Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 448
February 5, 2014
New Thief trailer features adult situations, thievery
Thieves will do what they do. And that’s getting nude, using strong language, finding themselves in a strong sexual context, using drugs, and committing violence. Wait, that’s just the ESRB disclaimer. In between those things, apparently, it seems the thief in Thief swings back and forth between sneaking through the shadows to snatch valuable knickknacks and going in balls-to-the-wall, which makes sense, considering the game is being brought to us by Eidos Montreal, the group who previously did the totally adequate Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and because, you know, it’s a reboot of Thief. It’s kind of a morality system for the morally bankrupt.
Nevermind, the survival-horror game that feeds on biofeedback, goes to Kickstarter
Most scary games just want to scare you, but Nevermind wants to scare you and then help you manage your anxiety. The concept for this white-knuckled first-person experience is really cool, taking advantage of biofeedback not just for self-help, but actually to adjust the thrills and chills as you play. It uses a headset that reads your pulse to hook into your biorhythms, and then pushes your panic button repeatedly. When you’re scared, the game gets harder; the only way to continue is to calm yourself down. And no cheating with Klonopin. We’ve talked about it before, and we’ll be talking about it again in a feature sometime soon. The Kickstarter campaign just went live, and we thought you'd like to know that creator Erin Reynolds is in need of test subjects for horrific scientific experiments. Ahem, I mean players. Definitely players.
Devastating footage of four guys racing each other through Super Meat Boy
Super Meat Boy is a ridiculously hard game that requires pinpoint jumping and the accuracy of a world-champion dart player (assuming that there is a world championship of darts). So when Something Awful forum members hosted "The Super Meat Boy Races," a competition to see who could race through it the fastest, the result was devastatingly painful entertainment. You can follow the long list of brackets here, or just kick back and enjoy the clip I selected and be thankful that the pain of face-planting into a buzzing saw is behind you. We should note this is super old but still wonderful, and we found it at Zoe Evelyn Hart's rad Tumblr.
EVE players get the august monument they deserve
Iceland will soon be receiving a dazzling piece of modern art, as CCP, creators of the persistently-hostile online world EVE, are erecting in downtown Reykjavik a monument to the players. The 15-foot-tall structure looks straight out of Battlestar Galactica and will have the names of the main characters of every active EVE player etched on it, Vietnam Memorial-style. It’s being created by the Icelandic artist Sigurður Guðmundsson, whose works include installations of hammers, bricks, and slippers positioned on carpet, and photographs of people leaning peculiarly against walls. No shit.
This has importance aside from the inherent glamour of having a shiny, stainless steel statue erected. EVE is the most fascinating game in, well, forever, and it’s worth being remembered. But because it’s a living, breathing community of folks who role-play as commanders and slaves on the Internet, and because the whole world plays out in real-time on servers, it’s hard to document. MMOs present a problem of preservation in this way, although MoMA has made efforts to document and enshrine it. But with a monument dedicated to this amazing online world that will one day surely collapse, these characters and these wars can live on representatively, and that's a great thing.
As I Play, Dying: My Afternoon with Shovel Knight and 1001 Spikes
Retro games are here to kill us all.
Deaf Resident Evil and Onimusha composer has been faking it all along
In a scandal on par with Milli Vanilli and Manti Te’o’s girlfriend, Mamoru Samuragoch, the composer of the soundtracks to Capcom’s Resident Evil Director's Cut and for the Onimusha series, has owned up to not actually writing any of his music for the past fifteen years, since he went completely deaf at age of 35. He’s been paying others to write it for him.
Samuragoch is an internationally renowned composer who didn’t only fake game scores but many of his famous compositions, including a tribute to victims of Hiroshima. He was given the nickname of “digital-age Beethoven” by Time in 2001 when he gave them the quote that has come back to haunt him: “If you trust your inner sense of sound, you create something that is truer. It is like communicating from the heart. Losing my hearing was a gift from God."
But the thing that bothers me here is this: why should we care if he wrote his own music or not? In pop, aside from the occasional star like Lady GaGa, it’s a foregone conclusion that artists are inauthentic—a figurehead for a synthesis of “real” creators behind the scenes.
And games often get attributed to creatives who have had a cursory role of oversight, like the way Sid Meier’s name is attached to every Civilization game, although he wasn’t the designer on those sequels. Also, we expect the majority of the games we play to have been outsourced to some unknown outfit in Eastern Europe. If he was a game composer exclusively, it wouldn't be as big of a deal. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
In Insurgency, some soldiers care about your voice
Talk quietly and carry a surprisingly realistic stick.
Playlist 2/5: The Wolf Among Us gets dark, Pale Machine tickles, and The Floor is Jelly rebuilds the platformer
Snowed in? Warm up with our picks from this week's Playlist.
Inside the twenty-year collaboration that brought us Psychonauts, Full Throttle, and Broken Age
Meet the John Williams to Tim Schafer’s Spielberg.
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