Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 423

Modern folk hero Notch continues to walk lonely road of truth

Markus Persson, Minecraft creator and final incorruptible soul of our degraded age, has walked tall against the corporation men once again. After learning of the purchase of Oculus Rift by Facebook—perhaps by listening to the mournful cries of prairie coyotes—the man called Notch spoke out in the candid style that has made his reputation as the last of the straight shooters.

“Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers,” said that clear-eyed drifter of the corporate badlands. They are not makers, these soft-handed people from Menlo Park; they cannot dig a hole and build a rollercoaster inside it.

Standing his ground—as he stood against the Microsoft bosses, the Steam barons, and the Youtube gang—he fired off hard truths until each listener had a gutful. “I will not work with Facebook. Their motives are too unclear and shifting,” he said, perhaps turning slowly to fix each man in the room with a look to make him feel lower than a rattlesnake’s belly. “I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition,” he added through possibly gritted teeth.

“This is where we part ways,” he said.

From a window in the Oculus Rift office, a small boy cries out: “Notch, come back!” Notch walks on, down the lonesome road of virtue.

This War of Mine presents war as it really is: hell

The impression one gets from a steady diet of FPS’s is that everyone is a hero, which is ridiculous and borders on propaganda and doesn’t take into account the far greater number of civilians whose lives become sleepless nightmares.

Well, until now. 

The point of This War of Mine, a horrific, survival—it's not quite survival horror—docu-game by the Polish devs 11 Bit, is merely to survive the ravishes of war, not multiply the body count, which, let’s face it, is what the enormous percent of us who aren’t associated with the armed forces would be doing. I damn sure would be running and hiding. You play as a group of refuges cowering in fear in a shelled structure, just trying to stay alive in a city under fire.

All that exists of the game at this time is a trailer with no footage. The date is an ambiguous 2014. But the idea leans so heavily against the status quo that it’s worth keeping an eye on, although there have been a few others in this vein, such as 1979, and even more games that to various degrees guilt players for shooting enemies, like Far Cry 3, and To Shooter, With Guilt, and of course Spec Ops. It's good to see developers resisting the typical war power fantasy.

Spate is as unfocused as its absinthe-addled detective

Enter the wobbly, awful future. 

Palmer Luckey on why the Facebook merger makes VR's future even brighter

The reaction to the news of Facebook buying Oculus Rift could be classified as reactionary, as reactions tend to be. But according to Rift founder Palmer Luckey, there are some very good reasons to be enthused about the buyout. Talking with the Reddit community, Luckey explained how the move will only make the little VR helm that could that much more awesome and relevant. 

The first part is obvious. With the publicity of the merger, more eyes and ears have been piqued by virtual reality in the past 24 hours than probably in 24 years; it’s easily virtual reality’s biggest news day. I'm fully expecting my dad to call me later and ask me "what's this Rift?"

But there are also some practical reasons why the move could get Rifts on the heads of the masses outside the gamer population, something that is generally needed for a gaming platform to thrive. Namely because of Facebook’s coffers, the Rift will have a lower price point and won’t be built out of last year’s old cell phone parts. “[Now] we can make custom hardware… that is insanely expensive—think hundreds of millions of dollars,” he writes. 

All this will result in higher quality machines at a lower cost to consumers, which sounds like a win-win. Besides, it was inevitable that if virtual reality was ever going to take off, it would make the leap from the hobbyist’s garage to a corporate environment, and this is a confident first step.

The troubling professionalism of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes

Kojima decides to grow up.

Facebook's Oculus sale proves that videogames now write the first draft of history

What do gamers know? Well, an awful lot.

Project Morpheus will kill us all

Virtual reality is coming, and it is terrifying.

Facebook purchases Oculus Rift. Wait, what?

This is not the polar caps are melting post. Presumably, somewhere in the fine print, something about this business transaction makes sense. Facebook has laid on the table 2 billion dollars in cash and stock options to purchase the crowdfunded virtual reality headset maker outright. 

Now before we get into a tizzy, this might or might not be the death knell of virtual reality that some of you expect. The noise coming out of Camp Mark Zuckerberg at least does lip service to the prospect of the Rift remaining a game console. Yet Facebook has an unremarkable track record as a gaming platform that publishes unique and interesting titles, so anything’s game.

The move could indicate that the social media network is interested in making the next step into the lucrative world of gaming, a step beyond social games and Zynga, but the rest of their statement doesn’t exactly back this up. The presser seems particularly antsy to brush over the Rift’s potential of breaking new ground in games, reintroducing it as a way for distant friends to hang out face-to-face online. 

Quotes like “This is really a new communication platform,” and “The incredible thing about the technology is that you feel like you're actually present in another place with other people,” and "Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever” abound, which makes me wonder about its fate. Already Notch has canceled the Rift version of Minecraft, and we could see similar diaspora among other Rift devs. The Rift community on Reddit isn't happy, but when are they ever?

Through the Oculus Rift: SightLine captures the illogical logic of Lewis Carroll

The interesting thing about SightLine is how it fucks with your sense of perception in manifold head-trippy ways: it’s like psychosis without actual psychosis, beautiful-looking and equally terrifying. For one, it’s played in virtual reality, and that’s always a bit unnerving. But it’s also one of those postmodern, first-person, metaphysical mind-benders like Portal or Antichamber where normal thought processes are overturned and toppled. 

The concept sounds suitably strange, with the game placing you inside a fairytale environment that vaguely reminds me of Alice in Wonderland, the catch being that the world around you mystically shape-shifts when you turn your head—something you’ll be doing a lot of, being that your head is snugly strapped into a virtual reality headset. The project is currently being pitched on Indiegogo, and supports the VR tradition where the most compelling software tends to be unconventional art projects rather than outright gamey games.

The Dishwasher is brimming with proletariat rage

Bacon! Minimum wage!