Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 456

Touching Obama's hair and my hope for the future of games

Revisiting what Obama's reelection calls for us to do. 

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day from Kill Screen

We're taking the day off. 

Majora's Mask deconstructed with this very practical glitch

For screwy malfunctions that break games in unthinkable ways, glitches are pretty inspirational. That’s why I’m mighty impressed by this glitch in Majora’s Mask, discovered by YouTuber user Indextic, which allows for fast travel to any region in Hyrule from the outset of the game. If you think about it, it’s an unexpected reminder that anything is possible if you just approach life in a quizzical way. Just a little motivation for your weekend!

Oscars snub Pacific Rim, continues to disdain monster-fighting robots

The nominations for the Academy Awards were announced this morning, and by some glaring oversight Pacific Rim failed to receive a nod in the Best Visual Effects category. (However, Gravity, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Star Trek: Into Darkness, and Iron Man 3 did.) The film is about ferocious reptilian monsters brawling do-gooder giant robots, so it isn’t too surprising that it was overlooked, but it’s still a shame.

I mean, when was the last time a kaiju movie—or a film featuring giant robots and giant monsters—won an Oscar? True, Tranformers was nominated, but it didn’t win, and anyway that was a major studio production, so the committee had to pay attention. Pacific Rim, not so much. Aside from being a kaiju film with bad guys unoriginally named “Kaijus,” Pacific Rim has plenty going for it, including an acclaimed director in Guillermo del Toro, and a dazzling visual display by Industrial Light and Magic. (Wired has a splendid video on the making of the film if you care to look.) 

We don’t mean to stir up the “which games are Oscar-worthy” pot, but maybe giant monster movies and videogames of any kind have a similar stigma. Like Pacific Rim, games can be fascinating documents of visual art and design and engineering, despite what you think of their ability to convey drama convincingly. Still, both have trouble getting recognition they deserve from outside their respective audiences. 

Invisible Inc. is your quintessential Klie game, meaning you haven't seen anything like it

There are rumblings out of Klei Entertainment about their slick-looking spy game. Specifically, that the game once known as Incognita but is now being called Invisible Inc. is making progress, entering alpha phase. Klei rumblings, unlike volcanic rumblings, are the best kind of rumblings, because the studio always turns out inventive titles that explore new territory and bring to light new types of play. To my point, Invisible Inc. looks to scratch the itch for the stealth game, the heist game, that turned-based strategy game, and the classic cyberpunk PC game. I have no clue how to classify this beautiful centaur, so watch the trailer and tell me what you think.

New PBS Game/Show asks if The Sims is just reality TV

The fourth installment of the The Sims is coming out in fall, which will undoubtedly bring the number of Sims games sold to a grand total of a gazillion copies. It’s already the best-selling game on PC of all-time, and we were wondering what makes a simulation about the ins-and-outs of everyday life so incredibly popular. 

The easy answer is that Will Wright created it; and that it has broad demographical appeal; and you can kill your Sims by having them get in the swimming pool and then removing the ladder. But that’s overlooking the possibility that The Sims is the DIY version of Jersey Shore, and The Kardashians, and many other shows that fall under the banner of reality TV. Does The Sims really satisfy our craving for watching real people in fake situations getting up in each others face?

Check out the episode to find out, and tell us what you think down in the comments!

Img via adam

Titanfall alpha invites going out to some very serious Battlefield 4 fans

We love how Titanfall is plopping down some towering robots into the standard tactical-cooperative-shooter. But how will the average Battlefield 4 devotee who lives and breathes through the barrel of an AR-15 feel about it?

Well, that’s what the guys at Respawn Entertainment want to know, as they have sent out invitations to a select number of Battlefield players. These lucky guys and gals were selected at random, asking them to play the game early before its March 14th release.

What we’re wondering is how they will like it. Battlefield has increasingly closed the gap with Call of Duty, homogenizing (or perfecting) the core "iron sights" shooting experience some fans of the genre expect. But Titanfall is radially different: 6v6, no-noscoping, asymmetrical play, creeps, and so on. It has the capacity to be a disruptive release, and the BF4 crowd's reaction will be an interesting bellwether.

Secrets of Raetikon is quietly and frequently astonishing

You smell that? That’s Alpine air.

Witness Twin Peaks' Red Room in Animal Crossing: New Leaf

A Reddit user has recreated in Animal Crossing: New Leaf the “Red Room” from the famous scene from the first season of Twin Peaks, which is arguably David Lynch’s most vivid and surreal two minutes of tape. (Personally I’d go with the Rabbits scene from Inland Empire, but I’m in the minority.) This is awesome for all kinds of reasons, but mainly because it’s Animal Crossing and Twin Peaks, which is an odd-couple combination that never should work but does, like bacon and chocolate. I’m picturing an Animal Crossing subplot where the point is to find out which of your cheerful townsfolk killed Nibbles. Eh, probably Tom Nook. 

Palmer Luckey talks about making the Oculus Rift look cooler, plus other things

The new and improved Oculus Rift was all the rage at CES, but there are still some kinks. In an interview with PC Gamer, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey tackled our biggest concerns, such as this one: when will this thing look less stupid and not make me motion-sick so I can use it for business travel?

On coolness:

You’ll look cooler! We’re making it look cooler. It’s getting a lot cooler-looking. Even these prototypes are a little misleading on our progress. This prototype is smaller than the original dev kits, but it’s a little longer and it is still kind of bulky. A lot of that is because these are all hand-built prototypes that we had to leave room to assemble things and hand-wire inside. So if it was actually a manufactured good, even right now, it’d be quite a bit slimmer. So you won’t look as stupid.

On motion-sickness:

No matter how good you make a VR headset, it won’t necessarily let you do everything you can do on a monitor without feeling disorienting, and that’s because a lot of things that you do in traditional games would make you sick if you did them in real life. The only reason it works is because your brain doesn't actually get tricked into thinking it’s in a virtual space. So even if we make a perfect VR headset and make everything flawless, there will still be certain experiences—barrel rolls in a fighter—that are going to make you sick. Or very fast altitude changes, which makes people sick in real life, or even just vertigo, looking down from a great height. 

On business:

When VR is going to be exciting is when it gets as good as real life at everything, and you start to say, well, why would I travel on a business meeting across the world just to go sit face-to-face with people, if we can just plug in Rifts and get all of the same nuance of communication we could have gotten otherwise.

In other words it's the perfect gift for the entrepreneurial businessperson unconcerned with fashion.