Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 475

The real reason we’re all still playing Mario

What Miyamoto has in common with Walter Lippmann and Don Draper.

Rock and roll will never die, and neither will the first-person shooter

In an interview today with Wired, John Carmack, the programmer of Doom and grandpapa of the first-person shooter, had the following to say about the longevity of the battle-worn genre. 

I think that first-person shooter is a stable genre that’s going to be here forever, just like there are going to be driving games forever. There’s something just intrinsically rewarding about turning around a corner and shooting at something.

This is similar to the old adage about rock and roll never dying. While there will always a place for a kick-ass four- (or five-) man bands like The Strokes, rock has evolved from its early days of rockabilly into a wide breadth of musical styles, from black metal to shoegaze. 

Though the virtual shotgun has only been around for a relatively short period when compared to the Stratocaster, we’re already starting to see the conventions of the shooter being reconfigured into entirely different types of games. The most obvious example is Portal, in which the stereotype of the big-f’ing-gun was rethought, instead using the action of shooting to bend physics and solve puzzles through space and time. 

The evolution of the first-person shooter can be seen in many titles since, from games that use guns to do the unexpected, like rotating planets in MirrorMoon, to games that ditch the guns altogether, but stick with the input conventions, like Gone Home. The FPS may never die, but it won’t be the same forever. 

(image via Tonedeaf)

Hello Games said the "p-word" in front of a nationally syndicated audience

Chances are you were too busy taking in the oceans of stars to notice the talking point of No Man’s Sky, the recently unveiled star-fighter from the studio that has brought us outstanding little gems about an Evel Knievel named Joe Danger. Maybe you were half paying attention, not knowing what you were about to digest. But there was a span of a few seconds when developer Hello Games really wanted you to know that this game is (wait for it) procedural. 

The typeface flashing on-screen goes on to explain how “every leaf, tree, bird, fish, rock, ocean, cloud, ruin, star, sun, galaxy, [and] planet [is] procedural,” which I must admit tickles the part of my brain that wants the holodeck to be real. But I had to wonder how many people really care what the term "procedural" means or is.

I suppose it’s easy enough to infer, given the context, that “procedural” means that many facets of the game are not man-made, but automatically generated by artificial intelligence. I know that because I write about videogames all day, and you know that because you are here reading. You and I also know that procedural games like FTL and Spelunky can be exceptional. But is the tech that underlies the experience what we really want to talk about when admiring these works? 

What’s really fascinating about procedurally generated content is the possibility of endless discovery, i.e. that these games can be reshaped into an unfamiliar figure each time. Sean Murray of Hello Games got it right on stage, without resorting to the word "procedural." “We wanted to make a game about exploration,” he said. “If you can see it, you can walk there.”

DataJack recreates the heyday of MS-DOS gaming

Ah, the library!

Why the Telltale's Game of Thrones series has been ten years in the making

Coming in for a King's Landing.

Upcoming adventure game Monument Valley looks beautiful, Swedish

A fanciful new trailer for the lovely-looking Monument Valley has been released, and its about as charming as flipping through the kids’ section in the Ikea catalog, which is to say it’s pretty charming! The crux of the game seems to be rotating and revolving blocks into impossible orientations so that a little guy in a pointy hat can climb to the top of the tower. To our unknowing eyes, the games seems to be a cross-pollination of the brain-punching puzzler Miegakure and the delightful illustrations of the games of Damp Gnat (whose iPhone game Icycle is candy to our eyes). If you haven’t heard of the developer ustwo, that’s because they work mainly with interface design, which is definitely a plus when making a gorgeous game like this one. 

The best quotes from the NSA World of Warcraft surveillance papers

The Guardian has published a document from the Edward Snowden leak that shows that the NSA has been playing a lot of WoW to fight terrorism. Yes, you read that right. They’ve been doing some elven espionage in hopes of catching international scumbags. Apparently, someone at DOJ has been reading Neal Stephenson. 

