Spring was intended to be a wonderful time of year. The snow newly-melted and the cherry trees in bloom, you are drawn out of your small desk space or dusty living room into more temperate air. But someone forgot to tell the I.R.S., who plopped the national tax deadline right in the middle of spring
In case you dismissed as outright lunacy BioWare’s facepalm-worthy decision to create a separate planet for gay and lesbian players in Star Wars: The Old Republic, queer game author Anna Anthropy has made a game to remind you of it. – – – The Hunt for the Gay Planet is a quick, quirky text adventur
Ever since Aristotle, the debates over how to classify things have been endless. Are house cats “useful” or “tame”? Is Makemake a planet? Are crappers sculptures? Is noise music? Are games where you walk around and explore a pastoral setting while interacting with an ethereal soundscape really games
Wednesday, the Polish developer CD Projekt RED announced The Witcher 3, the latest entry in their fantasy RPG series about a white-locked alchemist in a morally-ambivalent middle earth. But we’ve known it was coming since a week ago when some people on the internet found a secret message in the trai
Like any other movement or medium, games are defined by the norms. Tune in to a country music radio station (we’re not suggesting this at all, by the way) and you’re guaranteed to hear a steel guitar, vocals that sound more like yodeling, and at least four songs about America. Turn on the tube and y
Somehow a small miracle has happened and everybody loves Fire Emblem Awakening: critics and players, old fans and fans anew, the Americans and Japanese, me and Jon. The developers are especially elated to have it out the door. In a recent interview with the team by Nintendo President Iwata, there we
Remember XCOM? Of course you do. It was the surprisingly great reboot of the classic strategy game that had the gaming press in thrall last fall. Yannick wrote our stellar review of it, arguing, “whatever Firaxis managed to salvage from the wreckage of XCOM’s legacy, they turned into a surpassingly
“Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom,” the theologian Søren Kierkegaard famously wrote in his philosophical work The Concept of Anxiety. What he meant was this: because we are autonomous beings, having the ability to think for ourselves, we are prone to worrying over the choices we make. You could s
When I think of the future of maps, I think about my old road atlas, the large, accordion-folded sheet of paper of the Great State of Alabama, covered with county roads and highways and twisty rivulets and interstates like arteries, and how it has long been replaced by my G.P.S. But when Tom Harper,
The answer is a resounding maybe. Simon Parkin tackled the crucial issue in a timely article for Eurogamer. To prove that they do, he tracked down a gun-crazed kid in Illinois, a B.B. gun manufacturer who produces replicas of automatic weapons, a US Senator, an game developer who wished to remain an
Here at Kill Screen, we love a good sim. And not just nominal sims like SimCity and, well, The Sims. We pine for the realistic sim, the kind where you’re placed inside the cockpit of a Boeing 747, or behind the wheel of a tractor trailer crossing eighteen hundred miles of hinterland. Matthew Shaer’s
Oculus Rift, the internet’s favorite virtual reality headset peripheral, made a brief appearance on late night T.V. [http://www.latenightwithjimmyfallon.com/blogs/2013/01/joshua-topolsky-shows-jimmy/] last Thursday courtesy the Jimmy Fallon show. Glowing hands-on reports from CES 2013 [http://www.po
Jason Rohrer makes games about the most peculiar subjects: the West African diamond trade, recursive universes, dying and senescence. Now we can add crime and punishment to the list. The Castle Doctrine, Rohrer’s upcoming MMO about breaking into people’s houses, is truly one of the most seedy strate
The Beer Diaries (which you could easily mistake for ‘The Beard Diaries’ if you were reading the web address and looking at all the pictures of guys with buffalo beards) is a new web series by Gregory Zeschuk on the subject of craft beers. A founder of the development house responsible for the epic
Yeah, we kind of doubt it too. However, it could possibly go down as the best videogame-to-cinema adaptation yet. Furthermore, it could actually be good. This auspicious thought is inspired by the noted British director Duncan Jones having just signed on to direct Warcraft, the film based on Activis
In a highly informative article over at Slate, Chip Walter explains that the reason Homo sapiens outlasted other rival species from the genus Homo, like Neanderthals and those roguish hobbit people (seriously!), is that we have a prolonged childhood which allows us the time for rather frivolous but
Normally, RPGs are about building a party. You start off with, say, a country bumpkin whose destiny is to align seven crystals and save the world from ruin, but first you’ll need to recruit a ragtag group of warriors, white witches, black witches, pink witches, ninjas, robber-barons, bear-wrestlers,
In a harrowing tidbit of information that filled us and doubtlessly a few of our readers with existential questions, Hidetaka Miyazaki, the director of the widely praised Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls games, told reporters at Edge that he would have a very minimal role, a supervisory one, in the prod
Tutorials, those intolerable instances at the start of a game when we surrender our attention to scrupulous instruction on sense-dulling punctilio, aren’t fun. At best a banal evil, and at worst a reason to give up on a game altogether, they have a tendency to knock me out. Though I was initially ex
It’s confirmed. When kids today grow up and look back at the media they consumed as tots, they’ll think the same thing we did upon reexamining children’s classics such as Alice in Wonderland or the “Pink Elephants on Parade” singalong from Dumbo: “Whoa, that’s some seriously drugged-out stuff!” Don’
We just wrote about how SimCity, the world-famous simulation game that lets you manage a living breathing city, is an inspiration for a new era of interactive maps. Using notes from a knowledgable architect, Tested has broken down how the beta stacks up against the real-life process of planning and
It has been said that war is long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. So what goes on during the long boring parts? I always assumed idle minds at war were occupied by the endless shining of boots and smoky rounds of poker. Oh, but it’s so much unbelievably sexier. – – – As ear
Interviews with Jake Elliot, one of the easygoing chaps behind the serene and magically-real adventure game Kentucky Route Zero, always prove enjoyable. And I’m not just saying that because I happened to interview him before either! It’s because Jake is a down to earth guy with a broad range of inte
Ramsey Nasser of New York’s Eyebeam Art+Technology Center (no relation to Albert Ayler’s New York Eye And Ear Control, sorry) has created Alb, which is perhaps the first Arabic programming language. While I for one am excited by the prospect of replacing our banal and rather clunky Latin letters wit
