Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 459

Nidhogg is so good it might destroy modern society

Laughing all the way to the apocalypse.

Rain World has post-human environments, way-too-cute cats

If there’s one thing that games excel at, it’s capturing grimy post-industrial apocalypses. But the other thing they’re really good at is portraying really adorable, cutesy stuff. The good folks who are making the platformer Rain World (they don’t have a studio name, just the makers of Rain World) combine these incompatible extremes into one adorable “slug cat.” This centaur for the Internet age is far more charming than it has any right to be and makes us wonder what other species of gastropod mollusks felines could work their kitten-y magic on.

As for the rest of the game, it looks great, and gives off the hard-as-nails jumping-game vibe. The guys have launched a Kickstarter to properly fund it, but I’m warning you it’s like a trip to the animal shelter over there. You won’t be able to leave without taking a slug-cat home.

Like a real orgy, Clusterfuck is all about group politics

Probably don’t throw this one out at the next office party.

Messhof says Nidhogg is a serious fighting game, despite having just two buttons

The competitive sword-clanger Nidhogg hit Steam yesterday. You should probably play it, and not just because it’s a fun party game to play drunkenly at indie game parties where Doseone shows up because the rap world has rejected him. Talking to Venus Patrol, its creator Messhof, who’s been laboring on it for years, said that this is a serious fighter, despite it only having two buttons.

The goal was for the game to be taken seriously as a fighting game, so I didn’t want too many people to play it until I had everything really worked out. Showing it off at events like EVO and XOXO gave me a good idea of where the game stood, but the more serious players demand a lot.

Nidhogg is all about the slow game — getting your opponent to make the first move. There have been a few games like this, and probably even more that I haven’t played — the best example is Bushido Blade, but I find the controls pretty clunky. I’ve spent a lot of time on the “game feel.” 

The takeaway here is that complex games can have simple controls. Depth of experience and complexity of button-presses aren’t the same thing. This is an idea we’ve heard repeated from other developers that are part of the new wave of independent, ultra-simple fighting games, for instance Divekick, a strategic fighter in which there’s only one move, the much maligned divekick. Two rows of attack buttons and monster combos aren’t always necessary was the sentiment of that game’s creator when I spoke to him last summer. And speaking as someone who’d love to learn to get into Marvel vs. Capcom but who lacks the time and patience, the gesture is welcome.

Now that Oculus Rift is forming a game studio, virtual reality is officially on fire

We recently learned that Oculus Rift—the guys who make the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset—are bulking up to develop their own games. They’ve already have brought on FPS-forefather John Carmack, although it was suspected he’d just be working on the technical aspects of thing. Not so! Now, they’re recruiting a team of developers around him. This is huge. Carmack's track record isn't spotless, but he understands game design, and is one of the best people we can think of to help figure out what the VR experience should feel like. 

Elsewhere, development for the headset is starting to shape up, too. It looks like Steam is poised to become the platform of choice for virtual reality, as Valve is a few days away from releasing tools that make it much easier for game devs to do there thing for the Rift. While an awesome thing about the Rift is the many exploratory developers making everything from virtual art galleries to sex sims, it’s great that some of the best developers are on board too. Can’t wait to see what they get up to.

Thank god we're getting a Witcher boardgame instead of some terrible high-fantasy books

The world of The Witcher is an uninhabitable continent with mutated reindeer and white-haired barbarians. And coming later this year is The Witcher boardgame, which is based on all of that stuff. The game is for four player and is a collaboration between CD Projekt Red and Fantasy Flight Games, so it should be excellent. It’s cool that videogames are starting to get these thoughtful tabletop accompaniments, as we’ve seen also with the Bioshock Infinite: The Siege of Columbia boardgame, which didn’t just rely on the license, but was a solid boardgame on its own merits. 

Frankly, a game based on a game is a much better option than the serialized “novelization” and comic-book-ification bullshit we get from other popular titles. Not to name any names, but Halo. A book tends to reduce games to generic, ridiculous sci-fi and fantasy plots. You can see in the trailer below that The Witcher boardgame has more than its fair share of wizards and warriors, but, because it's a game, it doesn't miss out on why we play these things in the first place. It's not because we are Nordic scholars who need a break from our dissertation on visigoths (no offense to Nordic scholars), but to be challenged, to be creative, and to be there. The Witcher boardgame lets us keep that.

Gran Turismo 6 is the racing game of our dreams

Holy hell this game is pretty. 

Want to play your Xbox One and PS4 on a 4K television? Well, sorry.

Ultra or 4K televisions got a big push this week at CES, with major electronics companies such Sony, Samsung, and Lenovo coming out of the gates with new flatscreen models. The difference between these sleek flat rectangles and your soon-to-be-old 52-inch plasma is that they have a much higher resolution—so much higher in fact that there isn’t much content to support the beautiful picture quality yet.

This makes me wonder if videogames will drive the adoption of 4K televisions the way they did with HD models a few years ago. While not the only reason they caught on, HD sets were greatly benefited by HD consoles with hot graphics that pushed the boundaries of men’s haircuts on computer models but required televisions with more pixels. 

As it stands the new consoles aren’t ready. Per a FAQ released by Sony in October: 

Support for high-resolution 4K output for still images and movie content is in consideration, but there are no further details to share at this time. PS4 does not currently support 4K output for games.

And while the Xbox One’s cable will output a signal in 4K, it’s still the same old high-def graphics on a better screen. Which brings me to my second point. Studios have to develop 4K assets for these newfangled TVs, which is going to be expensive, and could divert funding away from important aspects like AI and game design. The jump didn't happen for 3D TVs, and it may not happen for 4K ones, either. 

The unreal world and work of LaTurbo Avedon

Avatars are people, too.

This perspective-bending puzzler from Carnegie Mellon belittles the FPS

This was bound to happen. You can only shoot so many guys in the face before you get tired of it and start screwing around with the formula. What this tech demo called Museum of Technology proves is that the possibilities are huge. But also incredibly small. The game pokes holes in your sense of scale, allowing you, for example, to pluck the full moon from the sky and drop it at your feet, where it looks no larger than a ping-pong ball. It's one of the more inventive tricks we've seen in a puzzler since portals. An added perk: smooth jazz piano.