Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 442

Some awesome modder created Papers Please’s totalitarian regime in Civ 5

Despite being the locale for one of our favorite games of last year, traveling to Arstotzka is probably not advised. However, it’s a fine place to go to war, now that a modder has created the fictional state in the Brave New World expansion of Civilization 5. 

The beautiful thing here, aside from the fact that the modder goes by Snakeeater337 (Snakeeater 336 was taken, apparently), is that he has taken great pains to remain true to the details of the fiction of Lucas Pope’s game. The artwork is in line, and he even creating a march from the game’s theme song. As for the campaign, it seems tensions have flared between the motherland and neighboring Kolechia. I hear conscription is mandatory. Glory to Arstotzka indeed.

You can download it on Steam. 

Wadjet Eye to release fifth in series of beautiful point-and-click games

We've been graced with a new trailer for The Blackwell Epiphany, the fifth and final game in Wadjet Eye Games’ long-running series about a dejected, undead detective investigating suicides and occult objects. That’s one reason why people love this series: the plot is mature and intricate and long. The game has borne a huge cast of characters that dovetail in a rich, intersecting yarn. The other reason is the overall production quality, with lovely pixel art and totally okay voice acting. Dave Gilbert and company have been doing their part to keep the adventure genre classy, sticking to the old-school ways of the mouse, but raising the bar with the writing and storytelling. It’s coming later this year.

Dadaist cartoon gets Oculus Rift support, awesomely

A glitched-out cat doing standup. A pooping pile of poop with stick legs. A cute plastic frog porn star, who looks like a friendly neighbor from Animal Crossing. These are but a few of the bizarre cartoon characters that you can possess in Character Mirror, the virtual reality “thing” by the awesome animator and short filmmaker David OReilly. 

It’s not much of a game, but rather an interesting experiment in virtual space. When you strap on a virtual reality headset, you find yourself looking into a mirror as you shape-shift between the utterly bizarre products of OReilly’s imagination, and there’s a lot of weird eye contact. The project serves as an addendum to his absurdist, award-winning animated short "The External World," which premiered in the US at Sundance in 2011.

Those lucky few with an Oculus Rift dev kit can download it here. The rest of us will have to make-do with the film, which isn’t too shabby of a conciliation.

Titanfall's giant mechas are officially Westernized, now that you can “rodeo” them

Yesterday, Respawn blew the lid off Titanfall, and the net is currently drowning in footage of man-versus-machine death matches, as is wont to happen. Also, we learned a few things about game resolution and battle modes. Importantly, there will be a mecha-on-mecha action. But mostly we got to see things in action that we already knew about, such as the fact that you’re able to jump on a Titan’s back and wrangle it into submission. 

This is what the game’s designers and everyone else are calling “rodeoing.” As you can see in the video from the instructive “Gator” below, it looks like a mechanical bull ride capped off with gun violence. It sounds like an important strategy to have for leveling the playing field between puny humans and big swaggering metal walkers. It's a little weird for foot soldiers to be cowboying mechas, a Japanese sci-fi anime mainstay, but that could be the entire point of Titanfall's aesthetic choices.

The Sun at Night casts new light on the Soviet Union

What can the space dog Laika tell us about history and current events?

Sesame Street and Street Fighter collide, streets run blue with fur

Nine seconds to continue. Ah Ah Ah!

Darkest Dungeon is probably the best-animated dungeon crawl ever

I’m not kidding, this game is gorgeous. You’ll watch the trailer halfway through wondering when you’ll get to the in-game shots and come to the epiphany that these are the in-game shots. Produced by Red Hook, Darkest Dungeon is billed as an old-school roguelike, but we’ve seen many of those. The real pull here is the hand-drawn art, which is darkly shaded and reminds me of a linoleum block print, but more colorful. It’s no wonder it’s blowing away its funding target on Kickstarter. I repeat, gorgeous.

Universal History of Light is either cutting social commentary or just completely nuts

Prepare to do ... something. 

Two artists’ plight to restore the atrociousness of GeoCities

Once upon a time the Internet was a simpler place. Websites had large “Enter” buttons on their front page. Crudely animated gifs of fireworks abound. And people made websites to simply say, “Hey, I made a website!” Then, the Internet grew out of its awkward teens, GeoCities closed down, and that part of our online collective memory faded into the ether, er, net. 

But all is not lost. As Rhizome explains, two artists, Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, have created a program that mines the wastage, taking screenshots of outdated homepages and uploading them to their Tumblr. They can do this because an online archival group had hastily taken a terabyte of data from GeoCities before it was shuttered by Yahoo in 2009. The early days of the world wide web are safely preserved, for now anyway.

This is emblematic of a larger problem of how to preserve the culture that has sprung up on the web. This assuredly affects games, as more and more games become available via digital download only. And the preservation of online games presents another huge dilemma. As we’ve seen with so many dead MMOs like Matrix Online, these games evaporate, leaving behind only recordings on YouTube. Let’s hope someone figures out a better way to remedy this post-modern problem.

Garden Warfare aims to be the shooter for you and your 80-year-old grandma

An inside look at an FPS looking to do something different.