Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 402

Amazing VR experiment turns your living room into an interdimensional drawing app

Crazy things happen when you combine a Kinect with an Oculus Rift, like drawing with your finger in thin air and watching shapes that defy the laws of nature levitate over your living room set. As we can see in this fever dream of a video clip, programmer Matt Guertin has invented a mind-bending 3D drawing tool for virtual reality. 

The setup he concocted allows him to quickly sketch shapes that are visible from all sides, making a convincing illustration of how virtual reality could one day give all kinds of digital objects and images the same physical dimensions in space that quote-unquote real objects enjoy. It’s stuff like this that makes me positive that one day our distant relatives will be looking at computer monitors in a museum alongside obsolete, antiquated devices like Calculagraphs.

New PBS Game/Show asks if the free-to-play model can save games from income equality

As 868-HACK and Corrypt creator Michael Brough mentioned in a blog post earlier this week, "I really don't like that putting games on iOS means people can't play them without some expensive gadget. It excludes people.” 

This gets at the crux of an irksome problem with the medium of videogames: it’s a very expensive hobby. In order see and play everything, you have to own a couple of expensive consoles, assemble a gaming rig, have an expensive data contract, so on and so on; whereas with film you can see most flicks with a Netflix account and Blu-ray player.

In the new episode, Jamin looks at the free-to-play model and asks if it has the capacity to eliminate the income inequality in games, even if it has been kind of predatory and gross in the past.

Check it out below, and please subscribe on YouTube!

Wake the Dreamer is the indie alternative to Nintendo’s Tomodachi Life

Wake the Dreamer for iOS is the highest-concept game we’ve heard of all week, and that’s definitely saying something. It’s one of those games that takes a good paragraph to understand, and hey, that’s what I’m here for. Judging from the designer Ali Sakhapour’s description and from the trailer, it’s a life sim and dream simulator, which actually reminds me a lot of Nintendo’s surreal Tomodachi Life reveal, except decisively more indie-fied. The game takes place between two worlds: the dream world where all kinds of crazy shit can happen that affects the real world, and a real world where you try to afford a bigger house. The project sounds ambitious and has my interest piqued. 

Build your very own (miniature) arcade cabinet

Does it accept regular sized quarters?

In Trials Fusion, we are all murderers

What does the future look like for motorcycle trials? Short answer: not good.

We are living in a terrifying sci-fi universe, says new museum exhibit

Sci-fi is the domain of Dune debates and fantasizing about the civil rights of autonomous robots, right? It’s cool and important stuff, but often studious, and not something you’d expect to find at an art gallery. 

But the Science Fiction: New Death exhibit, currently showing now through June 22 at the University of Liverpool, features all kinds of art that’s inspired by sci-fi, such as creepy AI-controlled robots that peep at you through holes in sheetrock. 

The motivation for the show was to point out how older visions of the future (via tech-y oracles like Orwell and Gibson) didn’t pan out. As the show’s curator Mike Stubbs told me, “Watching my daughter fall asleep mid Snapchat, while feeling trapped in a new form of on-line-over-work-social-media-overload, it feels more akin to a dystopian present reminiscent of JG Ballard." 

The emphasis on present-day dystopia is easy to see. For instance, Zack Blas’s blob-like masks, called Facial Weaponization Suite, look like a David Cronenberg prop, but are crafted from biometric data of queer men, a protest of studies that use facial recognition to determine sexual orientation. According to Stubbs, it addresses surveillance culture through disturbing speculations and strategies to overcome it. “These are hyper-real renditions of our current state, or our state next week,” he said.

A glance into the neurotic psychology of FPS cheaters

What motivates someone to utilize aimbots and other banned cheats in an online FPS? The obvious answer is that they want to win but suck, but this pretty fascinating feature article at PC Gamer shows it’s more like a neurosis. It seems some cheaters have an overwhelming and irrational compulsion to cheat. 

