Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 388

Introducing Kill Screen’s Virtual Reality issue

Long story short, we’re planning on being bought by Facebook.

Dance offs in virtual reality are going to change your life

If clubbing in virtual reality turns out to be anything like this insane dance party demo, tearing the club up in, say, whatever the VR equivalent to Second Life is will be a consciousness-altering nexus of pulsing wavelengths and florescent tracers—no party favors necessary. 

As you can see in the Dance Central-y VR experiment of the very talented technical artist Drew Skillman, which makes use of Kinect 2.0 motion-camera and an Oculus Rift VR headset, there’s really no limits to the light show when you are bumping and grinding inside an immersive stereoscopic construct. It is awesome projects like this one that are actually going to draw people outside of "gaming" to VR. On the downside though, unlike partying establishments that exist in physical reality, there’s little-to-no chance of getting lucky, as you’re only dancing with rays of energy and disembodied outlines. But who knows. 

Watch below.

via Prothetic Knowledge

Watch this live-action Another World film get all Nicolas Refn

There's something about you, boy.

SXPD realizes your dream of being inside a 2000AD comic

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Side-by-sides prove actual Chicago looks better than Watch Dogs, has higher frame-rate

These side-by-side comparison shots of the Windy City next to scenes from Watch Dogs officially confirm that the real-life version of Chicago in fact has better graphics. And after it’s too late to cancel my pre-order! 

The landmarks and skylines of the massive Midwestern metropolis are captured fairly convincingly by the digital city planners at Ubisoft, as evidenced in the image gallery of one Stewie2552, which places selfies of the game’s ball cap-wearing hacktagonist next to pro urban photography. Views of the Trump Tower, water taxis, Wabash Ave. Bridge, and Millennium Park are all pretty much intact, with some obvious changes for legal reasons like replacing The Bean with an anonymous sculpture. Still, it’s impressive stuff.

Click on over to imgur to check out all the shots.

Introducing the (literally) epic new Beowulf boardgame

From the people who brought you Moby Dick, the card game.

Tarkovsky, Tarkovsky, Tarkovsky: a cinematic companion guide to Kentucky Route Zero

As we well know, theater and cinema are huge influences on Kill Screen fave adventure game Kentucky Route Zero—probably more of an influence than, well, games and adventure games. Over at Venus Patrol, designer Tamas Kemenczy has listed the films that the game takes influence from, aside from David Lynch, which everybody knows. 

The gamut is all over the place, from Death of a Salesman to Le Quattro Volte. But the recurring theme is Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, who you probably know as director of Solaris. The sphere of Tarkovsky’s influence is wide, including the films Stalker, Nosalghia, and The Sacrifice, with Kemenczy saying that “KRZ owes a lot to the pacing, visual form and choreography of Tarkovsky,” specifically in his process of “sculpting in time.” He also lists plenty of movies inspired by Tarkovsky, so if you love the game like we do, you should love this convenient viewing guide. Check it out!

Have a great Memorial Day!

We're observing the holiday. See you tomorrow! 

Watch the Usain Bolt of robots outrun a moving car

Why is it that a robot must always look terrifying to perform an impressive feat? Don’t they have any friendly, safe, innocuous looking robots? Maybe it’s just my active imagination envisioning the legs welded with knife blades, but there’s something inherently unsettling about watching the lightning fast Outrunner spin end over end in a way that could easily chase down the fastest human being on earth. 

Controlled with a remote that looks not to different than an RC truck’s, this little guy can fly, maintaining speeds of 45 mph on a treadmill, a world record, and 25 mph on the street. So you can still escape if you have wheels… for now. The engineers are encouraging robot enthusiasts to mod and improve the model for a robot marathon later this year, which sounds destined to incite panic.

 

Monument Valley devs reveal painful process of bringing M. C. Escher to life

Navigating the impossibly constructed catwalks and minarets in Monument Valley worked so seamlessly that I never stopped to ask, “How did they do this?” This despite the fact the Escher-esque game broke the rules of geometry and rational thought and space. However, pulling off a Penrose triangle that your character can march upon is pretty tricky stuff, because computers are always insisting that players follow strict internal logic, as the devs disclose to Leigh Alexander in this fascinating, if highly technical, interview. Says director Peter Pashley:

Every time [we] made a configuration like this and did what was necessary to stop bad connections forming, as soon as [we] wanted to modify it, [we’d] have to do it all over again. 

Click on over to Gamasutra if you’re interested in getting down to brass tacks with one of the year’s more remarkable mobile games.