Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 401

This 2D beat’em up has elevator-scene-in-Drive levels of violence

The beat 'em up gets graphic.

Be a good little capitalist with To Build a Better Mousetrap

Make, build, earn. 

The secret to social game success: sound

Dr. Karen Collins on gaming’s unheard triumphs.

Box Art Review: the soulless redundancy of Watch Dogs

Check me off as "generic bad ass."

One man’s obsessive vision to print out the entire Internet

The poet Kenneth Goldsmith is in the midst of an absurd endeavor to print out the Internet. All of it. This naturally irked the Internet who formed a petition called "Please don't print the internet," as if his very subject was an unwilling participant in his art. He obstinately refused to stop, as you can see in the picture above, found on his Tumblr, captioned with “We printed the fucking internet.”

There is no way one man could print out the entirety of the Internet, of course. That’s why his project is crowd-sourced, with participants mailing in more than ten tons of paper. But when you think about it, there’s like zero possibility that even a million people could print out the whole Net, with every frame of video footage needing to be captured, and every new comment left in a text field needing to be sought ought. 

As for what any of this means, you could probably think up all kinds of artistic bologna, but one of its statements is very lucid. Goldsmith says the project is in part a tribute to Aaron Swartz, the hackivist and tragic hero of free information.

Read more about it here.

via Rhizome 

Road to TWO5SIX: Steve Gaynor

The creator of last year’s watershed Gone Home discusses its wake.

This Disney-themed tarot deck would melt Aleister Crowley’s black heart

In tarot, you have two extremes. You have grim-looking cards covered in foreboding occult symbols that will rub out your soul. And you have this rosy deck of Disneyania that reminds you of all your favorite animated features from Walt’s golden years. The Disney Major Arcana, created by the very talented Dmorte on Deviant Art, serves as a reminder that there was pretty weird stuff going on in old Disney flicks. Still, maybe it’s just me, but a Hanged Man card that has Goofy dangling by his heels after what was likely a comical picnicking incident doesn’t strike one with the impending sense of doom that it probably should. You can just hear him chuckling, “Har-har, garsh!” 

Be sure to check out all the cards here.

via Boing Boing

Factorio gives the middle finger to SimCity’s vision of industrial utopia

SimCity is about building a flourishing biome where citizens can live without dying of smog. Factorio, contrarily, says screw that. It is a game about wrecking the environment by building sprawling, Rube-Goldbergian, obscene, waste-shitting factories out of conveyer belts and tens of thousands of claw arms. 

Judging from the new trailer, it loosely fits alongside games like Papers, Please and Prison Architect inside the very trendy space of legitimately good games making a statement for a social cause by having you make awful choices to win. And the cause here I suspect is pollution, as you can see in the scene in the trailer where black smoke spreads over the depleted wilderness as a pack of wild, uh, armadillos/rats/triceratopses(?) bum rush the facilities before being splattered by a train. 

This one has got my hopes up for a non-PETA-related, honest-to-God simulation based on Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

Watch how a Japanese villager is replacing the dead with real-life NPCs

Take a moment and watch this micro-documentary on a 64-year-old Japanese woman who is sewing elaborate dolls, leaving them in the place of departed neighbors from her dying village in the valley of Shikoku.

For the past decade, Ayano Tsukimi has been repopulating the remote village of Nagoro with arts-and-crafts people, sewing buttons on their eyes and coiffing their hair with yarn, because her home is becoming a ghost town. Why? Well, because, as we learn in the video, her village has dwindled down to 36 residents and doesn’t even have a general store or local school, though at one point it was a thriving manufacturing town. It’s kind of heartbreaking, but awesome too. 

I’ve got 99 problems but Notch’s new game about existential dread isn’t one

The bowler-hat-wearing, dubstep-bash-throwing Minecraft creator created a quick little game about exploring the squirmy mental content of a nihilist. Coded for the latest Ludum Dare game jam, Drowning in Problems is sort of an existential take on the Cookie Clicker genre. This text-based, choice-laden leveling system tells a story about all the drawbacks of having an highly-intelligent, post-Descartes, over-thinking brain, skill point by skill point. In any case, the game is sweet and worth your time and totally adds a thoughtful dimension to the new class of spreadsheet games like Candy Box.

You can play it here.