Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 454
January 23, 2014
A Story About My Uncle's grappling hook looks like Metroid Prime's, but doesn't suck
I once went rappelling with my uncle. OK, that’s a lie. But if I had it would make a good conversation starter for A Story About My Uncle, which was announced for Steam yesterday. The game about first-person jumping through a forest with the assistance a glowing, mystical grappling device started out as a demo that was fawned upon by many. But Gone North Games has teamed up with Coffee Stain Studios (loving these random studio names, by the way) to turn it into a proper production, which is great because a.) first-person platforming needs perfecting, and b.) more games!
More info to come. May this YouTube video from the 2012 version hold you over.
Bardbarian is equal parts music-battling heaven and grinding hell
There is one really, really big problem with this game.
Why does this app where you have a staring contest with Salvador Dali exist?
Is this thing even funny? Is that the point? Since when is my phone capable of eyeball detection? Is there something wrong with my left eyeball, since the left eyeball reticle isn’t moving? Has my Bell’s palsy came back? Why afterwards am I shown a clandestine photo taken of me while I was looking stupidly at my phone? Why does the iPhone camera take hideous selfies? When was the last time I shaved?
January 22, 2014
The Edward Snowden of Paid Let’s Plays
The word around the Internet is that there have been some seedy deals going down on YouTube channels, with major players directly or indirectly paying content providers to promote their gaming products. Specifically, Microsoft paid one of their partners, Machinima, who in turn paid YouTubers a lousy three-dollars-per-1000-clicks if they said something nice about the Xbox One, according to a blogger who leaked the proof of the deal. (Note: that's not him in the photo above. That's some some random dude I found on YouTube.)
While it’s certainly questionable for game companies to be buying user reviews, it’s also expected, as it is well-known that publishers do their best to tiptoe around issues of journalistic ethics. But YouTube isn’t even journalism—or if it is, it’s in some gray area of quasi-journalism—so journalistic ethics don’t apply. While the value of the critic has been called into question in the age of do-it-yourself reviews, this just goes to show that maybe there is a future for people who do wear a journalism hat.
Blizzard’s small, interesting, and free Hearthstone is open to the world today
Gather 'round the hearth. Stone.
Daniel Benmergui's long-awaited Storyteller is now longer-awaited
Daniel Benmergui has been working on Storyteller—his critically acclaimed, experimental, narrative-generating puzzle game (phew!)—for a long time. As we detailed in an in-depth feature on him at the end of last year, it's his passion project, and a rallying cry for videogame developers in Latin America. But now he’s taking a break.
On his blog, he posted that the project was temporarily suspended while he pursues a commercial version of Ernesto RPG, the charming little free roguelike he put out a month ago. “I’ve been working on it for three years now and I am starting to feel creatively numb from always dealing with the same project,” he wrote, before going on to explain that Storyteller was the project of his life and that he would never abandon it.
Let’s hope the break will get the creative juices flowing, because when I played Storyteller two years ago, it was refreshing, taking a novel approach to, yup, storytelling through solving puzzles.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance is the largest medieval open-world RPG on Kickstarter
When it comes to big open-world games, size matters. That’s why we typically don’t see on Kickstarter games with the span of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the medieval open-world RPG that will feature around thirty hours and 3.5 square miles of horseback riding, crusades, smithing, and historical slaughter. And that, my friends, is just the introductory chapter.
Although Warhorse Studios from my count is an 18-man-and-woman Czechoslovakian wrecking crew with one fierce-looking bull terrier, they’re still a tiny studio to be undertaking a game of this magnitude. A lot of Kickstarter projects have struggled to produce games with girth, with games like The Banner Saga and Shadowrun Returns tapping out early. It’s not that we need games that are longwinded and packed with bullshit, but open-world games are about exploring expansive cities and wilderness. The Kickstarter page indicates they want the game to be large, but refined. Here’s hoping they nail it.
Octodad: Dadliest Catch devs reveal the unlikely inspiration for their comedy
Spoiler: it is not the Octomom.
This fascinating documentary goes inside China's dreaded internet rehab camps
Do you find yourself refreshing your blog posts at traffic lights? Feel itchy and irritable when the Internet is out? Wake up in the middle of the night to change your Facebook status? That’s OK, we all do.
But keep it to yourself when in the People’s Republic, or you might wake up groggy from sleeping pills at one of China’s terrible internet rehab camps, where electrodes will be connected to your scalp and drill sergeants will forcibly reconnect you to the reality that you have lost. If you cry you’ll be allowed to write a letter to your mom.
The New York Times has gone inside these technological detention centers, which are pretty much Anthony Burgess’s vision of juvenile rehabilitation for level 99 World of Warcraft players. There's always the chance, as there is with any news about China, that what we're seeing has been sensationalized to make China seem like more of a hellscape. Then again: take a look.
Image by Peter Zuehlke, Bradmays via Wikimedia Commons
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