Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 431

New PBS Game/Show asks if you will suck at virtual reality

Virtual reality has the potential to cause the most tumultuous sea change in games, well, since virtual reality. The tech was introduced back in the ‘80s, but the thing is, it never materialized into anything, except for that mobile VR cave I played once at the mall. 

Now, things are different. Affordable consumer virtual reality headsets are eminent, and the experience is amazing. Only one problem. The games we play today don’t lend themselves very well to being inside them. I mean, could you imagine stuffing a body in a dumpster in a virtual reality version of Hitman. Talk about uncomfortable. 

From the physical to the psychological, there are all sorts of ways gaming in VR will be totally different than the games we play today, raising the grave concern that we will all righteously suck at virtual reality. Jamin at Game/Show explores.

Find out what he thinks, and be sure to leave your two cents in the comments!

Box Art Review: The sultry noir of Max Payne 2

“For this to work, I was going to have to trust her.”

Squeak for joy! Classroom Aquatic was successfully funded

We were unsure if this day would come. Primarily because Classroom Aquatic is a virtual reality game about a class full of dolphins cheating off each other, and the Kickstarter project was asking for $30 thousand. Dolphin-game lovers like me surely recall the cruel fate of the ECCO the Dolphin comeback on that platform. But this one just squeaked it out (sorry!), and we’re glad it did, because the game looks all kinds of charming. And because we’ve never played a stealth trivia game and the prospect is intriguing. And because it teaches us the valuable life lesson to never trust dolphins, even though it looks like they are smiling. 

Watch this code-jacking controller go psycho folding Mario into Zelda

Technically speaking, illucia qualifies as a game controller. But as its strange, dazzling data-jacking proves, it operates on a whole other metaphysical level. We see it connected to Tetris doing a block-falling remix of Notorious BIG; making music from bullet-hell patterns; ethereally beaming Mario from Super Mario Bros. into The Legend of Zelda. What the blazes? 

While gamepads let us control Master Chief, illucia lets games control other games. Confusing, I know. But also beautiful and terrifying. As its inventor Chris Novello told me over email, “illucia is about connecting computer worlds.” It lets a player take activity from inside a game and send it anywhere: music software, a paint program, another videogame. You name it. 

Videogame on videogame controlling is not only mind-bending, but also bends the code. At least “codebending” is the term Novello used for it. His magic controller allows him to twist a few knobs and splatter the screen with trippy audiovisual patterns and generative art. “I deeply believe in the medium of games, but I think it has so much more potential than our culture currently activates. I don't think that illucia is the answer to this, but I do hope it helps people see new possibilities and ways of thinking about the medium,” he told me.

This isn’t only aesthetically pretty, but gives new insight on the inner working of the software, allowing us to visualize “the personality of the game’s interior,” according to Novello. Apparently, a lot of games' personalities are total nightmare material, borderline chaos.

But chaos is the wrong way to think about it. He tells me illucia is not really glitch art nor noise, but a precise instrument for playing a network of software, like a surgeon’s scalpel, as sure as pushing to the right on a d-pad. Games don’t crash under its manipulation. For the most part, it’s clean data regulation. It responds reliably, and poses the question, as he puts it: “What if we had more power to decide how information flows, and we used that to make art, perform, and just experience the joy of playing with systems?” 

Crawl is like Diablo, but with gorgeous, gory pixels

The dungeon hack Crawl, recently greenlit on Steam, is a grisly little action-RPG with very, very pretty pixel art. The new trailer is a visual symphony of small four-sided shapes—a feast of upside-down pentagrams, Carmackian floating demon heads, and plenty of blood-splatter. 

Like Diablo, it allows you and up to three buddies to rampage through a damp, subterranean, freak-filled dungeon, with the caveat that your buds can possess the baddies and the spike traps. Another difference from Diablo: these pixels are hella expressive. Games from smaller studios that feature spectacular pixel art is a trend we're loving, as we've seen a ton of them from smaller studios lately: Rain World, Hyper Light Drifter, Gods Will be Watching, et cetera. And Crawl sits easily among them.

Public play meets magical realism at insane Australian event

A live-action, interactive parade into the spirit world is being hosted this weekend in Melborne as part of Pop-Up Playground’s Fresh Air Festival. Called Spirits Walk, the gist of this otherworldly street game is that participants will take to the streets for some good old-fashioned LARPing, but with a fascinating scenario inspired by magic realism, ditching the traditional association with middle-earthen stereotypes. 

Spirits Walk is more about surreal theatrical exaggeration, or doing weird stuff in public and feeling weird doing it—i.e. the story of my life. It also involves wearing gorgeously strange masks and handing out tokens of “distilled energy.” It sounds pretty similar to Mardi Gras in the States, but is the rest of the world not entitled to quasi-pagan freak-outs? 

I think so, and so does the game’s creator Grant Howitt, who normally doesn’t make games quite this far out of societal boundaries. “My normal stuff is zombies and shotguns and running and screaming and adrenaline, by the way, or disco-dancing, or stealing sweets whilst wearing a bandit mask,” he wrote on his blog Look, Robot, where you can read more about his fascinating project. 

Cosmic DJ's new trailer is a hallucinogenic rainbow of synth pads

As you can see in this amazing announcement trailer, the synth-beat game Cosmic DJ is all about the retro-future ’80s. But its funny-strange distilling of ultra-kitsch transcends the callbacks to fluorescent lasers and vocoder voices we’ve gotten so used to over the past few years, with games like Hotline Miami and Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon and Starwhal. There are definitely echoes of those games, but also Peter Gabriel, and the electronic music artist Lone, and everyone’s favorite synesthetic smelting pot Rez, all dictated by a hypercube who sounds like a rakish Megatron riding a synthetic rainbow. Did I mention it’s a music game?

Label Gear Solid turns the stealth game into a lesson on queer identity

One wonders how Snake would fare.

The pure terror of Fingerbones would make Hitchcock proud

An exercise in dread. 

New Watch Dogs trailer highlights story; apparently, you had a daughter

Huh. From what we’d seen and heard, Watch Dogs' protagonist was to be some sort of morally indignant Edward Snowden. But the new story trailer that was “leaked” today (doesn’t a leak seem like a far-too-convenient way to go viral with a game about wide-reaching government snooping?) frames the story as “the government killed my daughter and now I’m gonna blow the whistle, motherfucker!” Yes, you did hear the phrase “big explosions, honey” get dropped in there. Also, on display: at least three guys getting shot at point-blank range in the stomach, and a crowbar beat-down scene.

The freeze-frame on the women below is not our doing. The game has a date now: May 27.