Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 414

Watch a guy in a Power Glove demo the terrible virtual reality of the 90s

This outrageous video of two Italian guys showing off virtual reality gear from the early ‘90s is pretty laughable—a great reminder that while the Oculus seems like the holy grail right now, in a few decades time it will almost certainly be badly outdated.

Here’s a little background on these VR enthusiasts' setup. They created an open-source platform stitched together from various technologies. It ran in MS-DOS and was controlled by the Power Glove. It made use of the SegaScope peripheral for Master System as a VR mask, which sounds to me like a bad idea, even in the 1990s. But considering it's an amalgam of toys, it’s pretty impressive. However, not as impressive as how it must feel to sit with fingers interlocked with one hand in a Power Glove. That’s the pose of playing with power.

via Prosthetic Knowledge

This winsome RPG has Earthbound written all over it

You can get a distinctive whiff of Earthbound-ness in the new trailer for Citizens of Earth, which if you recall is the scent of scratch-and-sniff pizza.

The endearing cult JRPG that bombed on Super Nintendo but lives on on Virtual Console and in the collective heart of the Internet hasn’t seen too many homages, surprisingly. And though the cast of brave tikes taking on an alien invasion with yo-yos and baseball bats has been replaced with a quirky entourage of adults, you can definitely see the influence. The odd messages in the scrolling text during turn-based combat, the weirdos inhabiting the cities, and the delightfully absurd Americana: all Earthbound stuff. 

This raises an interesting question. Recently, we’ve seen quite a number of games that are inspired by the classic JRPGs of yore but aren’t Japanese, like Child of Light and Celestian Tales, that beautiful Suikoden-looking game. Do we accept them in the canon, call them JRPG-likes, or just love them for what they are?

Today in videogame food news: "Gamer" soda and Power Mitt Oven Glove

We were wildly divided about which of these products was more useful to the modern player of videogames.

First, Gamer, a “dedicated beverage brand … created specifically for the videogamer.” Gary Carlson, the owner and originator of Gamer, wants to expand his distribution but alas, many locations will not accept his glass bottles—he needs cans! I am huge fan of regional sodas, pops, and other carbonated beverages, especially if they have caffeine and real cane sugar. While I personally reach for a can of Red Bull while I play Titanfall or Civ V late into the wee hours, that Game_Jam/Mountain Dew debacle might have opened the door for Mr. Carlson and his sweet, sugary dreams. Here's hoping. 

The Power Mitt Oven Glove is growing on me. I am not shy about my reliance on my As Seen on TV Ove’ Glove Hot Surface Handler, but I’ve burned my arm and wrist on the door enough times to want an oven mitt that reaches a bit higher. Looks like the perfect match for that Space Invaders spatula you’ve always had but were shy about using. 

Expos are so much better with this deck-building business card game

Your de facto business card is a no-frills presentation of your name and number and Twitter handle, so potential business partners can contact you later on. But if you are a game designer among an expo of game designers, it might be advantageous to flaunt your chops by designing an entire game that fits on a 1.5x3" piece of paper. 

That’s what Manuel Correia decided to do for EGX Rezzed, as he blogged about on Gamasutra today. The difficulty was how to make a fun game whose instructions were straightforward enough to fit on a card and that could be played with items that someone always has on them. So he craftily devised a card-fighting, deck-building game out of—what else—business cards. It’s kind of a coffee-table-book-about-coffee-tables sort of thing. 

It works by assigning special attributes to business cards with certain characteristics, such as if they having rounded edges or a white background. And it plays out in a quick game of card-laying strategy, which you can glean by squinting at the card in the above snapshot. It sure has my self-printed Averys beat.

Did Squall die in Final Fantasy 8? This blog sure thinks so

When Squall took an ice shard to the chest at the end of the first disc of Final Fantasy 8, you were probably secretly wishing that the most emo dick Square ever created would be blotted from existence. (Uh, 15-year-old spoiler alert?) Apparently some people wanted this so badly that they’ve postulated the Squall’s Dead theory.

The theory has been around awhile, but the blog Squall’s Dead has dumped a term paper’s worth of energy into it, generating an active and heated conversation in the comments. They provide ample evidence that the second half of that game was all a dream, or better, the flickering of Squall’s miserable unconscious as it twists free from his body. 

The blog takes pains to provide some research on the matter, delving into the usual exegesis required to understand a Square game from that era. They could be on to something, or this could just be an apology for Square’s tone-deaf follow-up to a canonical game. Maybe it's time we revisit it? 

This game's vector-drawn megacities are just gorgeous

Vektropolis is a cyberspace-y visual orgy of a crosshair shooter. What’s particularly impressive is the level of details in the vector graphics, which back in the day only rendered crude outlines of tanks killing tanks and stuff. Yeah, these are simulated vectors, but this is pretty much what your modern open-world game like Watch_Dogs would look like if those cool, primitive, fractured vectors—which were sketched by actual lasers across the darkened recesses of an upright cabinet—had survived the arcade extinction. You can see individual grass blades, explosions like an obscene plasma lightning ball, and masses of people roaming the streets in the video. Albeit the people resemble walking crime-scene drawings when zoomed close-in, but that’s still pretty awesome for vectors. 

The game is currently being Kickstarted by a couple of old-school game programmers from the UK. Where do I insert my quarters? 

Every videogame is a comedy, but only a few are in on the joke

Finding videogames in pizza boxes.

Soul Fjord makes disco feel dead all over again

Remember when they brought Starsky and Hutch to big screens? 2004? Yeah.

Who is Deception IV: Blood Ties for?

Fool me four times, shame on everyone.

Watch a real-time global mapping of cyber warfare and feel terrified

Only you can prevent malware from spreading.