Some of us have trouble sleeping. We place our heads on a pillow and we’re forced to acknowledge all of the personal, social, and global fears that exist in the backs of our minds. We hesitate to linger on them in our waking hours: We change channels in the middle of a news story, we fly through Goo
Ladies and gentlemen, from the flight deck: This is your hijacker speaking. On behalf of your former captain—who is currently hurtling toward the earth at terminal velocity—I’d like to welcome you aboard Panau Airlines Flight 635, with service to wherever I feel like ditching the aircraft.
?The Call of Duty series represents the extreme forward guard of “hyperrealism” and technological might in contemporary game design. It’s a bombastic, McBay take on American foreign policy. Parents, commentators, and critics look on in horror as frenzied gamers lap up each new entry: Call of Duty ga
Some know Will Wright as a game designer extraordinaire, the creator of megahits such as SimCity, The Sims, and Spore, among others. But for two short weeks, I knew him as my boss.
Excerpts from a conversation with David Gaider, senior writer at BioWare, conducted for the piece “Talking, Believing, Knowing: Making Friends in Dragon Age” in Kill Screen Issue #3.
King Carrion is a U-shaped canyon. Meat Boy starts atop the left-hand cliff, works his way down to the base, bunny-hops across platforms suspended over insta-death maggots to obtain a series of keys, and then climbs up the right-side cliff, where Bandage Girl awaits. Apart from several enemies and b
The PlayStation 3’s security wall has fallen. As of this week, the disc has been slipped in, Tron-style, by a few hackers’ combined efforts, and the game console’s “private keys”—336 seemingly random letters and numbers—are public. Other recent game systems have taken shots from hackers, particularl
As much fun as I had watching The Matrix, or at least the first one, I was quite excited that many of 2010’s films—from Hollywood blockbusters Avatar (I know, last December; close enough), Inception, and Tron: Legacy to the indie tour de force Enter the Void—broke out of the sterile dichotomy betwe
Lists are serious. A critical consensus and a “Game of the Year” pick can cement a title’s place in the canon. Plus, those little “BEST OF 2010” stickers on the boxes? Those aren’t cheap.
Another season, another issue in the works, another theme for which we need your amazing, intriguing, and confounding ideas. But this time, we have a bonus-sized Call for Pitches. After all, you may have noticed we have this new website here …
Sometimes, I see myself through the eyes of my non-gamer readers. My mother-in-law, say. I see a competent writer who, for reasons incomprehensible, devotes himself to writing about a hobby that is immature at best and an active waste of time and talent at worst. Readers like my mother-in-law likely
After five years dedicated to the beautification of the boardgame, Mike Doyle found a new calling—Lego sculpture. It was this summer, on a trip to Legoland with his boys, that Doyle, a 43-year-old graphic designer from New Jersey, rekindled his passion for the building blocks. When he got home he s
The path to survival lies straight ahead. I cannot scale these walls, Sam Fisher-style, and wait for my pursuers to haplessly wander underneath. Nor can I dig a makeshift hidey-hole and wait for danger to pass. This is not Splinter Cell, this is not Minecraft; this is Pac-Man, and so the path to sur
In a year when almost every critic gave Red Dead Redemption a near-perfect score, why didn’t anybody tell me that I needed to play Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood? I get it: You enjoyed the sense of place created by Redemption‘s open range. You got to ride a horse that felt natural, its animations sm
Excerpts from a conversation with Katherine Isbister, associate professor at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and director of its Social Game Lab, conducted for the piece “How Does It Feel?” in Kill Screen Issue #3.
What follows is my attempt to understand the widespread popularity of a mobile videogame called Angry Birds. I don’t play games, but this past summer I became bed-ridden, unable to read or listen to music. Jamin Brophy-Warren, this publication’s president, happened to be taking care of my less print
At times, games can seem useless. “The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.” Oscar Wilde ends his preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray wry tongue in wry cheek. Being useless is glorious. It is our freedom.
So you like videogames, right? But you probably like other things too. Good food. Beer. Clothing. Architecture. You know, things that adults like. Culture things. Things you can touch and see and talk about. We here at Kill Screen are just like you. We like stuff. That’s why we’re not just a magaz
