Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 458

Playlist 1/15: Nidhogg gets us dueling, Joe Danger Infinity rides into our hearts, and Titan Souls is small but brutal

Each week we play many games. Here are some that you should, too. 

Here's hoping the new RBI Baseball game won’t just be another MLB 2K

Just weeks after 2K said they’re burying the MLB 2K franchise, we have an announcement for a new baseball videogame, and it’s a name children of the ‘80s might have nostalgic feelings for: RBI Baseball. What was debatably the best title of the NES era that involved smacking a red-laced ball over the fence is now headed to next-gen consoles, we learned late yesterday.

We know little more than the title. It will carry the official MLB license, and have the year ’14 in the title, suggesting that it's intended to be a yearly thing, assuming it sells well. That’s about it. Whether the new ballgame will be inspired by the pixels of yore or the realistic simulation, like MLB 2K, has yet to be seen. 

It’s probably the latter, but hopefully the former, as RBI Baseball was pretty much universally beloved by ball fans. It looks like we’ll know something sooner than later: the game is due in time for spring training.

*Correction: 2K is not affiliated with this title.

Voice input is the future. So why is it so bad in videogames?

Most importantly: When will we be able to seduce non-player characters?

Portal creator's Soul Fjords cross-stitches rhythm and roguelikes on Jan 28th

 

The only reason I can figure Kim Swift is releasing Soul Fjord on January 28th as an OUYA timed-exclusive is because the little cuboid console fondly reminds her of the Portal cube. That, or money. In either case, we have the first footage of it in action, which you can scope at the 1:15 minute mark in the trailer below.

In case you’re wondering what’s up with the Soul-Train-meets-cartoon-vikings theme, the ex-Portal designer told us last year, “We ended up with 70's funk and soul which seemed great from a music perspective, and Norse mythology which was fantastic from a character and world design perspective.” My first thought was Blacula meets valkyries.  

The presser we received explained Soul Fjord as a “rhythm roguelike,” which in non-gaming-jargon means that you push buttons in time to cues scrolling across the screen. And that you die a lot. And that a funky bass line kicks in when you’re doing well. I personally prefer the term "Rhythm and Rogue," but whatever you call it, this blending of music genre with role-playing staples is something we’re beginning to see and will probably see a lot more, with Crypt of the NecroDancer picking up plenty of nods from the Independent Games Festival. It serves as continuing proof that anything can be RPG-ified.

Xenogears book to be re-released, pored over by a small minority

In the lineage of all things Xeno, first came Xenogears, then came Xenosaga, then Xenoblade, and then this art-book, Xenogears Perfect Works, which hopefully captures the series mega-complex-Freudian-psychosexual-reincarnation history of Catholicism story, to go along with drawings of robots.

The book is actually a reprint, and will sell for the US equivalent of about $50, but the point is that it’s being reprinted twenty years after the game whose name it bears was relevant, and this made us wonder about the stature of the Xeno series. Its fanbase is small but fervent. If the Xeno name hadn't been bungled and tossed around a few times, that fervency could've grown into something larger-scale, like we've seen with the Persona series. Is this book's re-release indication that the Xeno games have gotten closer to securing a spot on the podium of great role-playing games, or is it just another act of fan pandering? 

The fact that it was reprinted after 2,000 Japanese fans voted for it suggests, alas, that it is pure fandom. But the series has been consistently fascinating (if not consistently good) and the latest, Xenoblade, may be the greatest. How about it? 

The Last of Us DLC sounds fascinating, even a year after the original game came out

No matter how playful this prequel is, you know it ends sadly.

Art trumps design in The Banner Saga

Life and death on the Old Norse Trail.

This insane hack puts Pong and Snake inside Super Mario World. Really.

There’s insanity and then there’s insanity, and this qualifies as the “and then there’s insanity” variety. A speed-runner on YouTube has hacked Super Mario World so that Mario’s noggin takes a metaphysical leap to a game of Pong, where it is batted around between two wood platforms. Next, it moonlights as the front-end of the snake in Snake. My reaction was tickled amusement, followed by terrible confusion, following by the realization that I may have just witnessed the most awesome glitch known to man. See if yours is the same.

What the blazes just happened? We thought it was a glitch, then a hack, and though we’re not 100% certain, we know think it's a glitch/hack, judging from the talk in the comments section. It sounds like Masterjun3 has used tool-assisted speed-running techniques to hack the game, reprogramming it while simultaneously playing! This was done by entering outrageous button combinations with the assistance of a computer, which gets a tad technical. This will not, in other words, work on your old Super Nintendo. But that shouldn't stop you from training. 

No Man's Sky's artificially intelligent game designer is pretty amazing

“Procedural generation” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but hearing about how it’s used in the space-flight game No Man’s Sky is pretty fascinating. Speaking to Edge, Sean Murray of Hello Games describes all the crazy, unexpected things that can happen when relying on artificial intelligence to automatically build landscape formations:

I run the game and I charge about an environment and find some caves and think, ‘They look good!’ Then I fly to another planet and see that they look terrible, and they’ve created some kind of crazy landscape. And then you fly to another and there are no caves, and then [on] another there’s water in the caves, because of where the sea level is on that planet, and you dive down and find that there’s actually some small bacteria-based life there, and it comes as a total surprise.

This sounds less like game design and more like actual space exploration, which has to make the work day pretty exciting. Murray first crafts a few land and water masses by hand, and then slots them into a procedural system that reshapes and distributes them across the game’s vast expanses, because it's just too big to do by himself. Then, off he goes a-wandering.

This is something we are seeing more of as games swell in size. The usual argument against it is that people just design better levels than computers do. As Murray explains, procedural generation is more of a collaboration between machine and man, and the results are that he can build awesome things, like caves filled with surprising bacteria-based life.

They're making a Magic: The Gathering movie, and it has high "awfulness" potentiality

Magic: The Gathering is the perennial deck-building card game about wizards and elemental spirits and evil and stuff. And sometime in the future it will be a motion-picture bursting at the seams with high-fantasy lore, as Twentieth Century Fox has acquired the rights to adapt it into a motion picture. 

Your guess is as good as mine as to how a card game will translate to the big screen, but it will undoubtedly involve fleshing out the universe. Wizards of the Coast president Greg Leeds is involved with the production, which may help them expand that universe while staying true to the spirit of the game. On the other hand, the word on the street—OK, the Internet—is that the movie is also in the hands of Simon Kinberg, who has worked on the X-Men sequels and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, so it’s equally likely that it will be terrible.