Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 463

Nidhogg to bring us swordfighting, hot beats January 13

We’ll all be playing Nidhogg and listening to Daedelus Jan. 13th. In case you’re thinking what and who, let me explain. Nidhogg is the competitive party-game-of-the-forever; it features sword-fighting and Atari art, and it’s finally coming to Steam. Another thing we found out is that the experimental producer Daedelus, whose discography is all over the place, is providing the tunes. If you haven’t heard his team-up with comic-rapper Busdriver, The Weather, we recommend doing that. 

Traditional videogame soundtracks can be beautiful stuff, but it's heartening to see musicians from outside of the traditional videogame-wheelhouse getting involved. This is something of a trend, and we'd love to see it continue. Drone-reggae shaman Sun Araw did the intro track to Hotline Miami. Buddhist prog rockers (yes, that’s a thing) Yamantaka//Sonic Titan contributed a song to Mark of the Ninja. Tangerine Dream's pause music for GTA 5 soundtracked pretty much the month of October for most of us. Collaboration like this exposes different groups of people to different things, and, anyway, it's always a good thing when talented people work together on something. 

This eye-tracking controller compels us to stare way too intensely at our screens

The eyes may be the window to the soul, but they’re also a highly accurate way to play videogames, as this new eye-tracking input device shows. This still-unnamed game controller by Tobii and Steel Series is a sensor that looks similar to a Kinect camera, and it works exactly how you’d think. By keeping tabs on your eyeballs, it can translate their movement to activities on-screen, such as swinging a tomahawk, or pretty much anything. 

What’s cool about this technology (aside from that it’s already improved computer-use for disabled people and clinical researchers, according to Venturebeat) is that it has real potential to make us better players. We’ve seen an explosion of prototypical tech for games here recently, but while these inventions can be great for mining new game experiences, they tend to make existing games harder to play. Touch controls aren’t as precise as a gamepad. Motion-tracking like Kinect or gyroscopes can be unwieldy beasts. Virtual reality made me want to vomit.

But eye-tracking is more like an augment for the way we already play games. When used in tandem with, say, a keyboard, it can free up your fingers for elaborate multitasking, which makes it perfect for Starcraft players and elite hackers alike. Or maybe you’ll just use it to steer the camera. In any case, it’s definitely less painful than neural implants. 

Murder in the Hotel Lisbon pushes the limits of our nostalgia

The native resolution of this game is 256x192. Take it or leave it.

TIME VIKING!!!!!ANDSPACERAPTOR is exactly why we’ll miss Xbox Indie Games

If you couldn't tell from the name, SKA Studios’s new twin-stick shooter TIME VIKING!!!!!ANDSPACERAPTOR is a mess. The visuals are a psychedlic whirl of bullet-vomiting velociraptors. The music wailing in the background is loud and relentlessly lousy thrash. But what the game lacks in good taste, it makes up for with its punk rock mentality of “we don’t really have to know how to play these instruments to kick ass.”

This was the pervasive attitude you found on Xbox Live Indie Games, Microsoft’s garage development service for Xbox 360, where TIME VIKING!!!!! was released this week. The service allowed anyone to build, publish, and sell games on a home console. Sadly, with Xbox One, Microsoft is discontinuing the service, opting to be more selective with the titles they let pass. You can’t blame them, considering that most of these games were total crap. But still, the scrappiness will be missed.

Back in 2009, SKA Studios’s first Xbox Indies’ game I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1 was a rallying call for the flood of bad, funny, but entirely playable games that became the calling card for the service. You got the feeling that things never went as Microsoft planned. There was something of a “fuck the authority” ethos among the creators. This was the chance for unknown amateurs from the internet to place a game on the most popular home console, and perhaps make it big. Not unexpectedly, the results were profane, like bathroom wall writing at a five-star restaurant. But that's kind of awesome. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, XBLIG. 

How tablets transformed the board game landscape

The die is cast.

Happy 2014 from Kill Screen

We're taking the day off to celebrate the New Year and enjoy some pulled pork. See you Thursday!

Think Kickstarter frees creators? Tim Schafer says otherwise.

It’s generally accepted that crowd-funding services are invaluable to games, allowing creative types to get things done without the oversight of a greedy publisher, who’d typically push for safe bets. However, in a recent interview, comments by Tim Schafer of Doublefine, whose game Broken Age was funded on Kickstarter and is under development, shed a little doubt on the wisdom of the crowd:

I guess I would say I do have an idea for how I want the game to be, but a lot of stuff that fed into the forming of that idea came from feeling like I knew the backers, from reading their comments on the forums. That they liked adventure games. … They were mostly very supportive, “you guys just do what you do,” and of course everyone has their opinion of “I think you should have a verb coin” or “I think you shouldn’t,” but I got a sense that they weren’t looking for a reinvention of adventure games.

Wait a minute. Wouldn’t we rather see the savant of adventure games reinvent the adventure game? True, his previous effort Brutal Legend underwhelmed, but that had the air of executive tampering. Before that, Psychonauts undersold but was inventive and beloved by all who played. Of course, Schafer’s classic adventure games are legendary, but even Grim Fandango pushed the form into new territory. It seems like a tragic mishap that one of the brightest creatives in the medium would be told by his biggest fans to quit innovating and get back to lock-and-key puzzles. In the words of George R R Martin, “Art is not a democracy. People don't get to vote on how it ends.” Unless that art is funded on Kickstarter, apparently.

Here’s something almost nobody on the planet knows about Nintendo history

Including the author, who has written a freaking book on the subject.

Christine Love's upcoming dating sim promises choke collars, heartbreak, kinky sex

Christine Love—the author of ingenuous, titillating, and culture-challenging visual novels—has announced her new game. 

There’s not much to go on aside from the title and the fact that it’s a dating game at this point, but luckily that title says a lot. My Twin Brother Made Me Crossdress As Him And Now I Have To Deal With A Geeky Stalker And A Domme Beauty Who Want Me In A Bind!!, or Ladykiller in a Bind may be the most descriptive name for any entertainment ever. 

Love also mentions that the game will play similarly to the social link portions in Persona 3 and 4, but less idealized, with all the casual manipulation and push-and-pull that comes with dating in real-life. Also included: kinky sex. 

Talking to Polygon, Love stresses that it's important to portray relationships honestly. Between the flamboyance of the title and the BDSM she implies, this may sound contradictory. But therein lies the genius. Her games elegantly toe the line, placing the player in exotic, occasionally uncomfortable sexual situations, somehow without breaking that tie to reality. To my point: even as a straight guy I really enjoyed Analogue: A Hate Story, her game about lesbian AI in a misogynic society. I'm equally jazzed for this one.

Titanfall removes no-scoping and quick-scoping from the FPS, infuriating ten-year-old brothers everywhere

Let's review over our FPS terminology, shall we?