Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 392

Valve is about to make Dota fun again

The orthodoxy revolts.

Good news: Google is buying Twitch. Bad news: live-stream Let's Plays

According to which news outlet you ask, it has either been reported, confirmed, or unable to be confirmed that Google is acquiring the ever-popular videogame streaming service Twitch for a cool billion. This is just the latest indicator of how ungodly huge people watching other people playing games is. We saw last week that more online viewers watch Twitch than HBO, and we already knew that it was a goliath in terms of web traffic. If videogames are becoming the rest of the world's R&D, and this is more evidence, as you have to imagine that Google isn't only eyeing the company, but their streaming technology that has been perfected by DOTA 2 players and watchers.

Keep it up games!

We support your decision to spend all day fiddling with Google’s Rubik’s Cube

I don’t know exactly how many hours of productivity will be lost to the 3D, interactive Rubik’s cube that appeared overnight as Google’s latest doodle, but assuredly a lot. Cracking the code is no easy task, with today’s date May 19th commemorating the 519 quintillion ways you could possibly fail to produce the solution to the color-twisting, cubic puzzle. Admittedly, a small portion of this writer’s own formative years were spent vainly searching for the correct combination of twists. And as Google has reminded us, it still boggles the mind. So we decided to do the next best thing to actually solving one with our own minds and rounded up some guides. 

Happy twisting!

Transistor: Supergiant’s accidental spiritual successor

One of the year’s most anticipated RPGs grew organically.

Two5six: a day of videogames and culture and werewolves and donuts

You should’ve been there.

World War Machine is like Diablo, but with hideous transhuman mecha

In the distant post-apocalyptic future, a war will be waged between grotesque mecha cobbled together from organic body parts, and it will be awesome. This post-apocalypse will also be fairly similar to Diablo, judging from this new trailer for World War Machine, a cool-looking loot-and-shoot-athon which came out of Square Enix’s crowdsourcing collective. (In case you’re unfamiliar, that’s the campaign where Square pledges development support to approved games.) The game itself looks pretty nifty, combining the fast-paced ammunition unload of a multidirectional shooter like Smash TV with the fiendish RPG mechanics of fiendish RPGs that hook you in a feedback loop that won’t let you go till the crack of dawn. 

The game just hit Indiegogo. Check out the trailer below.

How SUPERHOT became that Matrix videogame we always wanted

Behind the scenes of the ridiculously stylish game-to-be. 

NSA threat words make for unexpectedly moving magnet poetry

The point of magnet poetry is to add a dash of creativity and wordsmithery to your fridge, I figure, but the point of this magnet poetry browser game is create a poem from the words those fearful “threat words” the Department of Homeland security is scanning the Internet for. The game is called POETRY THREATS! and, surprisingly, it makes for better poetry than any I’ve come across on the freezer door. “She was in to me like a chemical spill of methamphetamine,” one poet writes. Another stacks words into the NSA’s logo; accurate, yes, but the meter was not even an afterthought.

You can express your inner poet through surveillance keywords at this scary/fun website.

Don't underestimate the power of voice

Jennifer Hale and Catherine Burns talk about talking. 

The 2014 Rube Goldberg Machine Contest winner, ladies and gentlemen

Rube Goldberg machines, those kooky machines that perform simple tasks with convoluted methods, are generally a thing of marvel, especially when said Rube Goldberg machine is the winner of the 2014 annual contest among college students. Luckily, that impossible contraption, which was built by a team of students from Purdue University, appeared last night on Jimmy Kimmel. 

A little background: Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist and mad tinkerer who conceptualized crazily-inefficient machines in the ‘30s. But this is the Internet so of course you already know that.

Watch in childlike amazement as this machine goes through an elaborate process to zip a man’s zipper.