Tag: fps

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Dusk is how you make a ’90s shooter for today

Living in the Northeast of the United States, David Szymanski grew up surrounded by the eerie woods and old buildings that dot the landscape in that part of the country. This is an area of the U.S. where you can find what Lovecraftian scholar S.T. Joshi calls “The Miskatonic Region,” the setting for many of the author’s strange and disturbing stories. Since the age of 14, Szymanski has wanted to create a first person shooter set in this part of the U.S. Now 26, he is finally making that dream a reality with Dusk. “I’ve always been a huge fan of Doom/Quake-style FPSs,…
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FPS has something to say about videogames and guns. But what?

Hugo Arcier’s FPS is about last year’s attacks in Paris, though it is not immediately clear in precisely what way. We know this because the artist says as much on his website: “FPS is a post November 2015 Paris attacks art piece. The artist deals with blindness hijacking video game codes, in particular of first person shooter game. The only visible elements are pyrotechnic effects, gunshots, muzzles flashes, sparks, impacts, smokes.” In practice, what that means is that a black space is lit up by flares from something vaguely resembling a videogame gun. They linger in the air, like lasers at…
Desync
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Hyperactive shooter DESYNC is made to resemble synesthesia

Beginning in the 20th century, modern design started being dominated by the saying “form follows function.” The idea was that when creating a building, car, or piece of software, pragmatism should come first, and style should be secondary. In Adult Swim’s upcoming game DESYNC, however, style is the function. Taking inspiration from classic shooters like Quake (1996) and Unreal Tournament (1999), DESYNC is a deliberately unrealistic shooter set in a colorful neon world resembling the computer reality of the Tron films. Enemies are abstract collections of polygons and vectors, and players dual-wield guns and swords while jumping dozens of feet into the air…
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Watch this new MOCA documentary on how the FPS has evolved beyond shooting Nazis

We’ve written before about how the shooter genre is expanding into a wider variety of games that can do nicer things than shooting dudes in the head. We did a PBS Game/Show episode about that. Also, I collected interviews with the creators of games that use shooter mechanics in surprising ways, like Proteus, and MirrorMoon EP, among others.  Now Giant Sparrow’s The Unfinished Swan, a whimsical game about discovering a forgotten kingdom by splattering it with paint, is the subject of a new mini-documentary from Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. They beat a familiar drum: we need games that do…