Here goes nothing: Steam will be adding remote installs. Microsoft is launching a new subscription service for the XBOX. Read the details here. Persona 4 will be coming out on the Vita this fall. Indie legend Notch may be in the next Total War game. Skullgirls is making its way to the PC. Rock Band iOS will be shutting down permanently. Check out these beautiful images from the newest PSN wonder, The Unfinished Swan. That’s all for now folks! See you all tomorrow!

video Please tell me those are Tacocopters.

It was recently Food Week here at Kill Screen, and a large theme that was consistently raised was the question of taste. Simply put, can you ever truly arrive at an essentialist, universalist notion of taste, or is the notion of quality and experience always already culturally predetermined? NPR’s food blog has this illuminating story of how the Pizza Hut Crown Crust Pizza came to be:  Many foodies have decried it as a “culinary abomination,” “a sign of the apocalypse,” or proof that America is finally losing its monopoly on gluttony. A reviewer at Serious Eats, who tried the Crown Crust in Dubai, wrote: “There seems to…

The Verge has an interesting piece up on a revolutionary new subscription-based service for the XBOX soon to be unveiled: Microsoft is planning to launch a $99 Xbox console package with a monthly subscription as early as next week, according to our sources. The software giant will offer the 4GB console with a Kinect sensor at its range of Microsoft Stores in the US, subsidized with a monthly cost of $15. We’re told that the two-year subscription will provide access to the Xbox Live Gold service and possibly some additional streaming content from cable providers or sports package providers. Customers…

You know the drill: Diablo III is going to allow intercontinental multiplayer, Blizzard announced. The company will also be taking a cut of the auction-house earnings. The next Call of Duty was officially announced. Details of Skyrim’s first DLC were announced. Check out this launch trailer for Mortal Kombat’s Vita version. God of War: Ascension is happening. That’s all for now! Check back tomorrow!

A new Facebook game is taking a stab at promoting healthy sexual behavior, The Huffington Post Gay Voices blog reports:  A new Facebook game is taking a socially-conscious look at the sex lives of gay and bisexual men, promoting the idea that the more men you have sex with, the more frequently you should be screened for sexually transmitted diseases and infections. Titled “Man Up,” the game allows players to attempt to bounce between brightly colored beds without being knocked off by a “love bug.” The higher a player manages to bounce, the more points they receive — but those…

A few weeks back, I wrote about how videogames are informing and changing our conception of history and the way we experience its most important tool: the archive. A more pressing question might be how the literal construction of history is beginning to change as more of our collective experience enters into what George Dyson calls the “digital universe.”The Economistreports: The Smithsonian is collecting materials, but has not made their efforts public. The New York Historical Society, the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library aresaid to be collecting documents by sending representatives to sites to grab flyers and posters. …

We here at Kill Screen obviously spend a lot of time making sure all things videogame-related that we discuss pass a necessary coolness factor (taste-makers that we are). But is coolness always the most important cultural standard to which we ought to repair? John Cassidy takes a look President Obama’s recent exercises in hipness and comes up with a different idea:   But for Obama, accentuating his hipness carries some dangers. The essence of being hip, after all, is that you operate on a more refined plane than most people: you are more fashionable, more discerning, and more discriminating than…

Apparently these days movie theaters only use fifteen percent of their total capacity, according to this recent Vulture post. Given changing models in distribution and marketing for film and television, are movie theaters doomed to become a piece of collective cultural nostalgia like the arcade room? The article goes on to give several persuasive strategies for how the shared spectacle and experience of the theater might be saved from the atomistic model most videogames have adopted: In February, Nicholas Gonda co-founded Tugg, a new venture that bills itself as “a collective action web-platform,” but is really just a simple way…