Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 416

How will chess be remembered by future civilizations?

Hopefully, with bazookas. 

Inside EVE Online’s fear of a Russian star cluster

The Red Threat of deep space.

This app is like Dark Souls' note-leaving system IRL, minus the anguish

One of the coolest features in the Souls series is the ability to scrawl hints, boldfaced lies, and evidence of your existential duress on the ground for other players to read. The app Slice, available on iTunes, lets users mark their physical environment in a similar way, well, except for those bloodstains that reveal to others their grizzly deaths. Now that would just be morbid! 

But everything else is pretty spot on, and it turns out Dark Souls makes a pretty awesome social app. You can drop a marker at your current locale on a GPS-enabled map and write a message that stays there forever. Also like Dark Souls, the user can upvote or downvote the note, which is totally anonymous. One big difference is you don’t have to physically travel to a spot, but can zoom around reading notes willy-nilly, although I guess you can kind of do that in Dark Souls 2. No word if it contains permadeath.

At last: a delicate, painterly platformer that you can rip to shreds

Shard, by Roger Hanna and Anita Tung, is very much your indie platformer with a painterly, abstract vibe, something with which we’re all plenty familiar. But you really never get tired of good art, and a large part of what makes this game refreshing is the visual eye candy. The backgrounds and foregrounds have sort of a watercolor-y, Paul Cezanne combo going on, which is nice and all. Also, you play as little guys composed of ill-defined shapes, as if ripped from a cubist painting. But the real draw comes from the act of, for lack of a better word, shredding, when the characters start rending the landscapes apart into jaggy shards. Has being destructive ever looked so nice?

This one is definitely worth keeping an eye on.

This voxel editor envisions an alternate history in which all games look like Minecraft

There was a very brief window of time, way back in the early 90s, when the future of 3D graphics was up for grabs and the voxel was a contender. Obviously, polygons blew them out of the water. 

But CubeTeam—the multiplayer, browser-based voxel editor—lets you build and print via a 3D printer the cubist landscapes that might have existed if games were built of tiny cubes instead of tiny triangles. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, they would probably look a lot like Minecraft, a game that doesn’t technically use voxels but achieves something similar visually. This gets very inside-baseball, but there are people out there who get very touchy over true voxels. Now the real technology can live in our cube-shaped hearts forever. 

You can play with it here. 

Somehow Hotline Miami 2 looks even more gratuitously violent than Hotline Miami

And that is something of an achievement. The highly praised 2012 original was a visceral bloodbath, complete with Al Capone poetic justice and almost problematically satisfying baseball-bat beat-downs. 

But judging from the new trailer, Hotline Miami 2 is upping the ante in the brutality department, as evidenced by the legions of goons getting shot, blood-smeared bathroom tile, a chainsaw scene(!!!), and a 2-second clip of a guy in a white tux having his face bashed in with a baseball bat. Pixels alone save this from fire extinguisher scene in Irreversible level of savagery. 

One of the talking points of the first game was how it asked players to commit violence in order to make them feel shocked about committing violence. Looks like they're not taking their foot off the gas pedal. 

Defusing a bomb in VR is harder than you think

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a game where a player wearing an Oculus Rift has to defuse a bomb per the instruction of her non-mask-wearing teammates. The clever thing here is it plays off many of the Rift’s faults: Strapping a mask to your head is exclusionary and awkward, there’s only one headset per computer, and also you look like an alien/bomb-disposal-tech while wearing one. Events happen pretty much the way you’d expect from watching any spy movie or television drama involving a bomb squad, with tense confusion over whether to cut the white wire with the red stripe or the red wire with the white stripe. And if the player fails, the Rift explodes and their head blows up. Er, I think that's promised in later editions. Here's hoping!

MLB ‘14: The Show is a delightfully revisionist take on modern baseball

Talking about practice.

Krautscape is like racing through a surrealist painting

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Depths of Fear: Knossos is an interactive B-movie

The labyrinth of ineffectual design choices.