Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 427

Science Fiction vs. Fantasy: Finally a March Madness bracket you care about

OK, that’s presumptuous and headline-grabby and probably not true at all. College basketball is a fine, fine sport, especially this time a year. It’s just I thought our readership would potentially get more out of i09’s amazing March Madness bracket, which pits your favorite sci-fi characters against your favorite fantasy characters that will lay the wood on one another. 

I was initially disappointed to find that this would not be settled by logic but folks democratically voting in an Internet-wide fan-gasm, but its hard not to be excited about the potential match-ups. Discworld could face The Neverending Story in the Sweet 16, but Princess Bride won’t make that easy. And I feel downright sorry for Babylon 5, up against top-ranked Star Wars in the first round. This should be fun to watch.

img via Brony-327

Titanfall is big, but it’s got heart

Also discussed: True Detective, high school soccer, magnanimity.

Find meaning in Train Song's bizarre seven-minute journey

We, uh ... we don't know what this is about. 

Don’t look for order in the horror of Knock-Knock

It will kill you.

Weapon Shop de Omasse picks apart videogame conventions

Begin your quest, noble store clerk.

If Apple designed the NES, it would probably look like this show pony

A gameophile's dream come true (if that's actually a thing), this aircraft-grade aluminum console plays NES and Famicom games and sure is sexy, but sexy in the way people fetishize sleekly designed electronic products, not, like, "sex" sexy. 

It’s called the Analogue Nt and is in essence a designer game system, which is lovely considering the way console makers mass produce their bland, black, plastic boxes as cheaply as possible. The best consoles and phones always look the same and are unspectacular, and it’s kind of a bummer.

But this dazzler brings the same IKEA-mindedness to retro games that noted designer Yves Behar brought to Ouya, totally rewired the innards of an NES with RGB video outputs and hi-fi sound. When you’re playing Cobra Triangle you want to do it right. All this bad boy needs is a tube amp. 

It goes on sale later this month, so save your money. Looks pricy.

A Nausicaä-inspired work of animation that lets you be director

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is pretty outstanding. But the problem is it’s static. Once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. However, the storytelling app IDNA—which takes inspiration from that famous anime of Miyazaki—is in a state of constant evolution. 

Now on Kickstarter, the episodic animated film for Oculus and iOS touts a technique called “spacial storytelling,” which is a fancy way of saying that it lets you direct the story by holding your iPad in the air and swiveling it. This sounds fascinating, as long as you have strong wrists and won’t drop your iPad. 

As seen in the video, not only does it shift your vantage of the frames of animation, but also seamlessly moves along the plot, guiding an adorable skydiving kid explorer along narrow mountain ledges; or maybe he’ll just do something else, if you’re not into mountain climbing. You can think of it as a story space with evolving, branching pathways—supposedly different every time you play it. Looks promising.

LAZA KNITEZ!! is like Samurai Gunn with runaway spaceships

LAZA KNITEZ!! is the sweet-looking deathmatch in deep space that implores you to wreck your friends' spaceships, courtesy a collective in Copenhagen. (Just a disclaimer up front: one of the devs is our very own Tommy Rouse, whose name you might remember from our fantastic Samurai Gunn review, and who I hear you don’t want to face in a showdown.) It turns out LAZA KNITEZ!! is similar to Samurai Gunn in a lot of ways, so maybe there’s some influence. Chiefly, it's part of the shiny, new local multiplayer movement. it looks to capture that same giddy multiplayer magic of you and three amigos jostling for dominance in a wave pool of pixels where one hit kills. The game is out now and is an OUYA exclusive.

Jeopardy! knave Arthur Chu meets his match: bad ‘80s hair metal

The Jeopardy! prodigy Arthur Chu, who bent the rules but did not break them, has had his win streak snapped at 11 games. A particularly lousy night answering trivia landed him in 3rd place in the final round, with little to no chance for shenanigans. Judging from the list of questions Chu got wrong, apparently pop music, the Spanish Inquisition, and contagious diseases aren’t his forte. “In this 1988 hit, Poison lamented that every rose has one of these.” Even I know that one.  

When I wrote about Chu a month ago, he was riding high, employing a devious strategy that struck a raw nerve with the ethos of the Jeopardy! illuminati. He circumvented the tradition of warming up the brain with easy questions before moving on to tougher ones, jumping around in a haphazard manner to score big. Purists claimed he was manipulating the system, but the rest of us loved it (at least until the Internet got bloated with Arthur Chu think-pieces, as it tends to). But the trivia will always come back to bite you: thus is the cruel fate of the blue board.

Darknet lets you pretty much live out Neuromancer, minus the neural damage

The neon synapses of the game Darknet are your ticket to cyberspace, and pretty much the only way to get there. Developed for Oculus Rift, the cyber-punkish prototype took first prize in the VR Game Jam, and now it’s fleshed out into a full-fledged excursion into that idealized ‘80s vision of technology. “Neon wireframes, abstract data visualization, and total information overload,” to quote E. McNeill, the game’s creator. That it's in virtual reality only helps medium match message.

One of the most appealing aspects of virtual reality, aside from “OMG I’m inside a videogame,” is that it will force developers to think of games from new perspectives and bore out untapped forms that don’t fall into pre-established genres.

Darknet is an example. It doesn’t suffice to call it a real-time strategy game, although it is strategic and takes place in real-time. Categorically, it is more of a puzzle-y, roguish, first-person, race-against-the-clock about hacking cyberspace, the way it was imagined in all those great but not-so-great cyberpunk movies of the ‘90s. Johnny Mnemonic is a good point of reference. 

All of which is to say: it’s about finding weaknesses in wildly visualized computer systems, surfing the grid and chiseling into ICE to exploit highly illicit information clusters. “The most exciting part of the fantasy is the idea that all of this light and color somehow has meaning, and if I could just learn to read it properly, I could become master of that world” McNeill told me. Darknet is designed around that beautiful, cyber-geek ideal. 

Of course, the Gibsonian fantasy of speed-fueled, geometric information highways never materialized. Cyberspace as envisioned in the 80s would be a user interface nightmare. “Who would actually use something like that? It sound terrible,” he said, followed by an tongue-wagging emoticon. 

“A lot of great fantasies fall apart when they collide with reality,” he says. However, that computer world of cyber-espionage and clashing colors makes a wonderful place to visit in virtual reality.