Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 390

Today in DayZ trolls: Bandits lying through their teeth

Let this serve as a friendly public service announcement: never trust anyone in DayZ. That should be obvious, but in case it’s not, watch carefully as two dudes lie through their teeth to lure a far too naive dude to a bullet in the back of his head. The video, called Ultimate Deception, by YouTube user FuTaWuh, is indeed the ultimate deception. I’m taking this as further evidence that DayZ has ceased being a game and now exists solely as a mechanism for trolling, a digital fly tape that attracts all the trolls away from the rest of the Internet.

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An album so hip and exclusive that only hackers can hear it

I was hacking Linux before it was cool.

A beginner’s guide to Kierkegaard, via Dark Souls 2

Absurdity and leaps of faith.

Go on an adventure you’ve been on before with Tesla Effect

In-jokes, wise-cracks, and slurs included.

Marrying Mr. Darcy turns your boardgame crew into cutthroat Victorian socialites

But seriously: everyone hates Mr. Wickham.

Brian Eno’s new app turns ordinary vinyl into invisible cities of sound

Brian Eno has a new album, which is not surprising since the father of ambient music stays pretty busy. But what is surprising and rather amazing is the killer companion app for the album, which is a collaboration with Karl Hyde of Underworld called Someday World.

The augmented reality toy (for iPhone only, sorry Android owners) allows vinyl collectors to visualize the analog music as fragmented digital art, like urban areas shattering into fractals. The way it works is really cool: just you hold your phone’s camera up to a spinning copy of the vinyl, and you can see what the music looks like as you listen. To see it in action, check out the clip below: 

This looks like Hyper Light Drifter but darker; here's hoping it comes out

In the year 20XX, in a TIGSource devlog...

Irkalla. It's a side-scrolling arcade shooter that has the pixel-y charm of Hyper Light Drifter (or your personal favorite upcoming GIF-machine), and all the bleak, gunmetal-grey mech-strewn wastelands you can ask for.

Yeah, the pored-over, long-gestating pixel art GIF-game is kind of a trend right now, but there's pixel art and then there's pixel art, y'know? And this two-man project looks to be the latter.

The devs even promise to keep their narrative ambitions in check and "just focus on a funny gameplay, heavy atmosphere and stylized pixel art."

Two out of three so far. We jest, but obviously there's nothing wrong with developers taking their time and making something personal and rad in the end. They have yet to venture into the cursed earth of Kickstarter, but if they go that route we may be talking Irkalla for real.

But, Irkalla, if you never make it...we'll always have the GIFs.

Star Citizen dev imagines a world where console and PC players hold hands

That is the idealistic gaming worldview of Chris Roberts, creative lead of Star Citizen, the space sim that has raked in ungodly gobs of cash. 

“We want to be open and have everyone play in the same universe,” he says in the latest issue of Game Informer. He goes on to explain how console players play on console servers and PC players play on PC servers, creating a situation where PC players get all the awesome updates. 

But Roberts sees no difference between modern powerful consoles and gaming computers, and says it doesn’t has to be this way. They should be treated equal. The problem is console manufacturers want to maintain control over the quality of content on their system, though Star Citizen might have some bargaining power.

Apple rejects sex-ed game HappyPlayTime because it's porn, apparently

Rack Stare is still cool, though. 

There are more ways to play DayZ than psychopath, apparently

This is the revelation I gained from the DayZ Character Dice Game Remix, a personality-rolling meta-game you play prior to logging in, with the numbers from your dice assigning you a specific mentality. 

Created by Reddit-users Conn3ct3d and Wingthree, the game casts you as either a hero, good guy, bad guy, survivor, crazy person, or psychopath accordingly. For those of us who only know of the ruthless survival game through hearsay, it shines a light on the strange psychology that exists within. For example, one role you can roll is “go[ing] around breaking peoples’ legs to make friends that can’t escape.” And for those of you who play regularly, here’s your chance to save yourself from a life of online lunacy.

The small text in the chart is much easier to read here.