Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 481

You have already played The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

You have always been playing it.

Kick back and watch Mario take a trip into hallucinogenic hell

"I can't make him look normal guys, something tells me it's gonna get worse," Vinesauce intones at the start of this corrupted Mario 64 video, and in this prediction he is correct. This thing belongs in the glitch hall of fame. Mario's big beautiful face, at the outset, appears to have been frozen just moments after eating a hand grenade; as the game begins, we settle onto a letter from a green-skinned Princess Peach. 

The audio-visual nightmare continues through the floor-boards of the castle, into great caverns of intersecting color, down a hallway composed of Mario's mustache repeated ad infinitum. Mario himself loses limbs, flips sidewise, adopts glowing immortal eyes and occasionally bursts open with beams of color. It's made via a speical corrupter (available for public use!) that works like a bizarro Game Genie, pitting the game's code against itself. "This is what a clown's septic tank looks like after years of partying way too hard," Vinesauce says at one point, and yeah: something like that. 

Black Friday is a lot less stressful when you let computers do your shopping

A bot that buys random stuff from Amazon, Darius Kazemi’s Random Shopper was a stroke of demented genius. Zazemi programmed the automated software to crawl the pages of the online retailer and spend fifty dollars on physical media at random each month, which is ironic in all kinds of ways.

On Black Friday 2013, Kazemi is letting you use his fancy shopping algorithm for $400 a pop. The limited edition “print” includes a hundred bucks worth of random books, CDs, and DVDs purchased using the software and a certificate signed by the artist himself. Since you’re likely to wind up with a Lionel Richie album and a murder mystery paperback, you’re probably wondering why anyone would would do that. Kezemi puts it best:

Cabela’s African Adventures is a sinkhole of modern game design

I hate the games down in Africa.

Our favorite games on sale this Black Friday

The above image is either a scene from The Last of Us or from a Target earlier today. We’re not really sure. So we don’t blame you if you stayed snuggled in bed on Black Friday, avoiding the riots at your local electronics department. If you braved the cold and the inhumanity, more power to you. But for less motivated spendthrifts, there are still deals on games that we love to be had from the comfy of your fireplace. Here are our favorites. 

The Last of Us - $34.99 

Unexpectedly touching for a game about zombies, The Last of Us is dank and hopeless, but also uplifting. Its sound guru Phil Kovats told us, “There needed to be moments of hope and of horror, accomplishment and loss.” Perfect for Black Friday.

Read our interview.

Papers, Please - $4.99

This one might put a damper on your holiday spirit, but you can buy it on sale now, and play it Sunday evening, when you’re dreading going back to work. Look at it this way: at least your job isn’t as bad as a morally-conflicted immigration officer’s in the Caucasus. 

Our review.

Cards Against Humanity - $30.00

Cards Against Humanity actually went up five dollars for Black Friday instead of offering a discount, which gives you an idea of what to expect from this hilarious, misanthropic card game.

Read our review.

Gunpoint - $3.39

In our review of this stunning, side-scrolling, stealth game, Stephanie Carmichael wrote, “Guns are not the point. It’s clever: in the midst of America’s firearms obsession, Francis creates a game about them that facilitates and encourages better solutions than shooting.” 

Read it here.

The Dream Machine - £4.99

Stop-motion and surrealism are cobbled together in this creepy point-and-click adventure about moving into a new house and stumbling upon a portal to the beyond.

Our review.

Videogame installation combines physical and digital play

RoRoD is a version of the classic brick-eliminating Breakout game that requires players to bounce a real ball against a digital display.

What the hell is Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 Full Burst?

Non-fans need not apply. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

We're taking the day off to catch up on videogames and maybe talk to our families. (We're still alive, Moms.) If you've got some time to kill, may we recommend diving into one of these? 

We'll be back in action tomorrow. See ya then!

STARWHAL is the euphoric fighting game with candy-colored whales

At the end of a long day, sometimes you really need some STARWHAL. You simply can’t beat the therapeutic qualities of a rainbow of orcas spiraling end over end in a futile attempt to jab each other with sparkling magic wands. Or are they unicorn horns? 

To quote its Kickstarter page, “STARWHAL will change your life,” and I believe it, as it has raked in a number of awards from prestigious independent game events. Plus, my editor tells me it’s great, and he generally has good opinions about games. Right now STARWHAL exists as one badass arcade cabinet, and on the PC, but the team is doing a Kickstarter in hopes of bringing it to PlayStation 4 and Wii U. They also want to add new costumes, so you can dress your levitating whale to impress. You can't say no to that. 

Steam reviews may become the AMAs of game criticism

One thing we’ve seen since Steam user-reviews have gone live is a onslaught of indie game developers asking for their Twitter followers to rate their games, as you can see:

This is amazing because, whereas large teams dread being reviewed by reviewers-at-large on the aggregate site Metacritic, here we see small developers encouraging their fans to give them reviews, good or bad. This planned community is an utopia where creators and players sing together, holding hands. What a wonderful world that would be!

The idea is similar in execution to Reddit’s AMAs, where forum users get the chance to go online with game developers and ask them anything. It’s an interview by way of the crowd. In encouraging an open dialog between creators and their fans, Valve is trying something similar, changing the rules of game reviews, getting reviewers out of the way. We hope in that healthy, communicative dreamland you'll still make time for humble old Kill Screen.

Additional reporting credit: Elyas Gorogo-Baker

[<a href="http://killscreendaily.com//storify.c..." target="_blank">View the story "Game Designers Who Really Really Want Your Steam Reviews" on Storify</a>]