Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 482

Need For Speed Rivals turned me into a feckless asshole

It’ll do the same to you, too.

In the 3DS's virtual Louvre, the tour guide is the art

Once upon a time in the late aughts, Nintendo had a dream that the DS would be used for any number of non-gaming extracurricular activities: ordering beers at Seattle Mariner home games, touring feudal rock gardens in Osaka; and ogling the Venus de Milo at the Louvre. 

The idea with the Louvre in particular is that instead of an audio tour, Nintendo supplies an audio-video tour, with a map, in 3D. The app gives you access to artworks in ways you wouldn’t otherwise have, such as viewing sculptures from overhead, or zooming in on the hairline cracks and fine textures of the Mona Lisa. 

This high-tech development in the art world was news last year, but now Nintendo has made the virtual tour available to any lover of art on the 3DS eShop. This is curious as it puts traditional art in the arena with the emergence of purely digital exhibits, such as “Plastic, Yet Still In-Between” by Andrew Benson, which uses the WASD keys to navigate.

This raises a thorny question. Certainly in digital exhibits navigation is a part of the experience. And we know from playing games that it’s all about the interaction. With the virtual Louvre, the art is just representations of famous paintings, but could the tour guide itself be the art? Okay, just forget that wormhole and go play the thing already.

Shenmue gets GDC postmortem, continues Dreamcast's jolly stroll into immortality

Yu Suzuki is scheduled to give a postmortem of Shenmue at the next Game Developers Conference in March. PlayStation 4 mastermind Mark Cerny will be translating for Suzuki. These postmortems are normally fascinating: developers cut like a flaming hot sword through the typical piles of marketing bullshit and speak really candidly about why they made the decisions they did. It's the sort of insight almost never offered before a game actually comes out. 

What's really interesting about the Shenmue postmortem in general is how nicely it slots alongside the ongoing reevaluation of the Dreamcast. Shenmue was intended as the system's crowning achievement but it was a coldly divisive game, demanding hours and hours of patience from players who were only starting to move out of the 16-bit universe. The system itself famously crashed hard and forced Sega out of the hardware game permanently.

But maybe they were just dropping the mic? Shenmue's open world and unyielding mechanics have aged nicely in critics' memories, as have before-their-time online efforts like Phantasy Star Online and Quake III Arena. Even oddities like Seaman and Segagaga have developed cult followings. (And do not even get me started on Virtua Tennis, still the best sports game ever made.) Edge recently named it the tenth greatest console of all time, and Zoya Street's excellent Dreamcast Worlds (which you can buy in this StoryBundle! [plug]) dives even deeper into its legacy. For all its failures, the system has sort of turned into a console version of the Pixies, if not the Velvet Underground. Not everyone had a Dreamcast, but it seems like everyone who did became a developer.

Unsurprisingly, Jonathan Blow hates Sony’s SmartWig

And who can blame him? The oxymoronic device which Sony has patented is a toupee that sends “tactile feedback” to your cerebral cortex when you, say, receive an email, or an important text. The hypothetical mane would be equipped with a variety of sensors, and possibly GPS, a point-and-click camera, a laser-pointer (potentially awesome for blinding others when negotiations aren’t going your way), and will conveniently detect ultrasonic frequencies. The news caused Blow to sarcastically tweet: 

The dawn of wearable computing is upon us, but it’s important for developers of such things to show some discretion and ask themselves this question: What is this aiming for? Computational fashion like HeartSync—the future-chic corsets that exchange color based on your heart rate—is not very useful, but fashionable and cool. Wearable technology like Google Glass: not very fashionable, but potentially very useful. We don’t necessarily need things like SmartWig that occupy the middle ground by not doing anything particularly useful or looking cool. That is, unless it comes in Matthew McConaughey hair!

Tearaway is a warm hug for the digital age

It also sets a precedent for what a Vita game can and should be.

Playlist 11/27: Drei makes shapes play nice, Stick It to the Man wigs out, and Super Mario 3D World is a blast of joy

Have a great holiday!

Check out this sweet bundle for a great collection of videogame writing

The StoryBundle is a collection of outstanding zines, magazines, guides, and even poems about videogames. And we’re not just saying that because we’re among them. (Issues number 1 and 7 are included.) We’re seriously honored to be featured alongside great writing about games such as Rise of the Videogame Zinesters by Anna Antrophy and A Slow Year (actually a game, not a book, but still literary) by Ian Bogost. So if you like to read and love games, or vice versa, there’s no humanly possible way that you’ll be disappointed.

Gaming on mass transportation may get a lot more tactile

Designer Thomas Wing-Evans created a way for strangers to play tic-tac-toe with each other during train rides.