Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 391

Super Time Force is obsessed with the past

Finding beauty in revisiting.

This vase is a mirror

How Grayson Earle’s Ai Weiwei Whoops! reflects today’s art world

Second Lifestock is the free-range VR simulator our chickens deserve

Still awaiting: Eggcraft, Sheep Fortress, Dark Sows.

This sea-faring sim lets you romance your crew or eat them. Your choice, really

With The Walking Dead and Gods will be Watching and now Sunless Sea, a dark and Melvillian account of life on the open ocean, cannibalism is quickly becoming the hot new trend in games. OK, maybe three games doesn’t exactly constitute a trend, but we’ll wait and see. The interesting thing about this one, with selling points like “eat your crew” and staving off “hunger” while joining leagues with “pirates,” is that it teases to tap into moral-choice-making with a slant towards villainy, a perspective TellTale’s games, for all their horrific qualities, seem afraid to flirt with. But this game promises to encourage unscrupulous manners when it hits Steam Early Access in June. 

Witchmarsh lets you hack-n-slash while pretending to learn about US history

Massachusetts in the Roaring ‘20s wasn’t just a place for drinking fermented cider beside the bonfire in waistcoats and coattails, apparently. It was also the perfect setting for the pixel-arty, grind-heavy, loot-filled, side-scrolling RPGs Witchmarsh. At least that’s what history according to videogames crowdfunded on Kickstarter taught me, which is, for the record, the most fun but least accurate way to learn history.

Witchmarsh looks to be a solidly put-together little production, with thematic touches of swing dancing and Victorian New England. But perhaps it’s the action that looks most intriguing, seeming to blend the collect-athoning from Iga’s Castlevanias with, according to the dev, Baldur’s Gate RPGing, and some good ol’ Huck Finn-reminiscent train-hopping. 

Fantastic drawings of Walt's original, utopian vision for Disneyland

The original prospectus for Disneyland has been revealed, and jolly gee is it great. Boing Boing has gotten ahold of the 6-page written document that explains Walt’s mission statement in detail. The booklet is full of strange factoids that will tickle the fancy of any Disney fan, like how the park intended to sell miniature, 30-inch tall ponies by mail order catalog. But the real draw here is the map, a whimsical, hand-drawn centerfold that captures Walt’s original ideas for the park. 

And it’s pretty recognizable as Disneyland: the haunted house on the horizon, the steamboat ride, the railroad girding the perimeter. What’s fascinating about the drawing to me is how it documents a utopian vision of long ago that was actually built and you can still go to: True-Life Adventureland, Fantasy Land, The World of Tomorrow, Frontier Land. Well, the Jetsons-y “slidewalks” never materialized, but most of it is here. 

Be sure to check it out over at Boing Boing.

And the finalists for best Euro-style board game of the year are...

Germany to boardgames, particularly “eurogames,” is like 1970s England was to punk, or post-WWI Paris was to Lost Generation literary works. It is the motherland, so it’s important to keep an eye on the German boardgame festival Spiel des Jahres. 

This year’s grand prize finalists include the very Lawrence of Arabia-looking Camel Up by Steffen Bogen; the word-associating party game Concept by Gaëtan Beaujannot and Alain Rivollet; and Marc André’s Splendor, a math-heavy card game themed around Medieval merchants. The festival also awards separate prizes in the field of children’s games, and board games for the connoisseur (i.e., not family-style), but the big one is the game of the year. 

The Spiel des Jahres dates back to 1979. Past winners including big-name games like Dominion, Dixit, Carcassone, and Settlers of Catan, so it’s a good barometer for future greatness in the world of boardgames. Be sure to check out all the nominees—in German, of course.

img via Purple Dawn

The supremely confident songs of Transistor

Supergiant builds an arc.

At last, an Oculus Rift game where you can play Zelda on a crappy old TV

Visiting fantastic virtual worlds. Simulating amazing experiences you’ll never have in real-life. Having out-of-body experiences in cyberspace. Forget all that. What we really want to do in virtual reality is play old games. 

And that is exactly what the MemoRift project by Roy Lazarovich allows you to do, creating a small virtual room with an NES and a CRT TV plunked down in front of you. There’s also a true-to-life IBM personal computer from the 80s which emulates old PC games like Prince of Persia. 

While the irony of using paradigm-shifting technology for a retro game geek-out is not lost on me, the project is a decent stab at tackling the problem with retro revivalism: old games were intimately connected to the hardware they were played on. So much emotional memory is tied up in DOS prompts and blowing on carts. I wonder if we’ll all be nostalgic for those bulky, constrictive Oculus Rift masks years from now.

via Prosthetic Knowledge

Kero Blaster is a world in search of a game

Spoiler alert: it is very cute.