Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 389

Torment devs suggest combat won't be as torturous as Planescape's

It has been properly established that Planescape: Torment is an legendary work of distorted imagination that happened to have pretty shit combat. But you can sleep easy knowing that the devs who are working on Torment: Tides of Numenera are aware of the opinion and are overhauling battles for the hotly anticipated PC game. 

In a recent interview, Jeremy Kopman, game scripter at inXile, promised that battles will be fewer and farther between, with none of those densely-populated group mobs you had to fight in the first game.

Also, there’s this:

We plan for it to be possible to complete Torment: Tides of Numenera without engaging in combat at all. Players can finish or avoid every Crisis using social, stealth, and exploration abilities. 

Phew! That’s a relief. A problem that inevitably comes up with some of these crowdfunded successors to classic computer-RPGs is that the mechanics lack the benefit of 20 years of spit shine. It’s good to hear the Torment team is proactive here. 

New PBS Game/Show asks if World of Warcraft can evoke spiritual experiences

You probably passed it off as just the right combination of sleep depravation, screen hypnosis, and Red Bull, but sometimes games make us feel, well, otherworldly. Cognitive anthropologist Ryan Hornbeck, who interviewed gaggles of Chinese World of Warcraft players for his dissertation, has a deeper explanation. He found that raiding and looting and healing in the mega-popular MMO can actually give rise to a spiritual experiences. We ran an article on it a while back. 

Of course being writers we were skeptical, so we wanted to look into this matter of spiritual healing through play further. And the result is this new episode of PBS Game/Show.

Let us know what you think in the comments!

Transform Proteus into a somber hellscape with Purgateus

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8-bit Zardoz rears its soothsaying stone head

A few years ago, Nick Criscuolo uploaded a sublime mock-up trailer for an 8-bit adaptation of Zardoz, the best absurd cult sci-fi to feature Sean Connery in a red spandex loincloth. Now Nick is very much interested in making that fictional project a reality, throwing some rather inconceivable level design concepts on his blog, along with animated gifs of the pixel-y former Bond on horseback. He's saying it will be released later this year.

Silly homages to old movies and television in the form of no-budget games are not uncommon, with Fight Club and My Girl coming to mind most recently, but it’s rare that they get taken seriously, like this one. Criscuolo is currently seeking a collaborator/programmer/fellow-levitating-concrete-head lover to help him make Zardoz: the stinky (but awesome) movie: the videogame a reality. Godspeed. 

Watch Dogs’ multiplayer critiques our always-connected world

Who hacks the hack dogs?

Fearless Fantasy is extremely weird. Should we care?

The way, way out.

Kiwanuka is a puzzler like its cast: simple, charming, and short

It takes a village.

Adventure Time creator gets all Twitch Plays Pokemon-y with crowd-played Twitter game

Currently, Pendleton Ward’s Twitter feed has been transformed from into a hand-drawn, old-school, first-person adventure game called Quest Attack!, hosted by none other than the walrus-bearded Adventure Time creator himself. 

It’s no secret the cartoonist is connected to games, with nods to tabletop RPGs on his show and his collaboration with Double Fine. But we didn’t expect him to ad-lib one, drawing each scene depending on the actions requested by followers. The past few moves/tweets have involved taking a blubbery “thing” from the toilet, finding a dagger underneath, and someone pausing the game. The game doesn’t seem to be going anywhere but maybe that’s the point. In any case, it’s a pretty awesome way for a creator to interact with fans. 

Oculus Rift + Kinect + Wii Balance Board = hoverboard ride of your dreams

Just when you thought your childhood dream of hoverboarding would never materialize … Enter: project Hoverboard VR, a virtual reality setup that simulates those bodacious fictional levitating skateboards of the '90s. Jiggered together from gaming peripherals that don’t get out much these days, the setup uses a Wii Fit Balance Board and Kinect 1.0 to make you feel like Marty McFly. Well, not quite. The virtual environment is not quite up to snuff, with a rudimentary pre-PS1 poly-count and wireframe, but as a proof of concept this is amazing stuff. And you thought you’d never have reason to pull your Balance Board out of the closet again.

1849 depicts California's growth during the Gold Rush, but omits one thing

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