Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 399

Occupy Wall Street: the app

All those in favor, press "ay!"

The NYC Games Forum illustrates the rocky road to becoming a game

Those things don’t just appear on your hard drive magically, you know.

Road to TWO5SIX: Kaho Abe

Kaho Abe's work melds form, message, and play. 

Third act of mysterious Kentucky Route Zero released in appropriately mysterious manner

The third episode of Kentucky Route Zero, the fine adventure game whose previous installments earned the 4th spot in our best-of-2013 list, has been stealth-released. They just kind of put it out there. 

What makes this series great is basically everything: the mature storytelling which is subtler and smarter than the “mature storytelling” we ordinarily see in games, the theatrical art direction, the Lynchian touches of the unexplainable, the strange VR art-house interludes, the influence of noise music and sacred harp, the ability to get out and explore any old hardware store or condemned church on the map. It also lacks all those pesky logic puzzles typically found in adventure games, which we definitely appreciate. So yeah, it’s pretty outstanding. 

Also I should mention that its game designer Tamas Kemenczy will be speaking at our Two5Six conference in Brooklyn on May 16. We'd love to see you there!

As for the game, it’s currently on sale on Steam and Humble Bundle. It can be yours here. 

This web app turns Google Streetview into cyberpunk art

I know what you’re thinking. Google Maps Streetview would look so much cooler if your city was rendered all cyberpunk-y in 3D point cloud graphics. Well, this interactive web app by Callum Prentice does just that, turning any boring sidewalk scene into neon-colored polygons against grimy black night. But what’s point cloud, you ask? The technology is, er, a set of data points in a coordinate system. It gets a little complicated, but you can imagine pointillism for polygons and not be far off. As for the web app, its much better than Streetview and all that facticity about knowing where you’re at.

You can try it for yourself here.

New Godzilla can produce an ungodly amount of urine

Godzilla has always been huge, but the Godzilla in the new Godzilla flick is frigging mammoth, and an un-thought-of consequence of that 55,000 tons of girth is a whole lot of urine production. According to the calculations of folks at Deep Sea News, a real mutant lizard of that size would micturate a staggering 151,436,928 gallons per day. This is of course the unsavory side of Kaiju movie production Hollywood doesn’t want to tell you. 

And the problem isn’t going away. They’re predicting that Godzilla will grow to a staggering 945 feet tall by the year 2050. That’s based on past performance and the ever-increasing height of modern skyscrapers, which Godzilla must topple to impress mates. At least that’s the scientific explanation. I seem to recall in the older films that he was angry with civilization for spilling nuclear waste into the ocean of drinking water he swallows.

Via Deep Sea News

Why we ignore gamers behind bars

A $5 zine reminds us we’re all becoming less humane.

Sportsfriends reminds us how local multiplayer can be

It’s in that name.

Wayward Souls will eat you alive

As brutal as Super Hexagon, as cute as Jetpack Joyride.

Jeff Minter games in virtual reality sound life-changing

The prospect of Jeff Minter making a game for Oculus Rift is pretty terrifying, especially when said game is Minotaur Rescue, a psychotic swirl of ZX81 graphics and random goat blurts. Personally, I love the game; it remains one of my favorites on iOS, and that’s saying a lot. But I say terrifying because you’d be sticking your head smack in the middle of this whirling, chaotic black hole of a game. 

Admittedly, Minter’s description makes it sound amazing: “I postulated that instead of objects moving on a flat screen the user might see objects moving on a sphere that surrounded him, as if he were entirely enclosed within a spherical screen.” I imagine that when I came out from the VR helm my hair would be streaked white.

Right now the game is available as a free demo, and is more of a testing ground for Minter to dick around with a Rift kit. You can find a link through this post on Gamasutra, if you dare.