Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 450

New PBS Game/Show asks if we should give over esports to the bots

The technical prowess of esports players is amazing. They have jet pilot reaction times, process Rainman-level calculations on the fly, and can perform ten actions-per-second with their mouse cursor. But once in awhile, even the top pro players fall victim to mental fatigue, or the human requirement to blink occasionally. Computers, on the other hand, are unflappable when it comes to technical performance, and they’re learning how to play games at an alarming rate. But should we allow AI agents to augment the abilities of human opponents in esport tournaments, or would they eventually squash us mere mortals and ruin the sport? 

Find out in the episode, and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

In our favorite story ever, Burial chooses Dark Souls 2 over producing new music

This story is so Kill Screen it hurts. Burial, the hermitic electronic artist on Hyperdub known for grainy, pitch-black beats, has apologized to fans, saying that the sublime Rival Dealer EP might be the last we hear from him for awhile. Why? Well, because he’ll be consumed by Dark Souls 2, like the rest of us. The thing about Burial is that, though prolific, he's reclusive to the point where you could question if he exists. His Dark Souls name-drop was part of a blog post in which he revealed his true identity to the world for the first time. He outed himself to in effect say "Gone gamin'!"   

His words:

Hopefully by the end of most years I have done some tunes that are decent enough to release. but Dark Souls 2 is on the horizon soon so I'm not sure if I will have many new tunes for a while because I need to play that game a lot. But I'm going to try to get some new tunes together before it comes out.

This is another signal that game creators and music creators are starting to speak to one another through their work. And it’s perfect that a game as austere and brilliant as Dark Souls could be indirectly informing music as austere and brilliant as Burial’s. I wonder if the From Software guys listen to Burial. They should definitely meet.

(Thanks @WJDDrew!)

All-time great dev Treasure hints at bringing a new game to Steam

In certainly the best news of the week, Treasure—the Japanese studio whose catalogue includes all-time greats like Sin and Punishment and Gunstar Hereoes—is making a game for Steam. The company has previously ported their classic polarity-flipping shooter Ikaruga to the digital platform, but now they're thinking about doing original stuff. Details are sparse, as the game seems to only exist as a nebulous idea at this point, but, in an interview with Famitsu, translated by way of Siliconera, the Treasure bossman hinted that it could be “a side-scroller action game.” Though “side-scrolling action game” ordinarily doesn’t speak to us much, when Treasure utters the words “side-scrolling action game,” our hearts go a-thump. 

This right here is the brilliance of Steam. It’s a platform that gives a venerable studio like Treasure the ability to keep doing what they do, which is to make insane and extremely-polished action games. Or as they put it in the interview, “to make whatever you like, and release it however you like.” Cave, are you listening? There's hope yet!

Why Nintendo’s announcements this week may save us all

Don’t be worried. Be excited.

Dawn of the Plow is the lone bright spot of this miserable winter

The South is recovering from paralyzing winter weather just as Dawn of the Plow came out. Coincidence? I think not. This little game about a trusty truck with a plow on front clearing the icy roads for vehicles is just what the nation needed, unless you’re in Austrailia, in which case enjoy your heat wave. The rest of us will be enjoying this awesome game by one Dan FitzGerald, who also made Dog Sled Saga, the cutest game about mushing huskies across the great white tundra to hit the Internet. This one is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android, so unless you’re reading this from a public library (what I call the office), you’re covered.

Forget Madden, let’s simulate the Super Bowl using Smash Brothers

Someone had to. Well, maybe not. We did anyway. 

What does Bravely Default: Flying Fairy say about the future of the JRPG?

Some notes on the house that Chocobos built.

Google maps collaborates with Lego, gets all new aesthetic-y

The New Aesthetic continues to leave its untraceable mark on reality with Build, the browser toy for Chrome that lets you construct Lego structures right on top of Google Maps. The project was started a year ago by a bunch of Australians and now is reaching into daylight. To play it means you have to download Chrome and thus confirm an end-user agreement with the devil, but building a Mario monument outside your front door is kinda worth it.

Check out this first-person impression of Valve's absolutely insane VR tech

Carlos Montero, the project lead on Black Mesa, the HD Half-Life remake, was one of the few who were invited to go face-on with Valve’s virtual reality helm, which is apparently the next best thing to lucid dreaming. So what do the lucky ones who tumble down the rabbit hole in Gabe Newell’s personal VR cave see? 

Well, here’s snippets from Montero’s very trippy account: 

Space with matrix of Cubes, textured with websites

Cubes were perceptually very small, say six inches cubed. 

I could walk up to a small cube and put my face into it. Text was super crisp.

Several batshit demos later:

Standing on a street in a downtown like space with many skyscraper-sized boxes.

Sense of space and perspective was nuts

Boxes really felt like they were insanely huge.

Dude then travels to Portal:

Portal 2 turret assembly

Valve guy mentioned that they noticed Normal maps don’t work with VR - you can tell they are fake.

Machine arms were building a turret from Portal 2.

Arms were rotating wildly fast, and I was very close. It felt dangerous.

This was the first demo with textures, I could look closely at the machine arms and tell the normal maps were fake, they broke down very badly.

There was also this terrifying encounter with a robot head:

Animated robot face

Didn’t spend much time here but there was a very high-poly animated robot face. It was just opening and closing it’s mouth like an automaton. I was able to push my face INTO it and clip into it, seeing the inside workings of the face.  This was a bit creep [sic] and weird TBH.

Mother of God! Just to be clear, Valve’s experimental virtual reality technology is not the same tech found in the Oculus Rift, but a much pricier version that takes place in a carpeted room covered in “QR-Code looking symbols,” according to Montero, which makes his elaborate account seem all the more like a nerdy, shamanistic spirit walk. With all these glowing, hallucinogenic reports of Valve’s VR, I’m starting to become a believer. 

The NSA is watching you through Angry Birds

The NSA and its British chums across the pond have been using a backdoor in ad-supported mobile apps—specifically, Angry Birds—to mine sensitive data, according to The New York Times. This includes Google Map locations, websites visited, and buddy lists, according to newly declassified documents leaked to the press by Edward Snowden. And you thought you were just flicking a peeved canary dressed as Obi-Wan into a very flimsy Deathstar.

It sucks that government snooping has tainted the beautiful thing that is free mobile games, but it’s not unprecedented. We already knew that the NSA had spies inside of World of Warcraft, which came out in a similar document leak last year. I guess if there is an upside it’s that this speaks to the rising cultural currency of games; they're a medium not just of artistic expression but of communication, as well. Might as well spy on'em, then.