Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 397

How the rules of social games are creeping into the real world

The subtle progress of gamification.

Road to TWO5SIX: Patrick Balthrop

The Bioshock audio designer has risked life and limb to create the games’ sounds.

This War of Mine interrogates the nature of the war game

Going beyond the call of duty.

Embarrassing photos of what the future of games looked like in 1991

If you would have told my 11-year old self that, in the future, we wouldn’t actually all be playing games with big, dorky helmets that used voice-commands to fire eye-lasers and wearing Game Boy fanny packs, my reaction would have been an enthusiastic: Aw, man!

I mean, the future of games looked so promising and awesome in this 1991 issue of Omni magazine, which also positioned the Power Glove, the Neo-Geo, and the chin-controller as the next big things. We saw how those worked out. But at least we can remember the future the way it was supposed to be by chuckling at these incredibly awkward photos of one super cool kid modeling the gee-whiz gadgetry of videogames’ yesteryears. 

Hopefully our own predictions for the future of games don’t look this weird in 25 years. 

Last Life will be a Kentucky Route Zero-style adventure game, says dev. We say: hooray!

Remember Last Life? Of course, you do. Who could forget that smoking-hot noir/sci-fi adventure game with an art style like Grim Fandango and a twisty transhumanist subplot. 

Well, we know a good bit more about the details now that it’s, like, 30 minutes from being officially funded, raking in over 100 grand on Kickstarter. And you can breath easy if the terse, difficult puzzles traditionally found with adventure games give you migraines. 

“I was really inspired by Kentucky Route Zero,” Sam Farmer tells PC Gamer, going on to say how the game is all about exploring the story and characters. KRZ was one of our favorite games of last year in part because it showed how the adventure game formula can be breath new life into game narratives, and vice versa—something we already got a whiff of with The Walking Dead.

The Way is what would happen if Eric Chahi did Dune

The talking point around The Way is that its Kickstarter video resembles Another World and Flashback, classic games with beautiful animation and no-bullshit design by Éric Chahi. And that it does. 

But the thing that stuck out to me is the similarities to Frank Herbert’s Dune. Note the tawny desert atmosphere; the fusion of old world mysticism with the technology you’d need in space (I’m pretty sure I see some palm locks); the several moons hanging in the sky. Also, the protagonist, who we see dying over and over in the trailer, as is wont to happen in a Chahi game, would be at home riding on top of a planetary parasite, although sadly there is no sign of sandworms in the game. But it looks great regardless. Shai-Hulud!

Horror games should be intentionally un-fun, says horror game designer

Videogames are stuffed to the brim with “fun” little feedback loops, like level-maxing and crossbow upgrades and loot-a-thons. But according to Thomas Grip, author of some of the most hair-raising horror games around, such as Amnesia: The Dark Descent and the anticipated SOMA, those delicious systems just get in the way when trying to scare the bejesus out of us. 

In an interesting slice of academia over at Gamasutra, Grip explains that all those game designer tricks to make games more fun will kill the scares. “The gameplay mechanic is almost sort of a side thing,” he says. I imagine it’d be hard to get freaked out while the reward-center of your brain is flushed with dopamine.

Why not read more here?

Alaskan tribe and game studio team up, document folklore in enchanting game

There’s just something inspiring about a small game studio teaming up with Alaskan natives to tell Iñupiat folklore through a beautiful puzzle-platformer game. What’s more, Never Alone, coming to PC and unspecified consoles this fall, gives you a trusty little white dog sidekick. Dogs are pretty inspiring, too.

Judging from the lovely new trailer, the game seems to fall into that class of game that uses classic “gameplay” as a vehicle to explore more nuanced and high-minded, if less fun, themes: in this case, art and narrative. Specifically, it has the romanticized indigenous vibe of a game like Tengami, but also the jumping and swimming with animals in their natural habitat of say, Donkey Kong Country. But you get the sense the real star here is the spirit of folklore and magical realism. 

This absurd 247-hit beat-down is possibly Street Fighter 4’s longest combo

Clocking in at a devastating 247 hits, this has a high likelihood of being the longest, most pain-inducing combo ever dealt to a brainless dummy opponent in Street Fighter 4. The move set is a minute and 37 seconds of Chun Li spamming icrouching blows, the occasional blue fireball, and that oh-so-annoying lightning leg kick. In short, this is basically the biggest dick move ever.

Of course, the game isn’t designed to let you pull off absurd combos of mesmerizing length, but rules were made to be broken, right? The YouTube user and apparent fighting game combo savant biffotasty exploited a glitch in the game to engineer this beastly combo. 

Via Top Tier Tactics

No Wave is a tribute to 1980s New York's noisiest scene

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