Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 385

Travel through a grayscale apocalypse in Composition 83

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The surprisingly British origins of the beautiful, handmade Lumino City

Or: why making a game by hand takes awhile.

The Lady is a troubling exploration of depression

But its troubles are many.

20 years of dungeon-diving leads iconic roguelike to unfamiliar realm: Steam Greenlight

ADOM isn’t only a roguelike—those terse tactical fantasy games of yore that don’t play nice. It’s an institution. It’s been under development for 20 years (including a 9 year hiatus), is considered one of the big 5 (roguelikes, not accounting firms), and after many moons of open development it’s campaigning to bring the gift of dungeon crawling and dying cruel, nasty death to millions on Steam through Greenlight.

But don’t let Ancient Domains Of Mystery’s reputation as a grandfatherly old game from the Stone Age fool you into thinking that it’s unapproachable. At least it has graphics now, so you no longer have to play with arcane symbols of computer code. But you might be compelled to relish that beautiful wondrous ASCII.

Check out the trailer below.

Because Mario Kart 8 released on a Friday, here are the rules to the best Mario Kart drinking game

For millions of college freshmen still living in the dorm room, Mario Kart isn’t merely a family-friendly kart racer featuring banana peel bloopers and a road-hogging anthropomorphous fungi. It is also a great way to get shit-faced. So with Mario Kart 8 releasing today Wii U, right before the weekend madness, we thought what better way to celebrate than by running through the rules of Beerio Kart, which for the record was far superior to Mario Party in the pantheon of Nintendo 64 drinking games.

I’ll leave the details for Reddit user miles5241 to explain:

Word of advice: don't get Keystone.

*Apologies for previous inappropriateness in original image file. We love Princess Peach.

Image via The Hobospider 

The ridiculous winning words to yesterday's spelling bee championship

The Scripps National Spelling Bee, a.k.a. the spelling bee of spelling bees, ended in a two-way tie yesterday, with the winning lads both misspelling some ridiculously obscure words: “corpsbruder” (a comrade) and “antegropelos” (waterproof leggings) respectively. However, they did manage to correctly recite each letter of “stichomythia” (a type of dialogue in Greek plays) and “feuilleton” (a section of the newspaper devoted to fiction) in the final round—words I couldn’t even begin to mangle. This made me realize that spelling bees are the professional esports of word usage: we all play games, and we all use words, but 99.9999 percent would fail miserably on this stage.

Case in point, the good people at Deadspin wondered if spelling bee winning words have always been so damn obscure. This resulted in a whole bunch of number-crunching geekery, and turns out: no they haven’t. In fact, they found that 11 of top 15 most arcane winning words have come since 1995, even though the contest dates back to the 20s. 

The list they produced includes impossibly rare words such as “elucubrate,” “prospicience,” “cymotrichous,” and “guetapens,” none of which even show up in my computer’s dictionary. So there you have it: spelling bees are pretty much the ultimate pedantic exercise for kids.

But at least they give us epic fails like this:

New PBS Game/Show asks if the FPS is dying or ascending

The first-person shooter had a good run. Ever since players got a taste of the recoil on Doom’s shotgun, the genre has been firmly planted at the forefront of the industry. They’ve consistently been the biggest moneymakers, pushed technical boundaries, and ushered us into in the era of online play. 

But as recent trends and sales figures indicate (ahem, Titanfall), their grip is weakening, like an aging gunslinger with an arthritic trigger finger who must be pushed by his posse into a nursing home. 

Yeah, plenty of people still get their kicks from dropping and head-shotting, but increasingly players are looking for something more. We’re seeing more games that use the mechanisms of shooters for ends other than, well, shooting things in the face, like Gone Home and Portal. So what’s going on? Is the FPS riding into the sunset, or is it evolving into a beautiful new form?

Watch the episode to find out, and please subscribe!

This videogame destroys itself to music, is nuts

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These warped playing cards bring the glitch aesthetic to royal flushes

Glitches in videogames happen all the time. Just go read The Sims patch notes. But we usually don’t find them in physical games, like board games, and card games, and hackisack, and thankfully so, because that would mean we’re living in the Matrix while some hideous inter-dimensional parasites feed on our hormones. 

But luckily we can simulate the glitch aesthetic of faulty software with this wonderful playing card set by the Swiss designer Soleil Zumbrunn. They are a bit pricy at $15 for a pack on Kickstarter, but they’ll be professionally printed, an each card is individually glitched out. This is the perfect way to bring technical malfunctions to poker night. 

How Among the Sleep hopes to take survival horror back to its roots

The power of powerlessness.