Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 398

Behind the scenes of Hyper Light Drifter's wordless world

Teddy Diefenbach fills us in on the game’s striking aesthetic.

The module still reigns

Kill Screen patches together games and music at Moogfest.

The Last Tinker: City of Colors looks to the glory days of mascot platformers

More mushroom kingdoom than “wahoo!” jump, though.

A history of violence: Videogame moral outcries through the ages

As long as there have been games, there have been people taking indignant moral stances towards them. 

This is shown in this nice write-up on a short history of game panics by Jesse Walker over at Reason. From New York City’s pinball ban, which we have a standout article on by John Teti in issue #1, to those seedy “Pac-Man dens” of the ‘80s, the usual suspects are all there: Cluster’s Revenge’s lewdness, Lieberman’s crusade against game violence, urban legends of loner teens becoming murderous psychopaths after playing Dungeons & Dragons. 

An interesting one I had not heard of is Death Race 1976, an unlicensed old arcade game based on an old sci-fi film about crazed killers running over pedestrians. There were some priceless scary quotes from fear-mongering psychologists afloat:

On TV, violence is passive. In this game a player takes the first step to creating violence. The player is no longer just a spectator....I shudder to think what will come next if this is encouraged. It'll be pretty gory. - The New York Times

The prisoners I dealt with...would have loved the game. - The Associated Press

One in four people would get it on with a robot, survey finds

One question more than any other will define the course of modern society: Would a sensible human being shag a robot? You know, possibly like this one. 

Well, 25 percent of people across the pond in the UK would. It turns out that one in four survey-takers wouldn’t mind have sex with a human-like machine, according to the results of a poll of 2000 residents by Middlesex University. Furthermore, 46 percent said they wouldn’t judge their fellow robot-lovers negatively. 

In general, the survey was collecting info on the public opinion of androids, which found that 1 in 3 have serious fears about robots threatening humanity. This means that a sizable chunk of participants would screw robots even though they thought robots posed a big risk to the livelihood of the human race. Way to go, people.

Via Boing Boing

Sounds like the creator of REZ wants to make a free-to-play game

Tetsuya Mizuguchi, worshipped by some for creating the rave-y, transcendent, perception-melding Rez, has dropped some big hints about his next project in the latest issue of Edge. And it’s sounding surprisingly social. Consider the evidence: 

One, his next game will continue the lineage of Rez and Lumines and Child Of Eden. So far, so great.

Two, he’s currently helping out with some Japanese social games, but he plans to get back to his own new game in 2014 or 2015.

Also, he says he’s looking at mobile games, and we’re of course down with that.

Many mobile games are not like console games, but that technology is very interesting. I want to think about the future from the point of view of what the future human wants.

And then he mentions that he’s not at all opposed to the free-to-play model.

You put all those together and an image forms in your head of a free-to-play, mobile game with social components that is connected in spirit to Rez, which sounds a little, uh, unexpected. But it potentially could be amazing, maybe?

Because who doesn’t need Link to the Past’s overworld crafted in paper

For the videogame map enthusiast, there would be nothing sweeter than hanging this diorama of the overworld from A Link to the Past over the mantle, at least until your significant other made you remove it. The miniature, 1:1, 3D model is handsomely constructed of paper and is easily framed in a deep-seated box to display. You can almost hear the overworld theme just looking at it.

This nostalgia trip was lovingly constructed by Wuppes, a super-talented and obviously very patient guy. And his love of seeing old games recreated in paper doesn’t stop at Zelda. His Flickr account is full of many other delightful dioramas from old favorites: Bomberman, Bubble Bobble, Golden Axe, that scene in Duck Hunt where the dog taunts you. And to answer the question I know you’re thinking: yes, there is a Dark World companion.

New PBS Game/Show peeks into the beautiful and terrible future of games

If the past has taught us anything, it’s that the future will be full of awesome videogames the likes of which we can only begin to imagine. But that’s not going to stop us from imagining, nonetheless. In fact, if you look around today’s environment, we can already sense some huge upcoming trends on the horizon. Will Twitch plays Pokemon evolve into a more interactive way of watching others play games? Will the advancements in AI such as deep learning infiltrate into games, finally giving us smart NPCs? Will someone use a videogame to create music and become as big as Skrillex? Will that cause a chain reaction of mutually assured destructions? What else does the future hold? 

Watch this week’s episode to find out, and let us know what you think in the comments!

It's like No More Heroes and Bushido Blade had a baby

Blade Symphony has everything to do with blades and almost nothing to do with symphonies, which is probably for the best since there aren't many good games about orchestral compositions. What makes this blade game refreshing is that it’s a full-on, strategic, sword-fighting, well, um, fighting game. The one-on-one, 3D, arena-based swordfights recall something between the hectic boss fights of No More Heroes and the big elegant duels of Bushido Blade. The game has been available in early access for a while, but as we see in the new trailer, it’s now polished and spit-shined and wiped clean of blood. 

Expel dumb kids to meet funding goals in satirical school management sim

The problems with the nation’s school systems are wide and oft the subject of a good argument, so of course someone is making a satirical game about it. 

No Pineapple Left Behind is a charter school-funding sim from the devs who previously made Neocolonialism, a digital board game about devastating the global economy. This one sounds equally socially focused, although on a local scale, as you play as a sinister principal in charge of overseeing that your students perform admirably on standardized test lest they change from well-mannered pineapples into noisome kids. (Thus the “no pineapple” pun.) 

The game is still in the very early stages of development but promises to deliver satirical ribbings such as hiring cops to turn your bad kids back into good fruit. Should be fun, unless you’re my father, in which case you’d likely adamantly disagree with everything this game is trying to say.