Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 461

The browser game Bokida is like Minecraft but haunting and beautiful

Bokida looks like Minecraft as envisioned by trendy European graphic artists. Just imagine the premise was tweaked from building unsightly brick buildings to building Abstract Expressionist sculptures. Another difference is that the emphasis here is just as heavily on knocking things down as it is building them. 

This beautiful, daunting, fragmented game came out a while ago, but the French collective Rice Cooker Republic has now made it so that you can play and explore from the comfort of your browser. This is something that we recommend you do. After work, of course.

République shocks the system and redefines mobile gaming in the process

This is the way our paranoia ends: not with privacy, but revelations.

Minecraft claims the surface of Mars, will soon conquer the known universe

At this point pretty much every square inch of Earth has been recreated in Minecraft, so the web developer Rachel Carvalho has turned to modelling alien planets in the popular game about blocky construction blocks.

Her project Voxel Mars is a Minecraft mod that lets you trudge across the vacant cavities of the red planet. The recreation is pixel, er, voxel perfect, pulling topological data from the data of the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter, an instrument that measured the surface by shooting laser pulses at the landscape from a spacecraft. 

What cool, scientific-minded projects like this show is how Minecraft has struck a chord within the educational community. It’s a game built on popular videogame elements like collecting, crafting, and fighting, but that also teaches us about history, physics, computer science, and astronomy, which is kind of wonderful. And sugar-wise, it’s more economical than the Taj Mahal I built of sugar cubes in 4rd grade.

Soon there will be a heck of a lot of Steam Machines to choose from

We knew they were coming. We just didn’t know it’d be this many of them. 

Today we learned from a report on Engadget that there will initially be twelve, count ‘em, twelve Steam Machines. Brace yourself for a long list of manufacturers: Alienware, Falcon Northwest, iBuyPower, CyberPowerPC, Origin PC, Gigabyte, Materiel.net, Webhallen, Alternate, Next, Zotac and Scan Computers have all thrown their respective hats into the ring. They each will be building their own competing version of the little console that will let you play the games that you purchased on Steam on the television that you purchased at a big-box retailer. This is just a partial list. Expect more of them. 

What I’m wondering is how the average consumer will be able choose between any of these machines. The process of buying a console has just gotten a little closer to the process of buying a washing machine. What you have is essentially a row of nearly identical-looking devices that pretty much do the same thing, but which all have presumably different specs and probably function a lot differently. That sounds awful, but if it somehow leads to more Steam sales, I'm in. 

Why would some people play MMOs by themselves?

In defense of being a loner.

How a paralyzed boy will mind-control his robotic bodysuit to kick off the World Cup

Here’s a feel-good story to kick off your week. A teenager will be kicking off the 2014 World Cup in São Paulo. The catch? He’s paralyzed, and will be assisted by an amazing robotic bodysuit built by neuroengineers at Duke. To put this in language that everybody understands, the device is controlled by the boy’s mind. Just picture Iron Man and you’ve pretty much got it. But technically speaking the technology uses a headset that reads neural signals to control the robot suit. The fancy tech was researched by implanting tiny electrical sensors in the brains of rats and monkeys, but now this youth will be trained to kick the ball and get the games underway. 

While important research in brain-controlled prostheses is being done in the field of physical therapy, less-important but potentially really cool research is being done with brain-controlled games. While current electroencephalography (or EEG) headsets are rather rudimentary controllers, the potential is there. There's no telling how biofeedback will benefit the way we live and play.

Welcome to the redesigned Kill Screen Daily

A letter from the founder. 

Why is Kill Screen running review scores again?

Short answer: it’s time.

The Walking Dead starts its second season off with as much brutality as possible

Get ready to do, feel, and witness awful things.

It’s Friday ya’ll, check out this GameCube vaporizer.

If you were in college when I was in college, during the GameCube’s heyday, you know what the bong-makers at Nebula Vaping know: rounds of Smash Bros. and rounds of the green stuff, by which we mean green-apple-flavored vaporizer liquid, go hand in hand. As our writer Zack Kotzer reminisced, there's something almost noble about the pairing.

Although this console/hookah/vaporizer no longer plays games, it is housed inside an authentic GameCube shell. While I have mixed feelings about these joyous machines being mutilated for the sake of a toke, it is four-player, so to speak, so at least it’s staying true to the spirit. Plus, the incognito factor should keep the paranoia at bay. Kick back and enjoy.