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We’re ok! Just a little wet.
No subways here in NYC and a lot of debris on the streets. Tom lost power and Joe has no internet. Mine is spotty, so apologies in advance for a light writing day!
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Chatting with Kepa Auwae, the man behind Punch Quest
Chances are if you see a Kill Screener on his or her phone in the office these days, they aren’t texting. They are playing Punch Quest, the free-to-play infinite PUNCHER. The point of the game is that stuff keeps getting in your way, and you keep punching it. In a way it’s like you are a quest, of p
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Tetris lets you feel like you’re tidying up, without actual tidying
Tetris has affects the human brain strangely, whether it’s with afterimages or blocking traumatic experiences. Tom Stafford at Mind Hacks theorizes that the appeal of Tetris lies in its continual presentation of unfinished tasks… much like popular RPGs, only without any pretenses. Tetris holds our a
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Identifying with a character is easy. Let’s create empathy in games
It is an inherent fact of games that the player will identify with the play-character; the act of playing literally requires it. Perhaps, though, it’s time to realize that creating characters to identify with and characters to empathize with are two hugely different things. Maciej Szczesnik, lead ga
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A year of memories turned into a video game
Open book. That is how we describe people who are easy to understand: they are easy to read, as it were. But perhaps that is an outdated expression and a videogame metaphor would be more apt? Alan Kwan, an artist of all trades, may have something we can work with. Early next year, [Kwan] plans to o
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This Halloween costume is strong to quite strong
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MIT Game Lab makes the theory of relativity into a game
Educational games are getting better. Instead of being interactive flash cards, they’ve become worlds where players can come to an understanding of real-life concepts. A Slower Speed of Light from the MIT Game Lab looks at what it would be like if you could walk at the speed of light. From their sit
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Lana Wachowski on how Dungeons and Dragons birthed the Matrix
The New Yorker goes deep on the Wachowski sibs as prep for their upcoming adaptation of Cloud Atlas. Fascinating little nugget buried below: It was around the time that Larry and Andy saw “2001” that they first directed together: on cassette tape, they read a play inspired by the “Shadow” comic book
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Hotline Miami dev helps pirates play his game
The postmodern mass-murder lark Hotline Miami is being pirated. Normally this wouldn’t be news, but it turns out the game’s developer provided the pirates with tech support. T.J. Hafter at PC Gamer found Jonatan Söderström leaving helpful comments on torrenting sites. Not only does Söderström (posti
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Kill Screen’s guide to Hurricane Sandy
Kill Screen HQ is boarded up. We’ve stocked up on beans, candles, masking tape and buoyant 16-bit cartridges, and two of every animal. It’s like Tokyo Jungle, but in Brooklyn! Lots of aspirational facial hair. At any rate, the big one is almost here. And this got us thinking about bad weather in vi
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We did not see this castaway simulator coming, but it is here.
As part of the Ludum Dare competition, animator Tom Campbell went all Tom Hanks on his entry by creating Adrift. Skirting the game/non-game conversation for a moment, Adrift falls somewhere between interactive wallpaper and Tamagortchi. You are, well, you and you are stuck on a boat for the foreseea
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Incredipede made us like insects, if only for a fleeting moment
While our basic insect/arthropod policy at Kill Screen is EWWWW EWWWWW KILL IT GENOCIDE, we are making an exception for the delightful new browser game Incredipede. In it, you play as a fairly uncoordinated eyeball named Quozzle with the ability to grow insect limbs, which are the levers you use to