From an interview with Tripwire Interactive’s president:

We see a spike in hackers after we have a sale on one of our games. Their last 10 Steam accounts have been banned, and the game is on sale for $3, so they’ll buy 10 copies for $30 on 10 different accounts and they’ll keep cheating.

All things considered, that is pretty nuts, and the people on the business side operate with the same obsessive tenacity. Later, the writer talks to Slayer and Prophet, two admins from the Ultra Cheats cheating website, where vendors sell bannable virtual weapon modifications. The lengths these guys go through to avoid anti-cheat measures is absurd: cycling servers every hour, renting servers in China with prepaid credit cards, coming up with ominous user names like Slayer and Prophet. 

You should definitely read the rest. 

Rabbit meets and woos woman, beautiful card game ensues

As is so often the case with falling in love, the first attraction to Poupée de Son is physical: “I could see myself with this good-looking person; I could see myself playing this card game gorgeously illustrated with rabbits and brides.” 

But that's just the start. This attractive game you were just looking to one-night-stand evolves into a complicated narrative where you are laying down cards about relationships and getting all tangled up in the messy emotions of another player. I almost forgot if I was writing about the game or my life there.

This contest of seduction between woman and burrowing, plant-eating mammal is based on Grimm’s "Hare’s Bride." But how the fairytale ends depends on how you play, which depends on how you feel deep down inside, which has something to do with how manipulative you are. The game was created by Winnie Song, Pierre Depaz, and TCLZCJA, students at NYU Game Center. Hopefully it makes it out into the wild.

Cyberpunk Game Jam yields rad cyberpunk games; here are our favs

Last month's Cyberpunk Game Jam has yielded enough interesting, colorful, diverse games to make Molly Millions do that gross thing where she cries through her mouth. With ten days to work, many devs came out the other side with impressively realized games.

A few suggestions: first, prolific jammer/musician Rezoner's Limbs, which has a pretty specific logline: "cyberpunk Papers, Please."

Unlike Lucas Pope's ethics-erosion simulator, though, Limbs (pictured above) is all about aesthetic pleasure: the star-dotted navy-blue sky outside your cluttered workbench, the slight stickiness—just a little resistance—of synthetic skin as you pull it away from its transistor-and-chip innards, and, of course, the endlessly looping synth-churn of the music.

Things get tricky as clients request more than a simple warranty check: diving into the manual to build a hand for a hacker or welder, you start feeling that time limit bear down on your neck. There's no miserable family awaiting you at home while you toil away, so feel free to make up your own backstory.

Second, there's DANGEMU's VA-11 HALL-A (free build available, $5 to buy into the upcoming full version), offering self-styled "cyberpunk bartender action" with detailed art and an LP's worth of bass-heavy future bangers. 

It's simple: make what your customer orders. The recipes get more complex—hope you remember all about exponents—but the interactive bits are really an incentive to get to the dialogue. Writer Ironic Lark has put in some work here; each character speaks with distinct personality. 

The first customer is a cyborg sex worker, who squeezes several free drinks out of you while debating the metaphysics of food consumption. After she hits the road, in walks a hitman with a taste for Bronson Extract...

The better your synthetic-rotgut cocktails land with the guests, the easier they'll spill their tales of neon-noir woe.

Lastly, Nik Sudan's Protocol puts you in the boots of a bike punk, the type you'd usually see under Judge Dredd's heel. Here, you have a chance to even the odds and put as many lawbots in the ground as you can.

As the enemy waves spawn faster and thicker, the road alights with colored lasers, raking across the screen, each accompanied by 808-style thuds and blips. Your unnamed biker gets a few new abilities to keep the fuzz off her tail, but it comes down to your reflexes in the end: clear the road, let your health come back up, and then dive in for more.

Many of the entries are hanging on recognizable skeletons—endless runners, one-button adventure games, FPS-es, top-down shooters—but for a game jam stuffed with androids and augmentations, maybe that's appropriate. 

The furious anthropomorphism of Bornard

Being an animal isn't easy.