Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 396
May 13, 2014
Satirical game about uselessness of arguing on internet immediately inspires useless arguing on internet
Horrible internet discussions just got super meta.
Guys like playing as girls in World of Warcraft; girls, not so much
The female population in World of Warcraft is a lot smaller than you think, as the game is populated with guys moonlighting as girl characters. This is the takeaway from a new study on the realm of ogres and magic pandas, which found that while 26 percent of male players chose the opposite gender for their avatar, only 7 percent of females played as males. The study also noted some unique behavior among males posed as females, such as more frequent use of emotional phrases and emoticons. Another interesting tidbit is that these guys were much more frolicsome than the average player, and by that I mean they tended to jump more.
Granted the sex-swapping survey conducted by researchers at Syracuse University had a small sample size of 375 players, but it’s potentially illuminating about our relationships with non-playable characters and gender orientation. Not to toot our own horn, but we do have this feature on the subject if you'd like to explore it further. PBS Game/Show had a great episode on it, also.
Watch out, Juggalos: GTA Online now tracking psychos
You might want to think twice before repeatedly running over the driver of that car you just carjacked in Grand Theft Auto Online, because the game will let other players know that you are a psycho. After installing the new High Life update, released today by Rockstar, your behaviors are officially being monitored by a stat that keeps tabs on your mental state.
The way it works is that now those little blips on the map that show you other players’ locations will turn brighter red the more mentally unstable they are deemed to be. You can think of it as a radar detector for indecent behavior. Next time you decide to engage in roughing up a helpless pedestrian NPC, or a not-so-helpless but amicable fellow scumbag, you get tagged—and possibly hunted down by a vigilante. Players with white-colored dots are allowed to eliminate players with red-colored dots free of penalty. This sounds like a cool way to bring the fun of running from cops in single-player to multiplayer, and also a way to police spoilsports who ruin the game for everybody. Not a bad thing!
How could you not love a game with a hook-shot gravity beam?
The developers of A Story About My Uncle understand something vital: there is no better tool/weapon/means-of-locomotion-in-a-game than a grappling beam. The new trailer reveals the platformer has you latching on to tiny land masses and levitating cubes in an attempt to cross deep chasms the way your uncle did. The play style strikes me as something between the first-person leaping of Mirror’s Edge and the parts of Metroid Prime when you were swinging from an electricity beam, but without the quicktime-events of the former and the clumsiness of the latter. You might remember this title as a standout student project from a few years ago, but now it’s being fully realized and looking great. Did I mention it has a grappling beam?!
Miegakure lets you touch the actual 4th dimension, creator says
As far as dimensions go, the 4th dimension is pretty impossible to understand. That’s because you can’t perceive or really even conceive it. But according to Miegakure creator Marc Ten Bosch, his metaphysical puzzler inspired by Japanese gardening allows the 4th dimension to be made real.
Over at The Creator’s Project, in probably the most fascinating interview with a game dev ever, he gets all esoteric about math and explains how the dimension-shifting in his game is based on mathematical concepts, which are actual proof that the 4th dimension does exist. He says:
Does a fourth dimension of space actually exist in the universe we live in? I would argue that the fact that it exists mathematically and that we can now represent it and interact with it using a computer makes it very real, in a strange way.
This gets a little tricky, but he goes on to explain how in a computer simulation a game world can be modeled in 4 dimensions (x, y, z, and n), although we can only see 3 of them. That’s why in trailers you see the edges of his structures disappearing off-screen. But even in its fleeting state you can get a feel for what it is. “This game is an expedition into unknown frontiers of our universe,” he says.
Go read the whole thing and prepare to be amazed.
Apple patent teases the possibility of 3D holographic technology
Will holographic 2Pac one day live in your pocket?
Kentucky Route Zero’s third act is as amorphous as we’d expect
Cardboard Computer’s meandering opus gets … meander-y.
An ode to Mario Kart’s almighty blue shell
Nintendo’s greatest equalizer.
Kill Screen Magazine's Blog
- Kill Screen Magazine's profile
- 4 followers
