Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 406

Playlist 4/23: Fract OSC, Hitman GO, and Rusty's Real Deal Baseball

We've got the games if you've got the time.

That Dragon, Cancer dev to document story in upcoming film

There’s a heartbreaking documentary in the works on the equally heartbreaking game That Dragon, Cancer. The film is called Thank You For Playing and judging from the newly-released teaser trailer, it looks like it'll be powerful stuff. 

Two independent filmmakers have captured the personal tragedy of Ryan Green, who is developing a nonfictional game based on his family’s struggles to cope with their infant son being stricken with terminal cancer. Green admits in the video that it was a tough call to allow strangers to haul in film equipment and point cameras at his son as he lay on a hospital bed, but, as evidenced by his game, Green understands the power of documentary. The best videogame documentaries, like King of Kong and Indie Game: The Movie, aren’t so much about videogames as they are about the people around them, and this one looks to be no different. 

The film does not have a release date yet, but the game is due out later this year on Ouya.

 

Take on a bunch of abstract goliaths in David

as

These interactive music videos remind us of Tron’s light-cycle scene, almost

The imagery for George and Jonathan’s interactive music videos for their album III is simple yet savvy: bright polychromatic lines streak across a grid towards infinity. It’s pretty much like the light-cycle scene in Tron, which is suiting enough for electronic music, but with one catch: all the combatants are stuck driving straight ahead. 

That’s where you come in by spinning around this real-time visualization in your web-browser, as long as you have a fancy computer that can perform complex graphical tricks. The album sounds nice and the interaction part is cool, and together they represent something we’re incredibly fond of: videogames and music getting in bed. 

You can play around with it here. 

Out of the Park 15 is the absurd game baseball deserves

Learning to love an unlovable game.

Nintendo becomes the poor man’s Girl Talk in NES Remix 2

Someone owes Diddy a royalty.

This app lets you pay back your friends by making it rain on their face

Mmm, how does my $13 taste?

Riot aims to politicize the board game with, what else, riots

We’ve seen a lot of great videogames that deal with social issues, but we haven’t seen that many boardgames. The crew of Italians behind Riot want to change that by putting you in the shoes of a citizen who is caught in a dangerous riot situation, where tension between protesters and officers is erupting into violence. The rules and design behind this unorthodox take definitely looks interesting, and as we’ve seen with great games like Papers, Please and Cart Life, the structures of injustice can make for some very compelling and unconventional play—you know, unlike actual riots. 

The designers are currently seeking funds on Indiegogo.

China issues list of censored content for console games; basically, no Persona

When we heard that China was loosening its reigns and allowing gaming consoles in the country, we figured there would be some stipulations, with everything we know about the extreme censorship behind the so-called Great Firewall. Well, we were right. 

The Shanghai government has released some guidelines for game makers hoping to release games in the Asian state. It turns out there is a 20-day approval process in which game are submitted to Shanghai’s culture department, during which they are filtered for content not approved by the state. 

There is a lot of forbidden fruit. The ban on racist content could get taken out of context but doesn't sound terrible. Things get worse from there. Also banned: games that promote cults and superstitions, games that feature unscrupulous behavior like drug use and violence and gambling, and games deemed harmful to China. So basically half of all games.

It should be interesting to see how and if publishers censor game content for the chance to sell them in the largest market in the world. You can read a complete list of the guidelines here. 

See Mario and Pac-Man transformed from pixels into 3D light

No, this astounding glass orb which contains beautiful rippling graphics is not the same thing as that plasma globe that sat on your nightstand when you were 11. Sorry if you got your hopes up.

It is actually something much cooler: a volumetric display. The term volumetric display is just fancy jargon for any device that arranges pixels in three dimensions, instead of the flat arrangement we’re used to from our screens and monitors. Thus, the volume. The idea is similar in concept to Matt Parker’s Lumarca, a cube of dangling luminescent light which has praise heaped on it by everyone who see it. 

This one, called the voLumen, was created by a teen from Austria called Maximilian Mali. It has plenty of trippy geometric art as well as a few shout-outs to games, like Pac-Man chasing Blinky. But the real star of the show is the engineering itself, seen at the 1:55 mark, where he slows his device down to a crawl to show that the graphics are created by a series of spiraling blades with lights on them. Fascinating stuff!

via Prosthetic Knowledge