Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 470

President Obama, don’t listen to anything the guy from Zynga has to say!

 

The President is holding a powwow with fifteen leading figures in the tech industry, and somehow the head of Zynga got on the list. This sounds terrible because it is. The purpose for the roundtable is for the White House to get opinions on how to correct HealthCare.gov and deal with the NSA. So, it’s smart to ask the advice of people like Tim Cook of Apple and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook. 

But the CPO of a company that carved out the manipulative social game market and hooked millions of listless clickers on raising virtual ears of corn? Unless Obama is planning to implement Farmville’s friend referral system for government-sponsored healthcare, or lure international terrorists with a banally cute contraband-trading clickathon, this can do no good. 

(img via NY Post's wordpress)

The 10 worst games of 2013, according to Greenlight Gold

You've gotta take out the brain. 

With the new virtual reality category on Steam, VR is officially a thing

A new category has appeared on Steam, bearing the words “VR support.” Now that virtual reality is a separate entity in the database, maybe this means we’ll be seeing some made-from-scratch VR games soon. 

When the current wave of virtual reality first gained momentum with the Oculus Rift, it was very much a do-it-yourself sort of experiment, much like Silicon Valley’s early days, which grew out of the HP Garage. We saw a lot of hacks that brought the tech up to speed so that you could shoot marines and drive tractor trailers in 3D, or 4D, or however many dimensions virtual reality exists in. 

As of now, the four games in this newfound category weren’t explicitly developed for the virtual realm, but were adopted. They’re basically experiences you can get elsewhere positioned closer to your face. There’s the forever-popular shooter Team Fortress 2; the moon rover sim Lunar Flight; the mecha-piloting space shooter Strike Suit Zero; and the zombie surviv-alypse No More Room in Hell. This is a good start, but we’re anxious to see what gaming with goggles will become once it breaks out of its shell. 

(img via Road to Virtual Reality)

We're celebrating the end of 2013!

It's the end of another year! And we're celebrating it the only way people with our unique dispositions know how to: By quantifying it in a series of lists that we probably should have not spent as much time thinking about as we did, but were also powerless to stop!

Next week, we'll take a breather and reflect with a series of more thoughtful essays. For now, take a look at these lists!

(Mouseover images to see the links.) 

Bounden for mobile will get you close, whether you can dance or not

For me to dance requires a good-looking partner and a blood-alcohol-level high above the legal limit. That, or a game that cajoles me to cut a rug by placing my fingers on an iPhone. Bounden, coming to mobile devices in 2014, intends to enlighten wallflowers like me with the rhythmical movement to music. 

The game, billed as a “mix of Twister and ballet,” is played by two players, both holding onto the same piece of electronic equipment, who, acting together, tilt the phone in such a way that little orbs on the screen move into a circle. Do this with grace and you’ll soon find yourself swinging and swooping in one another’s arms. In fact, the studio hired a professional choreographer from the Dutch National Ballet to ensure the authenticity of the dance moves.  

This is great if you're in the market for a dancing coach. But it also seems destined to be a genuinely fun game in its own right. Bounden is made by Game Oven, the small studio known for games such as Fingle, a suggestive iPad app played cooperatively while touching fingers, which, as I learned the hard way, should not be played with undesirable strangers who likely haven’t showered for the duration of the game convention you’re attending. That lesson probably goes for their dancing game, as well as almost everything else in life, really.

The best games of 2013 that weren’t released in 2013

Like new!

Drakengard 3 looks like more Nier, and here's why that's a great thing

When high-definition gaming had become predictable, Nier was a breath of fresh air. The story of a strongman in search of a cure for his terminally-ill daughter was touching, experimental, and weird, an action game that wasn’t afraid to try things, like interactive fiction. But with the closure of its developer Cavia, it looked like Nier was sadly no more. 

The thing that's occasionally forgotten about Nier is that it was actually a spin-off from the sporadic-but-quietly-beloved series Drakengard, which has its origins way back in the days of the PlayStation 2. And well, well. Look what we have here. The third Drakengard, or Drag-On Dragoon 3, which is actually a prequel, is being released this week in Japan, and should be headed to the West next year. The series is being kept alive by its creator Takamasa Shiba, who’s joined forces with Access Games, which seems like a great fit, as they are the team who brought us the offbeat, Lynchian Deadly Premonition. 

The trailer, ahem, advertisement movie, looks great, and I hear it's everything you could possibly want from a Drakengard title: a woman with an orchid for one eye, a dragon who speaks in a shrill register, and a Japanese lady singing in English. It looks to be surprisingly well-produced, too, which is nice considering that Nier felt like it petered out halfway through, when the studio lost funding. 

The top 10 worst buzzwords of 2013

Let’s start with “drivatar” and go from there.

The outdoorsy Eidolon is more stunning than actual nature

One of the best things about artistic expression on the Internet is that cool games come out of nowhere, like western Washington. 

Actually we don’t know where Ice Water Games—the startup studio behind the misty, scenic Eidolon—is from, but the Pacific Northwest is the location for their game about venturing through computer-generated forests. 

The game has sort of a Planet Earth vibe, but also reminds me of Proteus, with big blocky polygons representing towering hemlocks, and streaks of wan light glowing in the smoky distance. As I look out the window at the sunlight and realize that this is another day spent hunched over my keyboard, I can totally appreciate a game about getting back to nature.

Candy Box clones demonstrate ASCII is ready for a comeback

Candy Box was a wonderful joke. It had a small but influential portion of the Internet wondering how a game that uses keyboard symbols for graphics could be playable, much less awesome. Candy Box 2’s punchline was self-referential: how could a game that was a joke justify a sequel? It, too, was inexplicably awesome. The thing was these games were good inspite of their feigned badness. Thus begun ASCII art's improbable comeback. 

Since then we’ve seen more than a few copycats, and The Gold Factory is the latest. Not much is known about who created it other than he or she frequents Reddit and that they borrowed some of their ASCII clouds from GeoCities, which seems like a haven for ASCII. 

The first thing you notice is that The Gold Farm pretty much looks and plays just like Candy Box. This is a missed opportunity. A quick history lesson will show you that ASCII is more than just ASCII. What we see in games like Candy Box and its imitators is known as the “Oldskool” style, with Candy Box particularly indebted to the work of the punch-card artist Arambilet. But surprisingly there is much more to the field of ASCII: Newskool, ANSI, As-Pixel, Block ASCII, 4-color ASCII. Not to mention “ASCII pr0n” and those elaborate renderings of Che Guevara. All I’m saying is ASCII is ripe for an explosion.