Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 480

Resogun is shiny but it is not new

Sort of like Regis Philbin’s face, really.

This new Minecraft de-make looks just like Minecraft, but what doesn't

Simplifying the vastness of the Minecraft universe to 252 bytes seems impossible, but French developer and designer p01 did just that with “Minicraft.” p01 has officially beaten Minecraft creator Notch at shrinking his own game. (Notch's own version of minicraft was 4gb.)

Minecraft isn’t the only game p01 has reduced into an impossibly small file size: “Wolfensteiny” is a tribute to Wolfenstien 3D. Oddly enought, it looks a lot like "Minicraft." Is that because the games and their tiny demo counterparts are actually alike, or has Minecraft infiltrated our consciousness so much that anything "blocky" resembles Minecraft? Either way, p01's compact visualizations are impressively ingenious. 

Just Cause 2 multiplayer arrives just in time to clown GTA Online

Just Cause 2 exists on the periphery for a lot people. It’s a three-year-old game that, similar to Minecraft or Skyrim, you tend to hear about more than actually play. Its community gets up to all sorts of crazy shit but it's a small minority that actually gets to participate in any of the group formation skydives, land/sea/air races, or road trip with hundreds of other Ricos. The barrier to entry is especially high for Just Cause 2 because the game doesn’t support an online mode. The multiplayer aspect of the game is entirely controlled by a mod that, like some sort of digital Whack-a-Mole, has been popping in and out of public beta for more than a year. No longer!

The developers are planning to release it onto Steam by the end of this year, where it will work with friend lists, have its own community workshop, and pull all the other tricks that come with Steam integration. In a way, what happened to Avalanche Studios’ Just Cause 2 is what Rockstar wants to happen with GTA V’s so-far lackluster multiplayer. With the recent unveiling of GTA V's content creator, it seems like Rockstar is just handing the tools over to their players and saying “Here, find a way to make it more fun.” Avalanche didn’t even have to ask.

Boston’s development scene spans the history of videogames

We talk to devs from Harmonix, Moonshot and the MIT Media Labs.

Are Romance sims the next Japanese gaming import?

A new article in Edge shows that, in Japan, there has been a rise in the amount of dating games played by women. What's interesting about this to us isn't just the demographic research that backs it up (some 49% of unmarried women in Japan do not have a domestic partner), but what it says for romance in games in general. 

These aren’t your typical nude-anime-girl dating sims aimed at otaku. Otome (or maiden) sim games are gaining popularity with professional women in their 20 and 30s who desire more than the simulated sex of those games. The narrative of these games varies from madcap wedding plots to scandelous samurai rendezvous in feudal Japan. But not all are typical warrior-meets-girl love stories. Ore Pri (or I Am Princess) is a popular game series made by a female developer, in which the characters are all homosexual men who partake in erotic activies such as cross-dressing. And Ore Pri's female production team is not the exception in otome games; the field is attacting a large amount of women developers. 

Could these romance sims gain an audience in the west, since women here have also picked careers over husbands? These games eliminate the unpleasant and unpredictable aspects of romance, providing an enjoyable story that doesn’t require an emotional investment, much like soap operas or romance novels. Given the popularity of these other forms of media, there is a definite audience for women-oriented romance sims in the US.

And anyway, love stories aside, some 45% of gamers are female. Any move toward games made by women for women is good as far as we're concerned. 

Here are a bunch of indie games apparently worth $1

A website called Shinyloot.com is spewing out indie games today for $1 apiece. These are, generally, of the XBLIG or Greenlight Gold level of artistic merit: either a jagged rip-off of a preexisting game or an attempt at something bigger marred by colored-pencil artwork. We bring this up not to shit on the games, but to ask: why does this exist?

We've all felt the tug of the Steam sale or the Humble Bundle, wherein we stockpile unplayed games that, more often than not, remain unplayed. This has become such a phenomenon that people have created calculators that measure how many Steam games you own but haven't played. Over at Gamasutra, Ian Bogost has written about the nature of the bundle. And while he offers a bunch of lenses (the bundle as patronage, as promotional campaign, as advocacy tool), I think he most convincingly portrays them as a sort of cereal fun pack, a bunch of samples that we breeze through and then discard.

So what do we make of the basement-tier indie game fire sale? Continuing the cereal metaphor, it's maybe a brown paper bag filled with random cereals: you don't really know what you're getting, you don't really expect to enjoy it, but hey, it's there and it's cheap. Sometimes, I guess, you just want a bunch of goddamn cereal. 

Image via Lara604

A brief overview of The Wrong, an art expo that exists entirely online

Explore the final frontier of art without ever putting on your pants. 

Why Call of Duty: Ghosts and Gravity share more than just outer space

Director Alfonso Cuaron explains the lasting significance of "moments" on screen

Proust iOS game brings the infamous questionnaire to the Snapchat masses

Do New Yorkers like sex or tacos more?

The Long Dark brings Canada to videogames

How a group of veteran devs are forging a new path for cultural pride. Also involved: bears.