Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 430

Dream across time and space with the charming, minimalist Doggins

What's over the moon? 

Betrayer has survived the winter, leaves the battered settlement of Early Access in but one fortnight

With the continued popularity of games like DayZ and Rust making the survival genre officially a thing, it’s about time we’ve seen a full-blown New World settlement crossbow shooter. Betrayer: In The Spring of 1603 has actually been on Steam Early Access since August, starving through the winter but, importantly, surviving, and now its developer Blackpowder is ready to make the crossover to an official colony, er, game. 

The fort-defender borrows a hint of historical accuracy from precolonial American settlements like Jamestown and the Lost Colony of Roanoke, but is set in an alternate reality where the usual demons of smallpox, hunger, and territorial aboriginals are replaced by undead skeletons and evil spirits and the like, because videogames. The result looks wet-yourself scary, and is coming March 24th.

Katamari Damacy and the return of “play” in videogames

Miguel Sicart yearns for a bygone era.

First clinical trial of LSD in 40 years. Where do I sign up?

Uh, wait. On second thought, never mind. Seems you have be terminally dying first. But this study by Swiss psychiatrist Peter Gasser was performed on 12 dying patients, many of whom reported a significant decrease in anxiety as they approached their final days. The New York Times doesn’t go into details about what therapy entailed, but the results were impressive:

After about two months of weekly therapy, the eight participants who received full doses of LSD improved by about 20 percent on standard measures of anxiety, and the four subjects who took a much weaker dose got worse. (After the trial, those patients were allowed to “cross over” and try the full dose.) Those findings held up for a year in those who have survived.

The remainder of the article is full of patients giving accounts of mystical experiences. You know, stuff like “[meeting] his long-dead, estranged father somewhere out in the cosmos, nodding in approval.” And it’s totally worth a click.

For your weekend enjoyment: Paintings of an astronaut touring the world of pop

The subject of an artist’s work is the source of endless armchair psychoanalysis, but I'm not going to touch this one. The artist Scott Listfield has a fixation for astronauts, painting them over 130 times since the early 90s. You'll typically find them gazing in blank-eyed wonder at pop icons like Optimus Prime, Mario’s coins twinkling behind a cloud, and the Queen in Aliens. That is to say: anything except what you'd expect an astronaut to be doing. Perhaps there’s a statement in this, something about the decline of the Space Age and the cult of culture. Maybe he just likes painting astronauts. But the works are pretty awesome.

You can see more on his site.

via The Verge

This gorgeous stealth game is like mainlining code

This video of the prototype of Mike Bithell’s cyberpunk stealth game Volume looks ridiculous in a very good way. Watch as your screen rips apart into fractals and reconfigures into the glowing synapses of a database. Bithell’s games tend to be lookers: his last effort Thomas Was Alone was eye-popping and well-received. But it was also a Flash game. Its simple, blocky environments were more Mondriaan than William Gibson. Though lovely in its on way, it belied that staring-into-the-singularity-while-mainlining-code feeling that we expect from our games about AI roaming the mainframe. But this is gorgeous. So far there is no release date.

Hard empirical evidence that games are better than music

Well, kinda. A new study by researchers at the University of Barcelona shows that some people are incapable of having emotional responses to music. But those very same people who don’t get all misty-eyed when they hear "Desperado" still found games stimulating.

For the study, researchers gathered 30 emotionally healthy students. Then, they monitored their heart rates and sweat levels while they listened to music everyone should be familiar with. Next, they did a similar test while the subjects played a game for money. The results showed that some people are genuinely apathetic about music, but all subjects responded positively to the game.

These results imply that the condition of anhedonia, or the inability to feel pleasure, doesn’t affect the enjoyment of games as much as it does music, and possibly other things.

You might think this is a great victory for the medium of games. But not so fast. According to Josep Marco-Pallerés, the cognitive neuroscientist who conducted the study, “Music doesn't give us access to biologically relevant advantages [which we rely on when competing for money or points in games]. The emotions are the key point in this reward." In other words, while we are biologically programmed to compete and overcome challenges, a love of music has nothing to do with survival instincts. So, you could argue music-lovers are emotionally richer than the more savage game players, even if everyone naturally enjoys games more.

via The Verge

Persona - (dungeons + demons + stats) + responsible gender politics = this dating sim for girls

Between bullying, internet strangeness, social anxiety, and navigating the labyrinth of sexual identity, junior high has high nightmare scenario potentiality. But the episodic dating game LongStory hopes to make that burgeoning period less mortifying for girls aged 10 to 16. 

LongStory looks like an Americanized Persona, sans the dungeon-diving RPG half of that game, or a Christine Love graphic novel, like Digital: A Love Story, but with a Chris Ware-ish illustration style replacing exaggerated anime. (Its character Nora, the friendly home-schooled kid who lives online, is a dead ringer for Fuuka from Persona 3, for instance.) And it hits on a similar theme: pushing positive social agendas while representing them in a way that's more realistic and relevant to stateside underclassmen. (And while avoiding the gender controversy surrounding the former series.) 

But besides all the do-gooder game stuff, the story looks to have an ensemble of believable, lovable characters. Well, except for the bratty pre-teen bullies. 

The game is available as of yesterday on Google Play. 

Javel-ein gives you one spear and one chance

What a cruel lover you are, Javel-ein. 

Danganronpa brings the visual novel up to speed

Before it dies of old age.