Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 449

Rain World is pretty much a .gif factory

We covered the post-apocalyptic jumper Rain World before. The plot eludes us but it seems sometime in the distant future slugs and cats become inseparably combined. The game crushed its funding goal on Kickstarter, because, well, slugcats (though after studying them closely I have a suspicion they’re just civets). But it was also a success because it looks really solid. And because of sick-looking gifs, which is the hot way to market your low budget game these days it seems.

Well, now there are more gifs, and a trailer showing these cute ragamuffins dueling half-alligators with sharp sticks. Also, gifs. Did we mention gifs?

Tom Francis' new game Heat Signature has spaceships, might have missions

Heat Signature aims for the stars, but is far from launch.

Touch spiraling vortexes and other people’s hands with Eliss Infinity

A teaser trailer for Eliss Infinity, the sequel to Steph Thirion’s Eliss, surfaced over the weekend, calling for a polite round of Internet high-fives among those with good taste and a good memory. Although the video doesn’t reveal much aside from a release date of Feb. 6, expect to be madly pawing at artful visual design. 

The first came out in 2009 before every other person on the planet had an iPhone, so it’s somewhat unknown for being one of the great early mobile games to really take advantage of multiple fingers touching, pinching, and/or gently caressing each other. The first game was a fickle beast in the difficulty department, requiring you to separate and recombine pixel-y orbs as they’re slurped down vector-borne black holes. It was practically essential that those fingers belonged to more than one person. Just make sure to play it with someone whose hands you trust, or bring hand sanitizer.

Hey Denver, playing Pokemon probably wasn't the best way to prepare for the Super Bowl

As you know, the Denver Broncos just suffered one of the most humiliating defeats in Super Bowl history. Things turned ugly quickly and stayed that way. The Broncos couldn’t match the Seahawks’ intensity and didn’t seem particularly inspired to be playing in the biggest sports game of the year. One interesting story that came out fo the game was Broncos linebacker Nate Irving playing Pokemon to get in the zone for the big game, which probably didn’t help.

"I'm actually going to sit in my hotel room, play my Pokemon game," Irving told the Wall Street Journal last week. Instead of tearing the club up, or scowling at a poster of Russell Wilson, or going into a Cape Fear-style trance, or doing whatever it is pro footballers do, he was playing Pokemon. This may or may not explain why the Denver defense was helpless against the Seahawks’ rushing attack, who looked like the 400-pound juggernauts that SB Nation writer Jon Bois predicted out there. Videogames have great therapeutic benefits, such helping you concentrate, calming nerves, and managing stress, but wrapping up Marshawn Lynch is a lot tougher than catching Pikachu in a Pokeball.  

Hunting Anubis turns the dogfight into a brutal, stealth cold war

Hide and go seek-and-destroy.

How Law & Order unintentionally captured the cultural shift into the Computer Age

One of the longest running shows in history, Law & Order ran from 1990 through 2010, which means it offers an interesting take on computer history. Artist Jeff Thompson noticed this after bingeing on the show on Netflix, and began documenting the evolution of computers used from season to season, which are usually found in the background on a desk. In a write-up on his project at Rhizome, he explains how “the show coincides with a major cultural shift: the rise and eventual ubiquity of computers and networked technologies over a crucial 20-year period in technological history,” which is pretty fascinating. Totally worth checking out if you have a fixation for cop dramas or old computer equipment.

PlayStation Now needs to be the Netflix of videogames

Future perfect.

How The Vanishing of Ethan Carter took over the Internet with three .gifs

Adrian Chmielarz of the Astronauts tells us of unspeakable horrors.

Games are cathedrals, and time travel, and other awesome things Tale of Tales said

Interviews with the Belgian art game collective Tale of Tales are always a wild ride, which is what you’d expect from the makers of Luxuria Superbia (a tube racer about racing down the fallopian tubes) and Bientôt l’été. But this interview with Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey by our pals over at Game Church is perhaps the wildest. Being a site that looks at games through a Christian lens, they regularly run a series where they ask game designers about their faith. Lesson learned: only ask these guys about their faith if you’re prepared for some seriously deep shit. 

Right off the bat, we get into these high concepts:

Michaël Samyn: I think one of the core beliefs that I think Auriea and I share is that everything exists; nothing is impossible. There’s a certain group of people that thinks there is an ultimate explanation for everything. We actually prefer not to because mystery is so much more interesting.

Auriea Harvey: Or the impossibility of knowing everything is what intrigues us. It’s not so much that we deny truth, it’s that we don’t want to pin down the world to a single truth. All things can be possible.

And, later on, this quote, which might be the best way to describe a game space ever.

I mean, we’ve always said that games are more like cathedrals than they are like movies. It’s a narrative environment, an environment that immerses you in a story, in a time. It’s a time machine. It’s made over hundreds of years. I mean, I have a lot of respect for this process that it’s been through.

The whole interview sounds like one of those dreamy, directionless, quasi-philosophical conversations one has while lying in bed with their partner on a morning after great sex. That, or an acid trip. 

Be sure to check out the whole thing at Game Church.

Behold: A circuit board that turns an eggplant into a synthesizer

The Ototo is almost too adorable. So adorable that it only qualifies for our late Friday afternoon post, because what’s better at the end of a long week than watching a circuit board turn almost anything into a synthesizer. And by anything, we mean anything: hoodies, coffee, house plants, cats. (Yup, I’m pulling these from my immediate vicinity for these.) All that and the rest of my house can become a musical object that responds to your touch. You can read on the Kickstarter page about the technical stuff, but the gist is that the sound is affected by the shape of whatever the device is hooked up to. Hmm, I wonder which cat thumps best.