Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 457

Kojima show Metal Gear Solid 5's second screen functionality, also the Predator statue on his desk

Yesterday Hideo Kojima tweeted a few pictures showing off Metal Gear Solid 5’s second-screen functionality, which puts to use that expensive tablet you bought. It displays the map from the game, and it also shows Snake’s "iDroid," which apparently is his celly, so you don't have to pull up a menu while riding horseback across the desert. No word on a mobile app. Still, all this is super-duper neat.

But what the hell is that sitting behind the tablet on his desk? Why, it looks like a grotesque, true-to-life bust of a Predator, which Kojima is clearly proud of, as he lifts the mask in the second shot. And who wouldn’t be? Just look at those grizzly fangs all twisted up and snarling in a way not even a mother could love. Who cares about when the game is coming out anymore. Where do you get that bust?

Boardgame and Final Fantasy vets team up to kickstart Unsung Story. Expect brilliance.

Final Fantasy Tactics designer Yasumi Matsuno is Kickstarting the strategy game Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians for mobiles, which is great because he's Yasumi Matsuno and he makes really great strategy games, like Final Fantasy Tactics and Crimson Shroud. But it's also great because of others on the project, namely Playdek, who is legit. Their version of Argicola is one of the best tabletop to tablet conversions ever, according to an informal office survey. Also on the project is Christophe Boelinger, who designed the highly regarded French boardgame Archipelago. Truthfully all I needed to know was that Matsuno is doing it, as he is legend. But with all parties involved I'd say the game has an incredibly high probability for brilliance. 

Net neutrality is dead and so is God

Net neutrality was a good idea while it lasted. Up until Tuesday, service providers couldn’t gouge you, the consumer, for burning through high-bandwidth on services like Netflix and online games, because all things on the Internet were considered equal. This kept competition fair and costs low. But after a ruling by the US Court of Appeals in D.C. this week, that’s one utopian ideal that may go poof. 

Though the ruling can still be appealed to the Supreme Court by the FCC, the court ruled in Verizon’s favor, who filed a lawsuit that essentially complained that they should have the right to dictate what flows over their pipes, however they see fit. And by however they see fit, they mean by charging a premium. 

This sucks for a multitude of reasons. Service providers could throttle a service like Netflix, while letting their own shitty proprietary services run wide open. Also, they can now charge you different fees for different activities that you do online. A likely scenario: Verizon could partner with Netflix (it comes preloaded on a lot of their phones) and build that into their plans while charging premiums for Hulu, or vice versa.

This is bad not only for the Internet as a whole, but games in particular. Online gaming chews up a lot of bandwidth, whether we’re talking a digital distribution service like Steam or upcoming streaming services like Sony’s PlayStation Now. And I can’t even begin to imagine how much internet usage has been spent playing Call of Duty and League of Legends. It’s pretty likely games, being, you know, a pretty huge industry, will be targeted. When you think about it, nearly every aspect of games touches the Internet, so in a doomsday scenario, this could be brutal, leading to a decline in esports, independent publishing, and Let’s Play videos, among other things. I mean, I could live without the Let’s Plays, but still. 

The tiny spheroid Ozobot wants to follow a line into your heart

We, for one, welcome our new Ozobot overlords. 

Good news: more original content for OUYA. Bad news: it's chess

Can the sequel to a 2,000-year-old game resuscitate the OUYA, the hackable system the Internet willed into existence? You’d think not, but then again there’s no bigger name in games than, uh… chess?

Ludeme Games is either really good at playing it straight or they're really serious about this whole thing. Chess 2: The Sequel is a poker-faced “mod” of chess, coming to OUYA on January 21st in dazzling high-definition graphics. As described on its website, the game isn’t so much a sequel as it is a variant, introducing new armies in different arrangements that will have you swiping rooks and pawns in unpredictable ways. Case in point: Reapers are queens that can teleport, which sounds pretty raw, until you realize it’s still, you know, chess.