It seems that national security agencies became aware of online games a few years ago and decided that they posed a risk to the nation’s safety. So they had agents infiltrate Second Life, World of Warcraft, and Xbox Live, despite having no evidence that the bad guys were using these services for communication. It doesn’t sound like they’ve turned up any. The surveillance operation has so far netted at least one lead for fraudulent credit card usage, but it seems that no major conspiracies have been uprooted, though agents have been playing plenty of games. Where do I apply for this position?

We thought it’d be creepy, funny and severely disappointing to look a bit closer at some quotes from the anonymous government papers: 

Terrorists use online games—but perhaps not for their amusement. . . Al-Qaida terrorist target selectors and … have been found associated with Xbox Live, Second Life, World of Warcraft, and other GVEs [games and virtual environments] . . . Other targets include Chinese hackers, an Iranian nuclear scientist, Hizballah, and Hamas members.

Can we really take seriously any terrorist organization prancing around as pandas in utility kilts? 

[The GCHQ had] successfully been able to get the discussions between different game players on Xbox Live.

Apparently, homophobic 10-year-olds dropping the f-bomb is valuable intel to the British government.

[WoW’s economy is] essentially unregulated [and so] will almost certainly be used as a venue for terrorist laundering and will, with certainty, be used for terrorist propaganda and recruitment.

Thus wrote an intelligence officer in the throes of a crippling World of Warcraft addiction.

You should go and read the entire post at The Guardian.

Skullgirls gets heart ripped out by Konami, continues beleaguered existence

Game development doesn't have enough drama to make a good TV show, normally. But, if you forced me to make a show for TNT (oh alright, if you insist), I would pull inspiration from the fighting game Skullgirls developer: Lab Zero. Just this last week their publisher Konami, without telling Lab Zero, requested that the game be delisted from PSN and XBLA. The game is slated to be taken down before the month is out, but there is a chance that Lab Zero can recover by using another publisher. Failing that, they can try again next year. The thing is, this obstacle is just the latest in a Homeric odyssey of ups and downs for the developer.

Skullgirls started off as the product of two guys, who pitched it to several companies before getting picked up by a development company called Reverge Labs. Eventually two co-publishers jumped aboard, Autumn and Konami, and things looked hunky dory for the devs. The game was well-receieved by critics and tournament-types. Then, like some sort of errant kraken attack, Autumn got caught in a legal brawl about a completely unrelated game and couldn't continue funding Skullgirls. Piling one tragedy upon another, most of the team got laid off from Reverge Labs. They managed to reform the same team and continue to work with Autumn under the moniker Lab Zero.

Still, they were mostly moneyless. Lab Zero ran an Indiegogo page that raised almost six times more than they had asked, spurning them to plan a whole slew of new content for Skullgirls. Back on top! Of course, around this time news about the problematic relationship between Lab Zero/Autumn and Konami began to surface, and last month Lab Zero announced they were in the process of ceasing relations with Konami. That brings us to present day, where Lab Zero finally made it home from their odyssey only to find Konami is burning their house down. Anybody got Michael Chiklis on the rolodex so we can make this happen? 

How furries wound up in an art gallery in Chelsea

Jon Rafman's collaboration with Oneohtrix Point Never scrapes the far reaches of the Internet. 

New trailer for The Division shows off a bunch of really boring stuff

Here's the thing: The Division looks great. I mean that it literally looks very pretty and that it also looks like it might be a really interesting game. Ubisoft is pretty good at this stuff.

The problem is that you'd never guess it from the trailer that dropped over the weekend, which carefully dodges saying anything remotely interesting about the game to instead spout a bunch of technical crap at you. Volumetric lighting? Check. Dynamic day/night cycle? It's here! Talk of immersion? You've come to the right place. 

Why is a trailer like this okay? It'd be like taking out a three-minute advertisement during the Super Bowl to explain the cinematography of the next Avengers movie. It's unfair to demand that all trailers speak to us in the exact manner we want, but surely boring into the game engine is the most, well, boring manner imaginable to drum up enthusiasm for a game.