Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 474

A look back at the last great console war

“Genesis does what Nintendon’t.”

This week in glitches: go up north in GTA5, and witness the rapture in Assassin's Creed 4

Keep open worlds weird. 

Samurai Gunn looks minimalist and plays fantastic

Well-placed strokes are an important thing in Samurai Gunn, the new, super-fun, four-player fighter for PC that dabbles pixel art with Kurosawa. That applies not only to strategy in a game where one hit will kill you, but also to the game’s visual flair. A horizontal slash scores the arena like a rice paper screen being sliced when you jab your opponent. The effect of chaining together several of these takedowns is striking. It makes you feel like a badass. It’s stylish. 

It’s true that we’ve seen more than a few of these lo-fi fighters, as the local multiplayer scene has been making a comeback. A thing you find with the ones that rise to the top is that they make bold stylistic choices. You see this with Towerfall’s bright, high-contrast cisterns. You see it with STARWHAL’s airbrushed marine life and light cycle grids. Though not technically a fighter, you see this with Hokra’s field of Mondrian cubes. That anyone can pick up and play these games is part of their appeal, but the simplicity of play demands a hot art direction. Watch and see.

Toca Boca’s Science Lab brings Swedish design sensibilities to the classroom

When I was in school, the periodic table was distinctly un-fun—a photocopied chart of elements and atomic numbers to be memorized in rote fashion. Toca Boca’s Science Lab for iPad, out tomorrow, looks like the greatest argument for the gamification of learning to date. (Putting aside how problematic the term gamification has become.) The scientific virtue of the interface is that it illustrates elemental reactions in a playful way. These far-too-cute Swedish embodiments of solids, liquids, and gases will have you bogarting your niece’s or nephew’s tablet, even as grown adults. That is one charming tungsten!

Desktop Dungeons brings the metagame full circle

Do we always need progress?

Dex proves that with a trench coat and shades any game can be cyberpunk

Even if you haven't heard of it, you know how Dex goes. A police siren wails in a rainy back alley. Purple neon letters carve through an infinitesimally gray city precinct. You used to be somebody until your memory implants were fried while hacking into the firewall of a sentient AI—a setup, you claim. Now you haunt the junk-sick streets pawning your kidneys in a trench coat and a pair of black sunglasses, or something. 

Dex, by Dreadlocks (not from Zion, but the Czech Republic), is a side-scrolling beat’em-up that has raked in a fair sum of money on Kickstarter, and, you guessed it, it’s a cyberpunk game. While the game looks decently entertaining and it’s hard to resist the allure of cyberpunk—because it’s cyberpunk after all—I have to question if games are overexposing the console cowboy. 

Last year’s surge in popularity of cyberpunk games was a godsend for fans of a genre on the wane, peaking when CD projekt RED announced Cyberpunk 2077, but now that a spate of games with pretty much the exact same theme have come to fruition, it seems like overkill. If nothing else, the resurgence shows that, like metal and D&D sword and sorcery, cyberpunk is resilient and here to stay. 

Photography game FO/CUS rethinks the aim of lifeless shooters

When a guy like John Carmack says that the first-person shooter will never die, it’s pretty much gospel. But FO/CUS by mindful xp is a prime example of how conventions of the shooter can be flipped into something non-categorizable and special. You can play it here.

Made for the 7 Day FPS competition but not finished in time, FO/CUS retools the function of zooming typically seen when using a rifle to snipe an unwitting hooligan in army fatigues. Instead of capping a fool, the player surreally zooms in with a camera lens on itty-bitty pixels, which happen to be microscopic people living in their bedroom.

The game is a one-trick-pony, for sure, but the brilliance in these interactions is that it makes clear the limitless possibilities in games. Every tiny point could hold a small organism with a life and story of its on, instead of the red dot of the laser scope flickering across a vital point. The subversive nature of the game reminds me of SUPERHOT, which, by tweaking a few constructs of the shooter opens an utterly unique possibility space. These games remind us that with games everything is permitted—and that the FPS as we know it is just the starting point. 

It sounds like Valve are working on a brain-imagery projection device

Valve’s Gabe Newell, looking and sounding a bit like Jerry Garcia, recently fielded questions from students who are learning to code. While the Google Hangout session was fairly standard fare for those familiar with the company’s m.o.—the internet upturning traditional economic models, the unorthodox work ethos of a freewheeling tech company, the one-off beard-stroke—there was an amazing nugget in the mix!

Halfway through, almost rambling to himself, Newell brought up some newfangled Neuromancer tech:

Our ability to talk directly to people's brains is getting better a lot faster and a lot sooner than I expected. There’s research going on right now to fully generate images inside of people's brains. . . It’s not just “Hey, cool, I’ve got a VGA connector on the back of my skull.” It opens up fairly science-fictiony abilities fairly soon in terms of the subjective experience you can create for people. It’s surprising that its happening at the rate that it currently is. 

What bedevilment is this? As you know, Valve are mad tinkerers of the videogame industry, refining virtual reality, experimenting with perspiration to measure biometric feedback, magically combining gamepads and mice. But this brain-imagery projection device make us wonder what else Valve has up their sleeve. Will we be playing Half-Life 3 in our minds? How would that even work? We’d love to see a prototype. 

Additional reporting by David Shimomura

Assassin's Creed 4 lets you play as a female pirate, finally

Blackbeard’s Wrath (absolutely nothing to do with Montezuma's revenge) is the multiplayer content for Assassin’s Creed 4 that’s out today, Dec. 10th. Among its cast of three heroic scalawags is The Orchid. Though her back story goes into Templars and the Qing dynasty and some stuff about how she balances her mind and body through the blade of her katana, what’s important here is that she is a female, and you can play as her.

While this is a step in the right direction for female representations in games, I wonder when Ubisoft will have the gumption to make a female the main character. As it stands in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, the women warriors are regulated to the spin-off. It’s true that Aveline de Grandpré was the starlet of Assassin’s Creed: Liberation, but her story was secondary to Connor Kenway’s. Here, it’s the same thing: playing as a woman is optional, and Blackbeard is the focal point. 

Ubisoft may be gunshy about putting a female in the leading role of their bread-and-butter franchise after doing so with Beyond Good and Evil, which flopped despite being excellent. But that was a decade ago and times have changed. As we saw with the makeover of Lara Croft in the latest Tomb Raider, games are capable of getting women right and selling big. Isn’t it time we saw a female lead in a mainline Assassin’s Creed game? 

Oculus Rift installation lets bikers cycle through virtual worlds

Hop across buildings or fly through the sky in an environment without limits.