Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 387

Kill Screen presents the Official Videogame for all 50 States

A painstaking work of scholarship.

Monikers is pretty much Cards Against Humanity meets charades

Monikers is a party card game that compels you to utter ribald sentence fragments while testing your knowledge of pop culture, like all great party card games do. And to act out “Syphilis” in charades, which sounds like the most unfortunate card draw ever, especially if you have syphilis.

The way it works is in three rounds: they can more or less be thought of as Taboo, a stricter version of Taboo, and charades, with a deck that ranges from the perverse to the obscure. The game is currently raising funds on Kickstarter and looks like a hoot.

The Yellow Wallpaper lets you, too, shatter the domestic sphere

From the crucible of another game jam—this time it's the Public Domain Jam—an adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story The Yellow Wallpaper has emerged [play here].

Famous for its visceral depiction of obsessive behavior (H.P. Lovecraft was a noted fan) as much as its political subtext, The Yellow Wallpaper tells the story of Jane, confined to bedrest in an attic by her physician husband John. 

Bedrest feels much like prison, as it turns out; the windows are even "barred for little children" (or wives). The cadence of the prose quickens with Jane's onrushing madness. She begins to hallucinate a woman behind the wallpaper, the "florid," "repellent" yellow wallpaper "committing every artistic sin." 

John traps Jane with the tools of the day: namely, that catch-all diagnosis for anything female, "hysteria." Driven off the brink of insanity Jane conflates herself with the woman behind the paper and breaks with reality—in the end causing her husband to faint as she "creeps" around and around the room in a haze.

How, you may ask, does that translate into a game?  

Fitfully, imperfectly, but promisingly. Creator Edward Curtis-Sivess (in Space) puts the player in Jane's shoes, of course, but also in a strange viewpoint that looks in on the papered room from outside—presumably the woman in the wallpaper.

Jane rushes around the room after the silhouette—tearing sections of the paper away with an unsettlingly loud sound—and the silhouette wanders outside as lines of Gilman's text scroll onscreen.

There's not much else to it, but the repetition of the gameplay, like the repetition in Gilman's prose, is form fitting content: Jane is boxed in on all sides by her husband, by the societal structures that empower him, by her sex. All you can do is tear at the walls, and in the end that illogic provides perverse victory over John's manufactured diagnosis. 

Curtis-Sivess created all the assets in the game—even the font!—and per the rules of the jam, anyone can remix and repurpose the assets available at the download link.

To the jam's larger purpose of broadening the base of go-to source material in games (Cthulhu and zombies are two bugbears the site singles out): mission accomplished.

Meet ET’s disturbing older cousins from canceled Spielberg flick

ET was a lovable, pitiful little alien that could bring a tear to a cold-hearted guy or gal’s eye. But he didn’t start out that way. His design was adapted from some less way friendly looking aliens from Steven Spielberg’s canceled film Night Skies, the designs for which have been revealed in some recently discovered production photos.

There were originally 10 creepy proto-ET variants, it turns out, and one weirdly adorable one, as conceptualized by the special-effects artist Rick Baker for the horrific sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But Spielberg met Harrison Ford’s girlfriend while on location for Raiders of the Lost Ark and decided to shoot ET instead. One of the uglies is pretty much a dead ringer for the homesick alien that charmed theaters nationwide, only with a sinister glower, more wrinkles, and dead insect eyes. 

See more alien designs that never were at Cinematallica. 

Playlist 5/28: Neon-hot bullets, depression, and lemmings

Can you videogame, Bobby?

Walking Dead writer to pen next Star Wars, hopefully Wookiee outbreak to ensue

Gary Whitta, a writer who penned three previous episodes of The Walking Dead for Telltale, has been hired to write the screenplay for the next Star Wars film. Whitta started out as a games journalist, so he has made a major transition. The rumor is the 2016 film will focus on a non-central character from the Star Wars lexicon, so we’re totally expecting a scene where Han Solo faces a difficult moral decision about sawing Chewbacca’s pinned leg off. 

This speaks fairly well for the quality of writing over at Telltale these days, even though the movie is officially a spinoff of the biggest sci-fi property in existence. Maybe one day we can hope that game writing has enough clout that we’ll hear of games writers being swiped up by films that don’t have fans dressed as space wizards on opening night. Better yet, maybe Telltale will be the ones doing the swiping. 

On the frontlines of the coming backlash against VR

Think of the children.

The impossible has occurred: Trolls are a force for good

Videogames subsume “that kid.”

Finally, a business card as irresistible to the opposite sex as your own pheromones

"I don't know, I'd have to smell him again. Just to be sure." - Said Every Potential Business Associate Ever

ibb & obb is like Portal, but adorable

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