Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 405

Nintendo layers on the zaniness in Mario Golf: World Tour

Also discussed: Golf (the NES game).

Jeffrey Yohalem on story versus game in Child of Light

Ubisoft’s small-team JRPG strives for cohesion.

Different Games Conference is the Diversity Lounge without the rest of PAX

And: when will “different games” just be games?

Enterprising 4chan user is creating a comprehensive list of every videogame ever

On my really optimistic days I think of the internet as this magical place where people from all over the world can come together and do things that are simply not possible without near instant access to vast amounts of data. On the days that are slightly less optimistic than that I see the internet as this place where things simply occur because if you have enough brains all connected together eventually they hivemind up something like what 4chan user “Data_baser” is doing, compiling a list of every videogame ever.

The list includes visual novels, foreign games, mobile and browser games as well as major system releases. It also includes the developer, publisher, release year and every system a game was ever released for. It even notes collectors editions, rereleases, and DLC.

Right now the list is topping out at over 43,000 titles but it’s growing and its growing fast. As I’m writing this Google Chrome keeps trying to kill the webpage because of how long it takes to load. In the words of the creator “Hello. I am working on a side project of creating a list of self-imposed challenges for video games [sic]”.

If this is their side project…what else are they working on?

H/t Geek.com

Head image via Tomer Gabel

Non-evil drone shoots beautiful footage from inside fireworks

Yeah, sure, drones are pilotless killing machines guided by unscrupulous soldiers from afar, but not all drone pilots have bad intentions. Take this dazzling footage of fireworks shot by a DJI Phantom operator from smack in the middle of the explosions. It should be noted that Phantoms aren’t the death-dealing variety of drones, but a commercially available younger cousin with a digital camcorder in tow, like a remote-controlled airplane, only way more sinister-looking. The shots captured below sure are pretty though.

via Boing Boing

This random game idea generator is Peter Molydeux-level good

The developer of Cookie Clicker has created a highly verbose random game idea generator and it’s ridiculously good. Some of the gems we've been clicking on around the office include: 

-a god game where you explore hipsters through terrorism; 

-a social media game where you cook jewels to buy virtual items; 

-and a shooting game where you ride horses with the forces of evil but bees are trying to stop you.

As crazy as these ideas are, I wouldn’t be half-surprised to find an announcement for the vast majority in my inbox tomorrow, considering that yesterday I wrote about a game where you search for exits while drinking soda in the first-person. It’s only a matter of time before this turns into a game jam. 

Try it out for yourself here.

Lethal League is the fighter where you nail friends with fastballs

A bullet point for Lethal League is “no weak shit,” and that’s the truth. The still shots aren't much to look at, but the announcement trailer for this alt-sports game from Reptile Games is sizzling. It's a solid minute of two characters slinging a ball or puck or other dangerous round thing at each other as hard as humanly possible. One of these characters is a robot in breakdancing pants on a skateboard. 

The game in motion looks like little else, a cross between dodgeball and Guilty Gears with a dash of Smash Bros., with plenty of powerful moves to charge-up and a lightening quick tempo. It looks to be another great local multiplayer game in the same phylum of BaraBariBall and Hokra, so it should be a blast to play with a crowd.

It’s coming to Steam later this year.

OMORI is equal parts Final Fantasy and Eraserhead

You'd be forgiven for thinking horror games have lost their edge lately. The current torchbearer is Amnesia: start with a weird fiction pedigree, keep the player on her toes with careful formal elements, and pop in a horrific slavering hellspawn when all else fails.

Games like Slender and its YouTube-ready ilk have nixed the first two, leaving a spare, often-generic level design that disperses jump scares with unflinching repetition. Lord knows how many Slender-likes populate Steam Greenlight and Kickstarter, but it's a formula that sells.

One thing you cannot accuse the freshly Kickstarted OMORI of is exploiting a formula—unless you somehow count “lysergic surrealist RPG” as a formula, in which case let's make more of those.

The game comes out of a blog run by artist OMOCAT; a blog which follows bona-fide hikikomori Omori (wait a minute...) as he talks to himself and his cat, listens to The Smiths, and occasionally points a knife at the bridge of his nose.

Not your typical protagonist, even for a self-released RPG Maker game, but OMOCAT says she's “always envisioned OMORI as a game,” and it seems to have blossomed into something quite interesting.

The point of reference seems to be Yume Nikki, both for the phantasmagoric day-glo aesthetic and for the willfully obscure narrative, which traps Omori in "white space" like an abstract take on Silent Hill 4. But between the warped battle system – like your usual Active Time Battle, except instead of casting Fira or Dispel, you tell your character to “Calm Down” in the face of what appears to be a hybrid shark-plane – and the promised loads of NPCs, dungeons, and quests, plus the eerily sweet soundtrack, the game has earned enough goodwill to muscle past its $22,000 goal in less than two days.

With 43 left to go, we'll see just what OMOCAT has planned for Omori– hopefully he's not too shy to attend his coming-out party. 

This Xbox controller knows if you're having fun or not

A researcher at Stanford has modded an Xbox controller to tap into and measure a player’s emotional states, such as whether they are happily engaged with a game, or if they’re ready to throw his very expensive controller across the room. The hand sensors gather signals such as your pulse, skin temperature, and electrical transmissions from your heart, which are analyzed by a computer that predicts how much you’re enjoying the game.

The dream is that such information could automatically adjust the flow of games without devs having to worry about difficulty levels and so forth. We’ve seen games that play with biofeedback before, like Valve’s experimental use of telemetry data in Left 4 Dead, and the stress-reducing Nevermind. But we haven’t seen many instances of that tech built right into a controller. Could emotional feedback be the next rumble, or will this go the way of Microsoft’s smell-o-vision gamepads?

Via Prosthetic Knowledge

Soda Drinker Pro dev says slurping on Xbox One is even sweeter

Xbox lifts the soda ban.