Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 444

This guy is building Ocarina of Time’s Kokiri Forest in virtual reality

Sometimes you can go home again, at least in virtual reality. A guy going by Dark Akuma is recreating Link’s happy boyhood village from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Oculus Rift. The software allows you to explore the quaint woodland clearing from the Nintendo 64 game in all it’s blocky, early-pologon-era glory. 

Maybe one day, you'll be able to break a few pots and chop some grasses. But as of now, the village is mostly empty, with no NPCs, story, or annoying forest fairies. All you can do is walk around in this complete, pixel-for-pixel rebuild. It’s very much a tech demo, but the latest build thankfully fixed the Deku Tree's mustache color. So, in other words, don’t expect to be riding bareback across Hyrule Field in virtual reality anytime soon, unless Nintendo comes out with a virtual reality headsets. Hey, crazier things have happened.

Make beautiful chin music playing Tekken with this keyboard controller

Student Geoffrey Guterl has made an electric keyboard that moves players onscreen.

Radiohead releases strange new music in their strange new mobile game

Today, Radiohead surprised everyone with a free mobile “app” called PolyFauna in which you walk around a desolate atmosphere while messing around with your phone’s features and, of course, listening to Radiohead. I’m just gonna call a spade a spade and say it’s a game. 

Here are some of the game-like things I did in it: swiveled 360 degrees in my chair to follow a flashing red dot through a barren planet surface; drew spiky tendrils on my phone’s screen that went spiraling ahead of me through space; took a photograph of a tree, which apparently briefly appeared on Radiohead’s blog, before scrolling down a wall of other photos taken by other players. 

Also found on Radiohead’s blog, frontman Thom Yorke’s elusive explanation of exactly what PolyFauna is: “It comes from an interest in early computer life-experiments and the imagined creatures of our subconscious.” Well, that clarifies things. 

He writes that the space-drone music, where you can hear him chanting softly in the background, was “born out of” the sounds from the song "Bloom," and brought to life by the multimedia studio Universal Everything. We also know the game was inspired by the King of Limbs studio sessions, back in 2011.  

Play it on Apple and Android devices.

Is World of Warcraft a religion? One anthropologist thinks so

Creating a sacred space, virtual or otherwise.

How Catlateral Damage constructs tidy living rooms for house cats to destroy

If, like me, you are the proud owner of formerly stray cats, you know the havoc they can cause to a well-kept house: the shredded upholstery of the couch, the spilled house plants, the random toilet paper roll attacks.

While a nightmare for me, this must be thrilling for my awful cats. That’s the concept behind Chris Chung's Catlateral Damage, the “first-person destructive cat simulator” that lets you terrorize an otherwise orderly house from the perspective of a mischievous meower. Yes, it’s genius, but I suspect he is the unfortunate victim of cats gone wild.

Over at Gamasutra today, Chung has posted about how he constructed the rooms for you to lay waste. There’s a lot of technical jargon about texture mapping and wall modeling, but in addition it offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes peek at how 3D structures such as houses are built and populated with doors and windows and armoires and so forth.

And to think: he goes through such intricate pains of tidying up this place so that a small furry animal can have an obstacle course. You and me both, brother.

This chart explains why Threes! is so painlessly brilliant

Like many of you, I am completely addicted to Threes!, the lovely new heir to the Drop7 and TripleTown fortune. And by fortune, I mean all of my time.

David Wolinsky's review hit the nail on the head, but as a strap-hanging commuter of New York City, I can't help but feel like there's something special about being able to play a game with one hand and hang on for dear life with the other.

It's not a common use case in a sense–having one hand hooked to a steel railing–but in another, building for this type of experience puts Threes! in a separate category of elegant user design.

It dominates something called "The Thumb Zone."

The phrase was invented by Steven Hoober, author of the O'Reilly book Designing Mobile Interfaces and as the name implies, the Thumb Zone is "the most comfortable area for touch with one-handed use." Hoober found that 49% of users held their phone in one hand and used their phone with one thumb.

In an unflattering critique titled "Facebook Paper's Gestural Hell," Scott Hurff pointed me to the concept and he breaks down exactly why the Thumb Zone is so important. 

I'm a typical, bored user waiting in line for delicious burritos or coffee, I want to maximize my swipes / flicks and see as many stories as I can, as quickly as I can.

Replace "stories" with "moves" and you have an accurate assessment of how good mobile games should work. In fact, the ones I often spend the most time with on my phone (iPad is a different story) are the ones that cause me the least amount of pain. This may seem obvious, but it's surprisingly uncommon. It still doesn't explain Flappy Bird's ascent, but hey, let sleeping birds lie.

Thief returns, and brings with it a host of questions about the stealth genre

Dishonored and original Deus Ex creator Harvey Smith weighs in on the state of sneaking.

Feed your curiosity in Weird Egg & Crushing Finger

Playing God or godly playing? 

The dadification of videogames, round two

How have last year’s fathers fared?

IBM’s Jeopardy!-playing AI is off to Africa to solve pandemics

Once trained to trounce the best players on the planet at Jeopardy!, IBM’s artificially-intelligent supercomputer Watson is heading to Africa to mine data that could help solve problems like disease and water scarcity. Although IBM has had difficulty marketing Watson outside of cancer centers, it's good that it can get back to the gainful employment of saving the world from outbreaks of cholera. You can read about the AI’s do-gooder efforts in this nice writeup by Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat. 

But with all the potential for Watson’s AI to do spectacular things, it makes me wonder why videogame AI is so unsophisticated, broadly speaking. While bad guys in titles like the original Halo and Fear were pretty impressive, most of the time we get the same doofuses who lose sight of you the moment they’re off-screen. Of course, I’m not asking for game AI to reach the level of Watson, but it would be nice if there was a real initiative to use the processing power of the new consoles to sharpen game intelligence, rather than rendering a game world that is 35 times larger than the last one, which was already pretty big. I can dream, can’t I?