Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 386

Scram Kitty and his Buddy on Rails is a cat-person masterpiece

Less "knocking things off ledges," more "shooting things in outer space." 

Brain massaging neural implants that treat PTSD are on their way

Neuroscientists at DARPA are dropping $26 million into developing a system of electrodes and chips to be implanted deep inside the brains of soldiers who are suffering from diseases like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. And I thought that’s what they made whiskey for! But seriously, this cybernetic setup is intended not only to better study and diagnose psychological illnesses, but also to administer electric impulses that sooth symptoms like anxiety and slowed motor skills. So it will be a great thing for the Armed Forces if they can pull it off. Also great: the name of the program is SUBNETS. Isn’t that the most cyberpunk-y megacorp acronym ever?  

Via The Verge

New Tangiers trailer is one part Deus Ex, one hundred parts surreal freakout

In case you need confirmation that Tangiers is still surreal and eerie, the new alpha trailer will remove that doubt. If anything the game has upped the level of horrifying, jet-black bizarreness. But as Kyle our intern justifiably asked as I was writing this, “Do we have any indication Tangiers will actually be anything outside of surrealistic imagery?” 

Well, a little bit. In the development blogs, you find enemies who you creep behind and hide from in the shadows. It’s definitely a stealth game in the vein of Thief and Deus Ex, but with less of the feeling like you are delicately springing a series of carefully-designed booby traps. But there’s plenty of dreamlike freakout to go around, with allusions that would tickle the fancy of William Burroughs and dadaist poets, according to the devs. 

Have a look for yourself: 

What the heck could Device 6 devs' enigmatic next game be?

We already know that influences can manifest themselves in strange ways in Simogo games, as evidenced in Device 6’s exegesis. So we should be careful about assuming too much from the inspiration collage for their new project, which appeared on their blog today. But taken at face value, it will involve maritime travel and guitar strumming, apparently. 

Knowing Simogo, this could be anything from a post-modern text adventure to a fishing game, but the hints certainly point to a music game, with the green hills of Proteus and the adorable microscopic organisms of Electroplankton featured prominently. That would be a nice return to the musical genre for the Swedish duo, who previously charmed with rhythm game Beat Sneak Bandit. But for now we’ll have to wait and see.

Mother of God, it's every airship level from Mario 3 at once

If your childhood was like my childhood, every Bullet Bill and spinning cannon from Super Mario Bros. 3's airship boss levels have been permanently burned into your memory. 

But that was then, and this is now. Because screen resolution has improved so drastically since the days of RF switches and rabbit ears, it’s now possible to display much more of old games’ levels on a single screen, as can be seen in these fascinating clips by YouTuber Atlas Videos. 

Not only that, but levels can be layered together to create Mario airship hell, apparently. This bit of retro voodoo is pulled off in a collaboration between tool-assisted speedrunners and curators of old virtual game maps. 

And you thought world 8 airship was tough.

Via Attract Mode

How ironic is it that Watch Dog's leaderboards are already hacked?

All it took was one day for the online multiplayer leaderboards for Watch Dogs to get hacked, perhaps not surprising for a game about using cyber-jacking abilities to crack into overreaching surveillance systems. 

As you see in the above screenshot, captured by Reddit user unsubdefaults, players such as xXPICSXx have already maxed out their scores. Other users are reporting that some players have used cheats to gain unlimited health and ammo in online modes. This obviously isn't cool, because online multiplayer is one of the more appealing aspects of Watch Dogs’ open-world, with features like Intrusion or Tailing, which borrow liberally from the great Dark Souls player-versus-player that lets you enter another’s game and track them down. (And we know how bad it sucks to be invaded by a hacker in Dark Souls 2.) Hopefully Ubisoft fixes this!

The sequel to Dots is (wait for it) Two Dots

Two Dots is a sequel to Dots, both great games about, well, dots. You connect dots, draw squares through dots, remove dots in a way so that dots line up. So, yes, there’s dots, cascading in ways that flex your mind in colorful patterns, bouncing playfully as they drop into an invisible rectangle container, filling it with green, yellow, and red polkadots. 

But what you really care about is not the dots, per se, but that the dots are a perfectly desaturated hue, that the game is simple and elegant, that the play field is centralized in “the thumb zone,” that the whiteness of the screen doesn’t clash with the whiteness of your phone’s shell, that when the person sitting next to you glances down at what you’re doing they see a minimalistic and sophisticated looking puzzle game and not Candy Crush Saga.

This is a worthy aspiration when choosing a mobile game. It’s a given that you’re half paying attention and killing time, so you might as well have class. The best mobile games get this right. 868-Hack goes great in a dimly lit piano bar. Threes! is not the go-to-game when you want to binge out, I don't think. And Two Dots is clearly a game that cares about being a well designed object, while at the same time not wanting you to think that the developers stressed themselves out over that pleasing “dum-dum-dum” sound effect when you match three dots. 

Cosmic DJ jams to the kitsch of 1980s music videos

as

How the rise of animal simulators is making the scientific method fun

Science teachers of the world, take note.

This computer is not compatible with your break-up

"he_wasn't_worth_it_anyway.exe" has finished downloading.