Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 452

The power and the glory of Samurai Gunn

Teknopants delivers a deathmatch of the decisive moment.

This Jazzpunk clip is how Terry Gilliam would direct a game trailer

In our feature today we posed it as a question, but the new trailer pretty much verifies that Jazzpunk is the funniest game ever, or at least it will give Octodad a run for its money. When I saw it at an indie game party a year ago, the guys at Necrophone Games told me how they developed it through a process of rapid prototyping—dreaming up whatever wacky idea they could think of, game jamming them over the course of a weekend, and folding their spoils into the game. The result: sheer stylish absurdity, as you can get a whiff of below. And while we're normally not crazy about the idea of live-action trailers, this one seems to magnify the extravagant humor inherent in the game, not mask the game's substance.

Symmetrain makes the spot-the-difference genre super hard

Relax hard.

Will Jazzpunk be the funniest game ever?

A behind-the-scenes look at what we're gonna call a Gex killer. 

Runemaster should be even more insane than actual Norse mythology

Understandably, wargame fans among our readership might still be bummed out if they didn’t make it to Paradox Con 2014 in Miami last week. But the trailer for Runemaster—the (likely strategic) RPG with incredible storytelling potentiality that Paradox Interactive announced at the party (and by party, I mean as far as a bunch of PC enthusiasts gathered together to play historical wargames can be considered a party)—will cheer you right up.

While the trailer is not very informative, you can gather there will be roleplaying, and Norse mythology, and settlements, and a forester with a wolf in the wilderness. Rock, Paper, Shotgun is reporting that an important part of playing will be bringing  about, or preventing, Ragnarok, a.k.a. the twilight of the gods, a.k.a. the Scandinavian Apocalypse, depending on how virtuous or conniving you’re feeling. 

Coming from the creators of the highly respected Europa Universalis 4, expect it to be special. In our review of its new DLC Conquest of Paradise, Eric Friden called that game “a story generator [that] rewards play with. . . grand, alternate histories.” And in Paradox’s Crusader Kings 2, a strategy game set in the Medieval period, all kinds of crazy, unexpected shit can happen, like birthing the child of Satan. We’re talking a Dwarf Fortress level of complexity. While the trailer is not going to win over new converts, those who are in the know should be excited.

Jay-Z wanted DayZ to be called ZDay, apparently

That is according to an AMA with Dean Hall, creator of the ruthless survival zombie game DayZ, who said the team had been contacted about the name-change by the lawyers of Jay-Z, arguably the biggest figure in pop music so far in this young century, who’s worth something like $500 million and who is married to Beyonce. Can we make a rule? If you’re married to Beyonce, you’re not allowed to sue anybody. 

Hall’s words exactly:

Jay Z's lawyers tried to get us to stop using DayZ and change it to ZDay, actually. We declined. But it did make me laugh.

And for good reason. ZDay just doesn’t ring like DayZ, or for that matter Jay-Z. While I’ll give him they rhyme, there’s no possible way anyone would mix up a zombie game with a rapper who wears straight brimmed hats and used to be part-owner of the Nets. 

This is just another example of litigators gone wild, and unfortunately, this litigation culture is endemic to games, with game studios sending a cease-and-desist to any studio that comes even remotely close to infringing on their intellectual property. We’ve seen it this week as Candy Crush Saga has become the enemy of the Internet for bringing down the hammer on The Banner Saga for using the word “Saga,” and before that trademarking the word “Candy,” and before that for making casual mobile games. If this keeps up eventually developers will have to start calling their games number strings and random letters. 

Riot plans to make League of Legends perennial, like any other sport

Sports are an institution. Esports, eh, not so much. With the exception of maybe Starcraft, esport players hop around to the hot new thing as technology advances and games start to show their age. But League of Legends developer Riot Games is determined not to let that happen to their popular MOBA esport. At a conference in Munich, Germany, Dustin Beck of the company told Ongamers that they plan on sticking around, if not forever, then for a very long time.

It's a sport like just like anything else. Baseball has been around 110 years. I'm not saying League of Legends will be around that long, but we see the shelf life of LoL as hopefully decades.

This is the right idea, as having some longevity would grow audiences and be good for esports. But it will be interesting to see if Riot can pull off a pro sports model. The NFL may make incremental tweaks to football each season, but they don’t have to worry about competing technology that changes the look, feel, strategy, and play of the sport. Ten years from now, the game landscape will probably look radically different, and studios frequently have trouble adjusting to generational leaps. (RIP Duke Nukem.) The future of esports is wide open enough that Riot's predictions seem as valid as the naysayers'. 

World of Warcraft helped someone come out as transgender

The Guardian recently ran a piece by Laura Kate Dale, who, after playing as a female in World of Warcraft, gained the confidence to come out and tell her friends and family that she was transgender. It’s a fascinating piece about the transformative power of online personas, and worth a read in its entirety, but here’s a taste:

While socialising, I had begun to act in a stereotypically male way, as though I wanted to prove to the world that I wasn't different. I was making an active rejection of everything female in an attempt to deny something that was becoming ever more clear to me. However, for some reason I couldn't explain, when it came to World of Warcraft I opted to play the game as a female character.

For her, Warcraft became a gender-issue testing ground.

It allowed me to try out female names and find which ones I liked, which ones felt like they fit me as a person. It gave me a chance to talk to people who only ever referred to me as female. It also gave me a chance to see the huge issues I would have to face in the future when people discovered that the person they had referred to as female was, “actually a guy.”

This really speaks to the futurist potential of games—how they enable us to have a second layer of existence where we can try on different roles and see things from other perspectives. In the best cases, like this one, we take what we learn from these alternate places and bring it back with us, and our lives are way better for it.

The Lightning Returns and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 trailers look great, if you ignore the dialogue

After watching the new trailers for Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy 13 and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, I'm cautiously optimistic for both of these big sequels.

But, holy hell, do they have some melodramatic dialogue. Which one’s worse? Be the judge for yourself, but it’s a mighty close contest, with Castlevania delivering up the heartfelt taunt: “If I cannot rule, the world of men, then no one will!” 

Compare that to Final Fantasy’s very serious: “If you wish to have my soul, you must take it by force!”

Videogames, we love you and still want to play you, but sometimes we seriously worry about you.

Box art review: The pure terror of Resident Evil Outbreak: File #2

It’s the details that count.