LIMBO: A Review

"Hahaha. You just got squashed."

Andrea. She doesn't always get my jokes —it's a language thing, I tell myself—, but when my onscreen avatar has a large box dropped on him she laughes like a drain. I guess among other things LIMBO is good to watch.

Games must have it down, now. A certain feeling of weight, that is. Batman: Arkham Asylum definitely felt like you were moving something like a real, large person and Assassin's Creed II has you feeling like a much more fleet and agile one.

LIMBO has you controlling the silhouette of a little boy with glowing eyes who has awoken in a forest of shades of grey and obstacles and ropes and giant spiders that are just the right size for the boy to tackle. It's a beautiful, ancient forest that flickers like an old movie and even it's horrors have a delicate allure to them.



But there's a nice weight here to the boy. His movements feel right, he moves at a slight jog and only jumps a foot or two in the air. He can't swim, but he's quite strong. Strong enough to pull helpful boxes around, anyway.

It also has any number of creepy, well animated deaths if you don't get everything just right. They are funny. If you aren't me. The games does have a fine atmosphere everything has the slightly off feeling of a dream. It's Kafkaesque, I think, though what I probably mean is that it reminds me of Orson Welles' take on The Trial.

Sound plays a very important part, too. There are clues in the noises of the game, and sometimes the action takes place off-screen, but you do hear it.

LIMBO is not particularly original. It is a puzzle-platform game. There's nothing that hasn't been done before. But LIMBO does it very, very well. It maintains a consistent atmosphere throughout and some of the later "twists" feel that much larger for the relative slightness of the earlier ones. It also doesn't outstay its welcome. You can probably finish it in a couple of hours. Those who feel that a euro an hour is right for a game will be very disappointed, but for those who will pay a premium for a finely crafted piece of art will be well rewarded by it.

If You've Just Got Over You Canabalt Addiction...

...On no account do you want to play Epic Coaster. Especially as it adds things like achievements and a global highscore table...

Shocking

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

No, really. I put in the text of the "A Bad Day For My Childhood" post and that's what came out. I suspect shenanigans, but what can you do?

UPDATE: Making Light suspects shenanigans, too, and tries to prove it.

Gaming News

So, Ron Gilbert is starting to take over X-Box Live Arcade.

Last week it was the excellent refit of Monkey Island 2: Le Chucks Revenge. And what a refit it is! New art, new commentaries, vastly improved control scheme and classic, classic gameplay. It's not really as funny as you might remember it — the games have always been warm smile, broad humour than laugh out loud (for the most part) — and some of the puzzles verge on the obscure (especially if you aren't listening carefully for the clues, I'm not entirely sure it's obvious why you need to win the spitting competition, for an example, or why you can pick up certain animals...). Video game writing, though, doesn't get much better than this.

This week is DeathSpank which starts off loud and rather crass and I hope it continues in that vain. I've not played it enough to form firm opinions on it yet, but the art direction and the writing have a unique feel to them from the start and that warm, broad humour is here in spades.

Now if he could get Telltale Games to convert the latest Monkey Island game to the XBox Ron's canonisation would be assured.

Also, Lego Batman was fun, Shepard's new Aegis armour in Mass Effect 2 is funky, and Leliana's Song for Dragon Age: Origins is a good blast of what made DA:O fun in the first place, hopefully I will eventually have the couple of hours needed to finish it.

More Roadzters

For the many Roadzters fans out there wondering when The Roadzters are they going to drop (that's the hip term these days, right?) their next youtube joint (mmm-hmm) here it is:

Homeopaths Get Taste Of Own Medicine

I guess there's some good in everything. An article in the Telegraph looking at a recent vote by doctors to cut homeopathy funding concludes:

And really, homeopaths shouldn’t be too disappointed. In fact, they should be grateful. After all, by their own logic, the less funding they get, the more effective it will be.

A Bad Day For My Childhood

I just found out that Johnny Ball, who was something of a hero of mine when I was growing up, is a Climate Change Denier. It's all down to spider farts, or something.

It is a little sad that he was booed off the stage by those who were there to hear it, though there is comedy value in the fact that contrarians can use this to show just how close minded scientists and "liberal atheists" are. Why it's almost like they are religious zealots or something. Brendan O'Neill[1], over at the deeply contrarian Spiked mag, has just such a rant handy. That is if you can get past his ultra-smug mug pic at the top of the piece...

The new collective of liberal atheists, of agitated ‘rationalists’, of Keepers Of The Scientific Truth As Revealed Unto Them By Richard Dawkins, can tolerate nothing so intolerable as someone taking the piss out of scientific theories about climate change.

You can tell by the inappropriate capitalisation that he is being satirical and by the arch use of "Unto" he's making a point about belief.

Atheism and science being relatively large churches, it's unsurprisingly easy to find disappointing people among the godless and the supposedly-rational.

The opposite of Atheism is, of course Theism, and most opinion-piece writers would, I hope, baulk at making general comments about Theists. A belief in God, god or gods tells you virtually nothing else about a person.

O'Neill here is hoping that by appending "liberal" to atheist he's narrowing the field. There are atheists, many of them good people, you see, but it's the "liberal" atheists you have to watch out for. Perhaps he could have narrowed it down to "muesli-eating, non smoking, yoga practising, Guardian reading, theatre loving, Volvo driving, liberal" atheists but I'm hoping his editor would have called him on that.

This is all to point up the irony. The liberals aren't allowing free-speech and the men of science aren't rational. How can we expect the other side to be any better?

Free speech doesn't mean having to listen to rubbish, though. And Science doesn't mean having to rehash all the arguments because someone wishes to. Climate change is well accepted now, to change people's opinions you have to do more than hand wave over some spider farts. It's not that they don't want to hear, it's that they have heard it. Many times. It wasn't right the last time and it won't be right now, almost the definition of a false hypothesis. Free speech isn't meant to weaken debate. It's meant to enhance it, at certain times having an opinion is enough (or handy access to Google, it's almost the same thing nowadays) but to change rational people's minds you need evidence.

It does seem, though, that climate change is leading to larger spiders, so Johnny Ball may actually be on to something.

[1] His blogspot url used to be boneill.blogspot.com and I can't help but think of him as "bone ill" for no good reason.

Congratulations To Eamon & Karin

This is late because I was ill. Yes, as always, it's all about me. I even get a mention in the news report.

Totally Old Skool Man

Ice Cube and The Roots drop "Straight Outta Compton" at Late Night.

This is just a blast, if you have ever felt a nostalgic pang for 80's hip-hop this will make you grin like a mother-mother.

P-p-pick Up A Penguin

I'm not exactly sure if the above is a real product or not. But it sure is cute and I would definitely buy one.

It's related to a bunch of redesigned Penguin book covers created by Amy Fleisher that are equally fun.