Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 432

Nazis I killed in Wolfenstein: The New Order

In chronological order.

Videogames and the aesthetic of ruins

Why are we obsessed with broken worlds?

TradeMarkVille imagines a world where all common words are trademarked

Trademark abuse is horrible. But TradeMarkVille—from the videogame activist Molleindustria, together with Mikhail Popov—is a bright, happy place where strangers on the Internet play an asynchronous guessing game with words. That is to say, of course, it’s an often hilarious pot shot directed at the trademark bully and least-popular-company-on-the-net King, maker of the chart-dominating mobile game Candy Crush Saga, who recently tried to trademark the extremely common word “candy.” 

They eventually abandoned that nonsense, but TradeMarkVille dares to ask what if trademarks were awarded to everyday vocabulary, for example, to words such as “dog,” “heart,” and “saga.” Well, there goes my brilliant idea for the game Dog Heart Saga. Developers would just have to invent new words to finagle around the legality in order to name their games. 

And we’d all be playing word games to figure out what they were describing. You know, words like: thingunderbridge. This was a word some thoughtful stranger across the Internet coined that I failed to guess. It wasn’t water, stream, air, or another bridge. I was able to guess “meoooooooooooooooooooooow,” however, and felt pretty proud.

Dark Souls 2 producer says combat is considerably less "gamey." Cause to worry?

Dark Souls 2 is less than a week away; that is if you’re as excited as I am and are counting down by the hour. One detail worth noting is that, according to an interview with producer Takeshi Miyazoe, the combat feels less “gamey,” and he goes on to say that they’ve been tweaking the feel due to character animations being motion-captured. 

I’m not sure if I like the sound of that, as the slow and satisfying motion of clanking a broadsword across an enemy’s armor in previous games was a thing of brilliance. As Mark Foster, developer of the “Dark Souls-like” Titan Souls, said in our recent Dark Souls feature, the weighty, realistic feel is paramount. The feeling was mutual among many designers’ interviewed in Chris Breault’s fine, fine article: “solid, heavy, real,” they wrote. Let’s hope that From Software under a new director didn’t fuck with it. Contrarily, if this means all those times when I pressed the attack button and nothing happened is corrected, more power to them.

Xbox One throws small indie creators a bone

All ye lamenting the death of fart simulators, lament no more. Project Spark for the Xbox One, the formerly PC-only game-maker project aimed at amateur developers, looks to remedy the problem of the walled garden Microsoft created when they got rid of Xbox LIVE Indie Games. 

As you may recall, the Indie Games service was a free-for-all that allowed anyone and eveyone to publish a game on console, no matter how crappy. So when Microsoft opted to forgo it on Xbox One, replacing it with their new “ID@Xbox” program, which requires devs to receive an exclusive invite to be part of, it put an end to the plague of Minecraft clones, flatulence prevention trainers, and erotic massages from the Xbox controller, but it also took a hatchet to some highly-legit developers.

Hopefully this will get them back in action. But there’s still no word on if and when the little guys will be able to make money off their efforts. 

via 

SoundSelf creator Robin Arnott talks games as meditation, sensory deprivation, and acid

SoundSelf is a game like none other: a tantric, psychedelic, Zen-like, trancelike, hypnotic, and hyperreal experience of being one with algorithms, and, yeah, the universe. When I played it, or rather chanted to it, a year ago in San Francisco, I found it a completely engrossing and soothing experience. But the project has come a long way since then. According to a far out interview with its dev Robin Arnott, the shifty, amorphous mandala sim is almost gaining consciousness. Just take that with a grain of salt because in the same interview he talks about being inspired by taking acid in the desert:

I’d recently had a powerful LSD trip at Burning Man. I was in this structure (reOnion) with complex kaleidoscopic shapes projected on the walls, and a beautiful droning soundtrack. I began chanting, and just as I did that, the structure filled with choral voices. I felt a physical bond with those voices -- like I'd caused them, like I was them. I felt the boundary of my self expand to include them, and to include the structure, and to include the festival, expanding outward infinitely. I was everything and everything was me.

You might be familiar with Arnott through his previous project Deep Sea, a sound game which involved strapping on a rather horrifying mask and hyperventilating as you're deprived of vision. When I talked to Robin many moons ago as a freelancer for Gamasutra, after Deep Sea but before SoundSelf’s conceptualization, he told me something similar: he was working towards inverting the terror of sensory deprivation to turn it into an euphoric experience. And it looks like he’s done it. He says:

In many ways, SoundSelf has been a working exploration of my relationship with the universe and the nature of mind... There's this wonderful history of meditation technologies -- from the mandala to the group-om to the modern day sense deprivation chamber -- external tools for internal exploration. I think SoundSelf is very much a part of that history.

SoundSelf is still in alpha, but you can get a jump on the path to videogame enlightenment by reading more from the interview over at Gamasutra.

Inside the horror game that wants to lower your anxiety

Nevermind fuses biological feedback to help your everyday life.

The Transformers MMO lacks any and all signs of Michael Bay-ness

This could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your opinion of Bay’s growling, baroque renditions of your childhood heroes, but the upcoming Transformers MMO is opting for the visual style of the Universe toy line rather than the movies. I’m personally a little underwhelmed with the trailer for Transformers Universe, because Bay’s vision for the toy property involves hulking autonomous engines ripping out each other’s motors, and the clip contain none of that signature overblown vulgarity. 

The gameplay footage is basically tiny bots shooting other tiny bots and very gradually wearing each other down, which is what you’d expect in an MMO, but never from Bay. Perhaps this is a tough comparison, as Bay is the ambassador of blowing shit up, with Revenge of the Fallen averaging 1.4 explosions per minute. We’ll see if Universe can keep pace.

Goofball Goals is to soccer what QWOP is to sprinting

Any goals scored are purely incidental. 

Unraveling the cult of Twitch Plays Pokemon

Praise the Almighty Helix.