Tag: Time

News

Inside the Kubrickian spaces of Twelve Minutes

Visual artist Luis Antonio’s been around. He used to work at a couple big name game companies (Rockstar and Ubisoft). But, feeling unfulfilled, he jumped ship to work on Jonathan Blow’s The Witness, a game that incidentally inspired him to learn programming and pursue his own personal project, Twelve Minutes. Twelve Minutes has been in development for around three years, but until now, was merely a passion project, a side activity. But now, that’s all changed: as Antonio’s announced that development of Twelve Minutes has achieved funding, and has become a full-time project. (A screenshot from the Twelve Minutes prototype)…
SUPERHOT
News

SUPERHOT is so close it’s burning our skin

The wait for SUPERHOT is over. Almost. With a newly announced release date of February 25th, the high-contrast, low-poly fever dreams of the Poland-based Superhot Team are only a few weeks away. A teaser trailer that accompanied the announcement shows these highly-stylized bullet hallucinations in action. While the “time only moves when you do” mechanic gives SUPERHOT the complexion of a puzzle game, it’s the frenzied, John Woo-inspired combat that’s center stage in the new trailer. But behind the brief and seamless action of this last look before launch lies a longer road to development. What was originally born of a…
Article

SUPERHOT and the unique temporality of videogames

When the Wachowskis transported bullet-time over from Hong Kong cinema to The Matrix (1999), mainstream western audiences were wowed. This was the beginning of something new for action cinema, the ability for the camera to pivot around action, playing a moment from a multiplicity of angles that stunned and awed in equal measure. The camera was unhinged from static points, instead echoing the orbital movement of a clock or pendulum. In the years following, slow-mo sequences in games misguidedly attempted to convert what was so fascinating about that spectacle into something the player could experience. Instead, it only introduced the…
News

Time Magazine might not get virtual reality, but The New Yorker does

Watching traditional media outlets like Time scramble to try and wrap their minds around something like virtual reality is, well, kinda adorable. Don’t get me wrong: for all the patronizing smugness we feel about knowing a bit more about emerging technologies (since we’re, you know, a videogame arts and culture website after all), we tip our hats to the history-makers over at more traditional publications like Time and The New Yorker. But as the Internet found out last August following Time‘s release of their big virtual reality cover story, there’s some fun to be had here. Because who could not laugh at anyone who thought a picture of Oculus Rift inventor Palmer…
News

Merrily Perily is a comedy of errors about poison and pooping yourself

There’s a certain type of prank prevalent on YouTube where the prankster dribbles hot sauce onto a friend’s food and also into their drink, so that once they eat the food and realize the predicament they’re now in, reaching for their drink will only make things worse.Merrily Perily takes that prank and stretches it out into an entire game. The game casts the player as Perry, a man who wanders into a village suffering from dehydration. You ask all the villagers for help, but for some reason, they’re all extremely standoffish and seem dedicated only to wasting your time. With…
News

When a ten-second journey through the apocalypse feels like a lifetime

If you’ve ever fallen before, you know firsthand that time is relative. You could be looking at your watch one minute—the second hand ticking onward in steady calculation—and then, in the next, you could be bending time and space as your limbs fly through the air. When you lose control of your body, the wind blowing back your hair as your rush to meet the floor, you begin to question the certainty of that clock’s hand. Falling shouldn’t take more than a couple seconds, right? After all, your buddy gravity is there to ensure it ends quickly and painfully. you…