Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 421

The agoraphobia of Project Spark

To play, to create, to have a beer and fall asleep.

This is basically a real-life aimbot

In first-person shooters, we call them aimbots—little modifications to the code that give your shot a superhumanly unfair advantage. But in real-life, we just call them scary. 

Designed by hunting enthusiasts (who else?) at Sandia National Laboratories, a defense contractor that makes lethal weaponry for the armed forces, these four-inch long, self-guided bullets use fancy laser technology to adjust their trajectory and steer themselves with high accuracy towards their target, which is more likely than not, another human being who doesn’t have self-guided bullets. 

Ethical or not (for the record, I’m going with not), these smart bullets are another example of how the tech of war and the tech of fun shooter videogames about war are becoming indistinguishable. When they start development on full-fledged Titans, that’s when I freak out. 

Square president has epiphany: people outside of Japan like JRPGs

Seems obvious, but apparently not. 

In an interview with the Nikkei, translated by the good people at Siliconera, Square president Yosuke Matsuda admits, “We weren’t able to see this clearly up until now, but fans of JRPGs are really spread around the world.” 

He seems genuinely baffled at how titles the company whitewashed to appeal to a global audience fell flat, while games targeted chiefly for Japan like Bravely Default found love around the world. While the old writer’s tip ‘write what you know’ is disputable, it’s at least correct to say ‘don’t makes games based on what you think will sell to the largest demographic of people.’ Having seen the err in his ways, he says that the company born and famed for JRPGs with get back to their bread and butter, which should be a welcome reprieve considering the poor reception of every Final Fantasy game since I can’t remember when. 

The strategy of making one game aimed at multiple markets has cost them on multiple fronts. Matsuda goes on to chalk up the depravity of the last Hitman to an idea of universal appeal in development. “They implemented a vast amount of elements-for-the-mass,” he says, resulting in fail. 

Reaper of Souls continues Diablo’s never-ending campaign

I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

Yep, Shelter 2's defenseless cubs still look adorable

Shelter, our favorite game of last year about one adorable sacrificial mama badger, is getting a part 2. As you can see in the new teaser and classy, origami-inspired concept art, Might and Delight is giving our heroine of the first game a reprieve. 

In her steed is another carnivorous matriarch: a lynx with sharp claws and piercing fangs who should prove more adept at defending her pack of young’uns than her predecessor, not that a badger isn’t fully capable of crushing a fox in its jaw. Like the first one, this game has a National Geographic documentary thing going for it, with motherly love prevailing over the cruel indifference of nature on display in the beautiful snow-covered wilderness.

Heavy Bullets teaches personal finance with extreme prejudice

A penny saved is a bullet earned. 

Kill Screen and Moog team up to explore the role of sound in videogames

As part of Moogfest, we're arranging an afternoon of talks featuring people who worked on Nidhogg, Dance Central, Gone Home, and more. It's gonna be awesome.

Watch in total revulsion as a female robot grind-dances

Yes, it sounded hypothetically cool when we read about it in cyberpunk pulps, but it turns out that android go-go dancers are terrifying as hell. Take this rump-shaking atrocity, a life-size animatronic woman that is smeared in dirt, wears a thong and a bird mask, and might be modeled after Lady Gaga. At least her dance moves are up to snuff. 

She is the handiwork of artist Jordan Wolfson, who programmed her to make eye contact with potential mates and not let go. She will seriously stare you down, her eyes hollow with robotic passion, as you move across the room. But should you get any ideas, just be wary of pinch-points. As for now, she isn’t tearing the club up, but safely on display at Zwirner Gallery on 533 West 19th Street in New York, now through April 19.

My Girl the videogame will either make you laugh or cry, but probably laugh

There are so many ways a videogame adaptation of the movie My Girl could go wrong, and My Girl: The Movie: The Video Game capitalizes on every single one of them, starting with the unwieldy name. Yes, this is one of those jokey platformers like The Great Gatsby whose punchline in its entirety is that this property should never have been a game. 

But its far more low-rent than that. You set out on a stroll through the countryside, playing as Macaulay Culkin, or whatever the name of his character was. Breathe in the fauna that is crudely rendered in crayon art while you can. The chiptune version of The Temptation’s "My Girl" soon wobbles off-tempo into unrecognizable clatter. And of course it quickly dawns on you how this story ends, as the bees buzz in. 

There’s not a heck of a lot to it, but its worth a laugh, and then hating yourself for that laugh, and then playing again.

New PBS Game/Show looks at the 5 biggest faults of game reviews

There are plenty of valid reasons to throw our hands up and abandon game reviews. For starters, we’re living in a day and age of early access and perpetual updates where games like Minecraft exist in unfinished states. On top of that, it is practically guaranteed that no two players will ever have the same experience; what good does the advice of a reviewer who may have approached a game a totally different way do for me? I mean, we could just crowdsource opinions from players the way user reviews do on Steam. 

Is there still a place for the critic in the modular, fragmented, subjective world of videogames? (We hope so!)

Watch the new episode to find out, and let us know what you think in the comments!