1982, he shot a short, bad, non-children-friendly, and incredibly bizarre film adaptation of the Grimm Fairy Tale Hansel and Gretel.
Now that lost project has been found and unloaded on YouTube, though surely Burton hoped it remained buried. It’s not a wash if you have an obsession with Burton weirdness or just a general appreciation for all bad films.
Watch below and be astounded that this once aired on the Disney Channel.
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