Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 446

Atari porn makes a comeback in Pippin Barr’s newest tragi-comedy

Small dick vs. medium dick. Medium dick vs. small dick. Big dick vs. big dick. These are choices you should assess before entering into any dick fight. What’s a dick fight? Well, don’t google it. Play Pippin Barr’s game Lo-fi Dick Fight instead. It continues his habit of publishing funny, way-too-difficult web games that instantly make us realize how absurd videogames are. This time he seems to be poking fun at Atari porn games, the size of one’s e-penis, and best of all Messhof’s sword-fighter Nidhogg, only with, eh, smaller swords.

Give 'er a go here.

RZA to defend his chess champion title, because he is the RZA

The RZA is the grandmaster of hip-hop, and we do not mean that in like a "Grandmaster Flash" context. The dude is mega-good at chess. Next week in Anaheim he will be defending his crown at the Hip Hop Chess Federation’s celebrity tournament, which is the most RZA-sounding federation ever. He’ll probably repeat because, well, he’s an evil genius, and he is mega-good at chess.

The event will also feature a jiu jitsu tournament and a presentation on the parallels between chess and the Brazilian martial art, because it is the most RZA-sounding federation ever. The federation itself is a solid charity, applying the discipline of chess to teach kids how to make the right choices.

Positivity, hip-hop, chess, martial arts—it's RZA's wheelhouse, alright. Has there ever been an artist whose output was so largely influenced by a single game?

New PBS Game/Show asks if Zelda exploits our nostalgia for profit

When you pick up a new Zelda game, such as The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, there are certain things you automatically expect. A little elven lad in a green tunic? Check. Fractured shard of a magical triangle? Check. Wacking chickens with your sword until they gang-tackle you? Check. The Zelda series is bursting at the seams with quaint little callbacks and shout-outs to previous Zelda games—oftentimes ones we played in our childhood, ergo creating a perfect storm of nostalgia. But is Nintendo exploiting our fond early memories to hook us into a Zelda machine that churns out an endless cycle of whimsy? And if so, is that a necessarily a bad thing?

Watch the episode and let us know what you think in the comments.

Bionic Chainsaw Pogo Gorilla is as wacky and violent as you'd expect

Here comes the Internet. 

Join Kill Screen at IBM's dev@Pulse featuring Jenova Chen, Oculus Rift & Elvis Costello!

Get ready for a deep dive on what makes games great. 

Area 5 on the quest to make a This American Life for videogames

There’s hope for us yet.

Videogame art is "art," says artist

Artist Jon Gourley has opened the Video Game Art Museum, featuring the 8-bit paintings from the backgrounds of video games.

Box Art Review: The surreal consumption of Katamari Damacy

What could be inside this thing? Everything.

The game that imagines the terror of trying to escape from an endless loop of Apple stores

We haven’t gotten our mitts on NaissanceE yet, coming to Steam on Feb. 13th, but from the looks of the trailer, it perfectly captures the modern American recurring nightmare of desperately running through an endless number of Apple stores, each storefront leading into another, nearly identical, hospital-white room of simplistically-yet-elegantly designed cubes. Don’t tell me I’m the only one this happens to. Seriously though, the game looks really cool. Check it out.

Al Franken is very worried about facial recognition on Google Glass

Senator Al Franken has spoken out against Nametag, one of the first facial recognition apps for Google Glass, saying that we “cannot reasonably prevent [ourselves] from being identified” by the all-seeing eye of geeks with amazing eyepieces. The app scans the faces of everyone in your vicinity and grabs their social profiles with a ping to a server on the net, which, according to Franken, crosses the line when it comes to the issue of privacy. 

The problem with this, Franken says, is that “cameras could be anywhere—on a lamppost across the street, attached to an unmanned aerial vehicle, or, now, integrated into the eyewear of a stranger.” Drones could be verifying your identity as you read this, recording for ever the garbage you ate for lunch. Scary, right? 

This makes me wonder if the growing concern over Google Glass is merely technophobia, cut from the same fabric as the concern that videogames make teens mass killers, or if the pervasiveness of cameras everywhere is genuinely something to be worried about. Right now, it’s a moot point, as Google itself doesn’t allow commercial facial recognition software to be used with its headsets. However, this kind of tech will surely come to fruition in time, as we’re already hearing about New York police beta-testing the device.