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PAUSE: In time for Valentine’s Day, a DIY pixel-y pop-up heart card.
Get the directions here. -Jamin Warren [via CMYBacon]
Kill Screen Staff
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Are games entering a Romantic era? A game based on Chopin’s Preludes thinks so.
In an interview yours truly did for Gamasutra, I spoke with experimental game maker Jake Elliott about Chopin’s Preludes, which were the source of inspiration for his short game Ruins. Jake explained to me how games might be entering a Romantic period. The Preludes are really expressive. That’s ano
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A shocking look at soccer’s dystopian future?
For years Major League Soccer has been trying to think up ways to drum up interest in the world’s most popular sport. Think no more MLS, because this youtube clip might be the ticket. Nothing about the game would have to change: attach shock training collars onto everybody on the field (including th
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Do Atari 2600s dream of electric poetry? Yes, they do.
Nothing is 0k is a program that allows Atari 2600 consoles to write poetry. This is a substantial feat, considering the machine only has 4 kilobytes of memory. The way this is done is rather geeky, but also very cool. The machine spits out a pattern of shapes and colors, as seen above, which can the
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Vicarious Play: Watching football requires similar mental activities to playing it.
Gridiron fans aren’t normally considered Mensa material, but becoming immersed in a game of football provides plenty of mental stimulation. When a fan watches a game, as one University of Chicago study showed, the same areas of the brain are activated as would be if that person were playing. This en
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War Games: This is why people are uneasy about drones.
I got a chance to play around with a quadrotor drone in an empty parking lot on New Years Eve. What’s the big deal, I thought. Yeah, it was cool that I could control the drone with an iPad using virtual thumbsticks, exactly like I’d play a first-person shooter. But the drone was pretty flimsy, it go
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PAUSE: What do books do at night? Play Space Invaders (among other things).
Via This is Colossal, a piece of stop-motion whimsy. Keep an eye out for the Space Invaders plug: After organizing their own bookshelf earlier this year, Sean Ohlenkamp and wife Lisa re-doubled their efforts for Type Books in Toronto. After several sleepless nights of animating with a crew of over 2
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Cheat Sheet 2/7/12: Journey’s status, Psychonauts 2, and THQ moving forward
It’s that time again. Here’s today’s wrap-up of mainstream gaming news. – 3 years of development later, much-anticipated downloadable game, Journey, is done and will hopefully be out soon. – Minecraft developer Markus Persson aka Notch, wants to fund Psychonauts 2. – After some pretty serious finan
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Does gaming help us relive our adolescence?
When I was sixteen, I got a speeding ticket. I knew I shouldn’t have been driving sixty-five miles per hour in a thirty-five mile per hour zone, but on the other hand how awesome was it (until I got pulled over)? Pretty awesome (until I got pulled over)! Wall Street Journal explains: Recent studies
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Debuting at the Super Bowl, "Slacklining" is Super Mario 3D Land IRL.
If you watched the Super Bowl on Sunday, you undoubtedly saw some Will Ferrell lookalike jumping up and down on a rope in what might have been the craziest moment of a Super Bowl halftime show full of very crazy moments. It turns out that guy has a name, and it is not Ron Burgandy. Instead, it’s And
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Heads up gamemakers, Room 237 reveals the benefits of allowing others to reinterpret your work.
In his review of Sundance film Room 237, Slashfilm’s Germain Lussier details how the film serves as a retrospective on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The film portrays several different readings of its source material which range from almost plausible to hysterically absurd. The way the alternative
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How and why do we remember places in games the way we do?
Neil Burgess’s TED talk on how the brain processes space is a fascinating look into the machinations of our minds but also treads some familiar ground. Burgess introduces the main component of how the brain processes and remembers space—the hippocampus—and then explains that each individual neuron w