Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 433

“A Rape in Cyberspace” gets remade for the IRL era

Julian Dibbell’s cyberspace classic is just as relevant as it was twenty years ago.

Shin Megami Tensei comes to iOS March 18th, makes waiting for Persona 5 almost bearable

Persona 5 may seem like an eternity or two away, but Atlus feels your pain. So they’re bringing a port of the original Shin Megami Tensei to iOS on March 18th, which kinda makes up for things.

You can think of SMT as Persona’s cigarette-smoking older sister. The difference between the two franchises is that, while Persona has went down the dating sim route with positive messages for depressed youth, SMT is just plain nihilistic, with game systems that encourage greed and betrayal and making friends with demons. Digital demons. Not real ones. An important distinction.

Even though it’s a translation of a twenty-year-old game, it’s worth paying attention to, because the ‘90s were the heyday of Japanese RPGs, and because the early SMTs have never officially been released over here. 

This game lets you vandalize Ai Weiwei's urns without jail time

Ai Wei Whoops is a game about the culture of art vandalism, where an attack on art by megalomaniacs and furious postmodern art haters often absurdly increases the value of the artwork. This apparently is not the case for Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s painted urn, which was valued at a million dollars and was busted in Miami recently. 

The whole thing is kind of ironic because, in 1995, artist Ai Weiwei smashed a cultural artifact in his tryptic “Dropping a Han-Dynasty Urn.” It’s pretty much what it sounds like. In fact, the photographs of him dropping it were hanging in the very room where his vase was smashed. The New Yorker has a pretty good writeup if you want to investigate. But if you’re like me and are just have a need for some late afternoon distraction, then Grayson Earle’s latest web prank/game will do you right. It’s wonderful stress relief. 

The Internet is more restricted around the world than you think

The Internet has great potential to do good stuff, like spreading freedom of speech around the globe, but according to this info-graphic map by an advocacy group for freedom of the press, it turns out that in many places it's just another form of censorship. The color code shows where governments rank in terms of restrictions on the flow of information through the Web and other outlets, with Canada and the Baltic states finding themselves in a good situation, but with nations like China and Iran colored black, and the small African republic of Eritrea coming in dead last. The United States ranks in at number 46 on the list, a little low for a nation that touts freedom and equality above anything else. But then again, we all played BioShock Infinite.

via Slate 

Yearning to be evil in Fable Anniversary

Molyneux’s ten-year-old game did a lot of good things. Evil wasn’t one of them.

10 Second Ninja demands platformer perfection down to the millisecond

You thought Super Meat Boy was demanding?

Kill Shakespeare is the boardgame based on the bard’s bloodiest plays

Even if you managed to sleep your way through your sophomore year, you know the story of Macbeth. The Thane of Glamis meets some witches, hallucinates about seeing a bloody dagger, kills his boss, and develops obsessive compulsive disorder. 

Well, Kill Shakespeare has nothing to do with any of that. Instead, it focuses on a military insurrection against King Macbeth and various other villains by other famous heroes from Shakespeare's canon, with a semi-cooperative campaign in which you and friends vow to protect none other than William Shakespeare himself from his own mad character’s wrath. Either these guys didn’t do too hot in English class or they're on some next-level deconstructionist shit. 

The game is currently being pitched on Kickstarter, having already reached its funding, but still has stretch goals.

The tortured, hateful parentage of South Park: The Stick of Truth

I learned something today: I hate South Park.

N++ trailer shows off what all those plusses mean

With its second-and-a-half sequel, N—the original keyboard-smashing, nuts-and-bolts jumper—has added another + to its belt, indicating that it’s bigger, badder, and probably harder. But also that + means it’s still the same beautifully designed platforming that you loved when avoiding trigonometry homework on your mid-aughts Dell laptop. 

The Playstation Blog has a post by dev Metanet explaining all the new bells and whistles, like deathmatches and, because this is PS4, particle effects. As witnessed in photos and the trailer, the game does look very pretty, but pretty in the way that an elegant minimal design can carry an aesthetic, not pretty in the way that will knock you down. We’ll see that prettiness sometime soon, won’t we? 

No release date has been announced, but we’ll let you know when it gets here.

The Wolf Among Us falters in episode two

Smoke and mirrors is right.