Take a trip to Catalonia in 360 degrees courtesy the Oculus Rift

Catalonia is a historic region in Spain that was settled on the Mediterranean in ancient times. It’s also the subject of this wild virtual-reality documentary, which isn’t recommended for those who fear free-falling through midair. 

The logistics of the 360 Catalonia Experience are tricky, but the project involves skydiving, 360 degree vision, and strapping an Oculus Rift to your face. This potentially-dizzying invention is the work of Xavi Elson of Barcelona, who wanted to recreate the rich cultural history of his home, you know, by simulating jumping out of an airplane, and spinning its ancient monuments and citizens like a kaleidoscope. I don’t normally say rad, but watch the video and tell me this isn’t rad.

Halo: Spartan Assault is the top-down shooter the Halo series didn’t deserve

Sort of like what people who don’t play videogames assume videogames are.

SimCity goes offline, world breathes huge sigh of relief

The news that SimCity is receiving an update, so that you can play it offline, has been seen as a victory for the Internet. But is it really? When the game launched last year, always being connected was required. Opponents of digital-rights management cried foul. There was pretty much a circus. Many players vowed that they wouldn’t touch the game with a ten-foot-pole.

In a blog post with the subtitle “reengineering a creative vision,” Simon Fox of Maxis reveals how the rejiggering took six months of work. But what struck me is how the creative vision for the game was compromised. He writes:

The original creative vision for SimCity was to make a game where every action had an effect on other cities in your region. As such, we engineered the game to meet this vision, setting up the player’s PC (client) to communicate all of its information to the servers. That means that our entire architecture was written to support this, from the way that the simulation works to the way that you communicate across a region of cities. So yes, while someone was able to remove the “time check” shortly after launch, they were unable to perform key actions like communicating with other cities that they had created locally, or with the rest of their region(s), or even saving the current state of their cities.

Sounds, as a lot of people have noted, pretty familiar to the whole Xbox One debacle, particularly in the wholesale backtracking by the developer. We beat this drum with the Xbox One, and we will again: we don't like the trend of developers reshaping their visions at the behest of the mob. Maybe Titanfall can convince people that always-online isn't apocalyptic. 

Dark Souls 2 looks every bit as dark as we hoped

There’s a new trailer for Dark Souls 2—which is coming sometime in early March, depending on which continent you hail from—and that can only mean one thing: deadly twenty-foot-tall sentries with patina trampling on disfigured human-centipedes. There’s also some old woman wheezing about curses and bats flapping against a castle in the backdrop, and after watching I’m totally psyched for the pain. 

That is to say it’s one of the few dark-fantasy games to nail sword-and-sorcery in an artful and original way. Of course this is nothing new for From Software, who made the two previous beautiful Souls games, and before that, three King’s Field games, which were beautifully grim but a lot less fun. While they start at square one with a knight and a sword, everything about them—from the deeply buried lore to that freakish goat head who cackles at you to feed it gems to the concept of losing souls twice removed—goes against the grain. Watch and see.

Unsurprisingly, Jonathan Blow hates achievements and your distracted lifestyle

Modern console features that pop up while you play are unbearable, or at least that's what Jon Blow thinks. This is the takeaway from the brain behind Braid’s Twitter feed, which recently erupted with a flurry of posts like this one:

And this one:

You’re probably thinking that you can conveniently turn off the dings of notifications, as Twitter also reminded him:

But to Blow it’s a matter of principle.

Those 140 characters are always running out at the worst times. But (in summary) he goes on to say that that effort could be spent improving how games run, such as cutting down on load times, and having consoles that detect your monitor settings, eliminating the need for region-specific games. 

In a way, Blow makes a very valid point. Few other forms of art have distractions built directly into them. On the other hand, how can we break down the "niche" walls of videogames if we don't force them to commingle with the rest of our lives, as the Xbox One does? File this one under: there is no one right answer.