Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 380

Glitchhikers is a weird ride to parts unknown

On the road with a new type of driving game.

How to recreate this morning's Xbox press conference at home

Assimilation is inevitable.

Where do videogame consoles go when they die?

A new art project sheds some light.

This modder continues to blow away Skyrim’s lackluster artificial intelligence

We’ve written before about how the modder Ether Dynamics is outclassing Skyrim devs by giving foes with one-track-mind AI a broader variety of ways to bring the pain. As he rightly explains, “No one reminisces about the 10 skeletons they killed, because they’ll be just like every other skeleton they’ve killed up to that point and thereafter.” So, he’s spiced things up by introducing two new enemy units that react smartly. These computer-controlled cutthroats play a lot more like you and I do, by looting potions from fallen combatants, and just avoiding general bad guy stupidity.

Check out his tutorial for some truly fierce mages and knights. 

This week in VR demos: an Italian opera & flailing a tablet to flap the wings of a devious demon

While you’re waiting with baited breath for the big news out of Los Angeles, we thought why not catch up on the weekend’s crop of outrageous virtual reality demos, which seem destined to encompass every possible human and non-human endeavor. 

The first up is Senza Peso, a beautiful looking and sounding short opera in VR by Kite and Lightning. It reminds me a bit of Parsifal meets the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World. Cross your eyes… now.

While Senza Peso is a bit low on the interactive front, as you’re on a guided boat tour through the singing land of the dead, but Dragonflight makes up for it, and then some. This wing-flapping, flame-blowing, dragon-flier makes use of not only a Oculus Rift headset, but also a tablet for holding out in front of you and steering the noble beast.

Someone seriously needs to introduce these guys because a dragon-flying opera could be amazing.

Notch’s new one is either satire of Steam Early Access, or just a game about horses

Cliffhorse—Notch’s new horse-trotting sim where all you do is run over green hills—is perhaps a riveting work of irony ridiculing lazy, unfinished games on Steam Early Access. Or maybe the Minecraft creator just has a thing for horses walking sideways on cliffs. Either way, it’s a new game from Notch, so we should pay attention. 

Admittedly the first theory is more interesting. Nothing against strong, solid-hoofed mammals. It’s just Notch’s message on the Cliffhorse domain jests about buying “early access’” and that there’s no guarantee of future updates, seeming to call out the newfangled service that lets eager beavers pay to play games long before they are ready for prime time. The timing makes sense. After all, Valve just recently updated their Steam guidelines warning us that games on Early Access may never be completed, after a handful of games have hit the skids. 

And it also makes sense that Notch would have an opinion on the matter, given the success of Minecraft, which sold millions before it was properly released and helped propagate the whole idea of paying for games while under construction. Is Cliffhorse a silent shout for devs to step up and finish their projects?

Then again, horses.

Torment your friends with this DIY Dune Pain Box

Something tells me this isn’t Frank Herbert’s official explanation for how the Pain Box in Dune works; but nevertheless, here’s a method for building your very own ad hoc phantom pain container, perfect for coaxing your lily-livered friends and children to sticking their trembling hand into. 

The enigmatic device that triggers intense pain without doing a lick of physical harm can be approximated by abusing a glitch in our pain receptors. This is knowns as the Thermal Grill Illusion, and the way it works is thus: the torturous mirage of searing pain can be created by stimulating pleasing coolness and pleasant warmth simultaneously. All you need inside your elaborately and sinisterly adorned pain box is a grill-like grid with alternating cool and warm rods placed side-by-side. To give you an example of what we’re talking, one researcher induced the effect using frozen and microwaved hotdogs—likely a first for the scientific method. Just be careful when trying this at home because things can get dramatic:

If you want to read more about the fascinating phenomena, head on over to io9.

How server farms power your favorite esport

It’s more straightforward than you might think.

Dadaism comes to videogames in the dark, stealthy Tangiers

Summing up the parts.

13-year-old boy AI passes Turing Test, much to the chagrin of actual 13-year-old boys

Alan Turing: check and mate.

This past weekend at the 2014 Turing Test in London, a group of judges were fooled into thinking that a chatbot was in fact a 13-year-old boy named Eugene Goostman, proof computers are getting smarter or humans are getting dumber. Experts are hailing the genuinely believable conversation skills of Vladimir Veselov and Eugene Demchenko’s AI as unprecedented—the first computer to pass a Turing Test with the rigor that Alan Turing would approve of. 

As a refresher, this means that the program was able to convince 30 percent of a panel at the University of Reading that they were talking to a living, breathing human being. Keep in mind the criteria for the contest is humanness, not intelligence; so this doesn’t mean that Eugene is a genius, and might have benefited from the assumption that he was young and naive. 

Still, it’s a mighty impressive feat of conversation engineering, and hopefully some of this computer generated chitchat will trickle into games. It would be a marked improvement over the f-bomb dropping 13-year-old boys who populate Xbox Live at least.