For more than two years, Ryan Kuo has edited for Kill Screen. As he heads off to pursue an M.S. at MIT, he reflects on the life of iPad gaming that is now ending when he gives back the tablet to the company. When is an app more than an app?
The popular airline simulator Pocket Planes may not provide goals, direction, or even motivation, but it does demonstrate the importance of being bored with a videogame.
Why is Phil Fish’s new puzzle game so addictive? Because it hides everything in plain sight, and lays bare the rest.
When Borderlands 2 is released on September 18, it will expand on the comic-book wasteland setting of its predecessor in more than a fictional way. The first game, a combination of first-person shooters, role-playing games, and massively-multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft, set itself apart for offering players approximately one million guns to use. This was accomplished through a technique called procedural generation, in which individual gun parts are randomly mixed and matched to create an overwhelming number of mathematically unique fake firearms. The sequel sees a return to the alien world Pandora, and an emphasis on the fictional…
Kill Screen contributor, comics artist, academic, and high-concept game maker Pippin Barr debuts a new game today. It’s called Epic Sax Game and it’s a glorious feat of keyboard jamming, Guitar Hero spoofage, paint-by-MIDI, and Eurovision homage. Check out this video (at your own risk) to see/hear the inspiration for ESG‘s riff-splosion. As with much of Barr’s work, the thing I like about Epic Sax Game is that it isn’t overloaded by meaningful rules—it conveys meaning through conceptual rigor and a certain openness that allows for (if not requires) naive experimentation. In this case, you’re supposed to reproduce the epic…
Everything looks wrong at first about BioWare’s final space opera. It turns out the makers gutted Mass Effect 3 to make it right. Here are their conclusions about humanity.
With apps, games, multimedia, multitasking, and online functionality galore, Sony’s newly released PlayStation Vita wants to be everything to everyone. Ryan Kuo argues that it is definitely one thing for one person: the hardcore gamer, whatever that looks like.
In our second Flash column, the joys of landing butt-first on gelatinous bears. Ryan Kuo gives three talking points about Juicy Beast’s cannonball game.
A rumination on the effects of rationality and irrationality on videogames big and small, including Skyrim, Dark Souls, Passage, and Braid—and why it’s important that game systems come out of culture.