Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 408

Oculus Rift gets its worst-possible application with this creepy male gaze app

We knew that commercial erotic apps for virtual reality were coming. But guess what? They're here.

Play Girls, coming out later this year, and compatible with Oculus Rift, has a lot of things that give me pause, such as the uncanny valley weirdness of the bikini-clad actress, who was professionally motion-captured and is, according to her profile, 150 cm tall. Also giving me pause: the idea that someone would be ogling her from inside a black mask fantasy-world.

The software is coming out of Japan from a company called PG Production, and is a piece of pure titillation, presenting a virtual young woman standing on the beach in front of a tiki bar. The interaction seems to solely involve spinning the camera around her body as she stands. You can check out the trailer on their site, which is probably technically safe for work, but still involves a lot of deeply problematic objectification.

This new technology is powerful stuff, but there will be a lot more along these lines. We hope to see it used in equal measure for positive ends, such as BeAnotherLab's Gender Swap project.  

Watch out Secret of Mana. Secrets of Grindea is coming for you

There are certain things you just expect from your classic 16-bit action-JRPGs. These include grinding and secrets and battling giant transparent-green Jell-o molds, all of which Secrets of Grindea delivers in spades. 

But when your classic 16-bit action-JRPG is coming from a team of Swedes twenty years later, you expect a little more. And judging from the trailer and new demo for Secrets of Grindia, which opened for pre-order last week, you get it. The game seems downright determined to outmatch its mentor, Square’s Secret of Mana, both in terms of cuteness (as can be seen in the giant rabbits that populate the game) and intense action-y, uh, action. (It has four player co-op. Secret of Mana only had three.) Also, tons of looting. Secret of Mana, your days are numbered.

What Now? is a glitchy recreation of modern anxiety

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Pillars of Eternity to have brilliant weakling fighters, idiot jackass wizards, and other strange classes

A fair critique of RPGs is that you inevitably wind up overseeing the same wimpy wizards and quick-witted rogues no matter which game you’re in. But Obsidian’s Kickstarted fantasy Pillars of Eternity gives you the option to disassemble those tried-and-true archetypes of the ancient rulebook. 

Josh Sawyer, lead designer on Fallout: New Vegas and now this game, told PC Gamer that he was upending the tea table in terms of character creation. 

If someone wants to make a brilliant, weakling fighter, that is a build that is viable in our game, and it’s rewarded within the conversations and the fiction of the world. 

If you want to make a muscle wizard, who is mighty and powerful and a stupid idiot, you can do that.  

His motivation is that he often has great ideas for characters while playing tabletop games, “but mechanically they’re shitty characters,” he says. But in Pillars of Eternity, they’re capable of holding their own. A shakeup in the dogma of D&D is something I can totally get behind.

Beyond Candy Crush Saga: the new wave of mobile videogames

Creating three seconds of perfection.

Is Nadia Was Here the most singleplayer game ever?

The surprising message of hope in a hopeless world.

Box Art Review: How Monument Valley taps into existential wondering

Explore, dummy.

Americans fear genetic engineering, robots, drones, and Google, in that order

According to a national survey that asked people about near-future technologies, the doomsday scenario is a bunch of genetically superior post-Gen Y’ers who’ll admit them to nursing homes with robot caretakers while they prance around in augmented eyewear, flying drones. That is to say that well over half of those polled by the PEW Research Center find the prospect of commercial drones, genetic modification, robot caretakers, and augmented tech like Google Glass terrifying.

But the future isn’t all bad. Most people believe that within 50 years we will be receiving transplants of organs grown in labs. About half think that computers will be able to produce art indistinguishable from man. Another great thing is apparently lab-grown meat, with a vast majority gung-ho about eating it—and here I am refusing to eat farm-raised fish. 

The paper is chock full of data about how we think about the future, far too many to list here, but which you should totally check out if you find this interesting. But the takeaway is that the future is going to be alright, or that we will be a paranoid society with grudges against our grandchildren because they have teeth that are so perfect it's scary. Either way. 

Studio Ghibli beer, worth drinking for the whimsical label alone

The label on this bottle of beer strikes me as curious and whimsical and unlike anything I’ve seen in my lustrous beer-drinking career, which has been the downfall of many-a-beers. That’s because it comes from the hot-dog stand at the Studio Ghibli Museum in Tokyo, as snapped by a blogger over at Boing Boing. You can really sense the Miyazaki-ness of this bottle that pays tribute to Nausicaä: Valley of the Wind. Now I’ll spend the rest of the afternoon dreaming of what other Studio Ghibli-themed beers might be peddled there: a Porco Rosso saison, perhaps? 

Via Boing Boing

Whoa Dave! actually deserves that exclamation point in its title

Whoa Dave! is one of those modern-retro games that makes you wonder if videogames weren’t close to perfect like 30 years ago. Deep down, all they really need is a setup mirroring Mario Bros., some pixel-y beasts hatching from eggs a la Joust, and a couple of players lapping up coins and trying to sabotage each other’s shit. Oh yeah, also needed: some algorithm telling the game to gradually ramp up the intensity from step aerobics to “Holy jeez, I can’t tell where my guy ends and the enemies begin!” 

It’s impossible not to have a great time with local multiplayer games like these—that is, unless you’re playing against the guy who made it. When I sparred with the dev Jason Cirillo a month ago on his Ouya (the game is also coming to 3DS, phones, and Steam), he kicked my ass all over the place. But it was still pretty fun, actually.