Game Review - Limbo

Limbo is an independent platform game released in 2010 developed by Playdead, it was first released for the Xbox 360 Arcade and in 2011, a version for PC and Playstation 3 was released, there is even a Linux version.

Limbo is officially recognized as an Art Game, a well deserved recognition based on its art style, gameplay and mood. The plot deals with a boy who is looking for his lost sister and for that, the must transverse a bleak landscape avoiding things like giant spiders, children who also want to kill him, deathtraps, and dangers of the environment. Because of the title, it is pretty much stated that this is the afterlife and both the kid and his sister are dead.

The game has black and white-sepia-washed graphics all which give it an air of something out of a dream, and the landscapes give it a feeling of coldness, emptiness and indifference to pain and suffering. For example, the beginning of the game takes place in a forest environment we hear distant birds and wildlife sounds, light filters from the treetops but then we start encountering deathly insta-kill bear-traps, hanged corpses and a giant spider. Later we encounter a cave with a pond with several drowned children and you watch helplessly as kid stumbles into the water and drowns:

This game has a lot of challenging puzzles, mostly physics based, and others in which timing is everything, in the last parts of the game we encounter switches that reverse gravity for select objects, and later they affect everything else. Be careful though, it's very easy to get killed in this game and you will always get gruesome death animations...

The first parts of the game in my opinion contributed a lot for the dark, foreboding mood, however, the game later switches from a woods environment to an urban-industrial wasteland devoid of life, making you feel like a stranger in a strange land instead of a lost boy and unfortunately, although the puzzles almost make up for it, the first part has the most variety of environments and gameplay styles (the cocooned stage and the spider boss encounters for instance) and as such its more emotionally affecting.

The audio in my opinion is excellent, like I mentioned before, in the woods part the sounds of animals rustling and the deep growl from the spider contribute with the immersion. The music is abstract and minimalist and relies heavily on acousmatic effects, for example: In the final part when the gravity starts changing periodically the music hints of every change as if it's also a physical part of the background and also the vibrating sounds in the music which relate to the spinning saw-blades:

The ending is very ambiguous and left open for interpretation, however in this case it works well because we are only invested in the personal voyage of the boy, and depending on your interpretation it can be either a happy or bittersweet ending.

Limbo is an outstanding game, even more so since it was created by a small company and received several awards in the 2011 Game Developers Choice Awards. So I would definitely recommend it.

And to finish this post, here's a hilarious alternative interpretation of the game:

The Mass Effect 3 Ending

On March 2012 Mass Effect 3 was released with very high expectations, however within days after release the game became the center of the greatest debacle in the history of videogames. All because of the ending which left many fans (myself included) unsatisfied.

A lot has been written about the ending, it reignited the debate of "Games as Art", and there are already YouTube videos that explain very well what is wrong with it. So this will be my take.

This post contains *SPOILERS*.

The Mass Effect series is one of the most successful Science Fiction franchise in videogames, Bioware succeeded admirably in creating a working and detailed universe on par with Star Wars or Star Trek.

For those unfamiliar with the franchise a quick recap: In the 22th century humanity discovered ruins of an ancient extinct space-faring civilization called "the Protheans" on Mars, a cache of alien technology was also discovered which contained the key for a form of Faster-Than-Light-Travel which uses the eponymous "Mass Effect" field, with this new technology humanity began exploring and colonizing the Milky Way galaxy eventually making contact with other alien races which also discovered Prothean ruins on their planets; so in the year 2183 humanity has been welcomed to the galactic community. In the games you play as Commander Shepard an elite soldier who has discovered a terrible secret: The reason the Protheans became extinct was because they were exterminated by a race of hyper-advanced machines called "the Reapers", these machines remain dormant for thousands of years until they awake and exterminate all space-faring civilizations, and the time for their return has come. The 3 games revolve on Shepard and his/her friends' struggle against the Reapers.

As thousands of gamers, I got hooked by Bioware's Mass Effect franchise, I played the first game on the PC on 2009, and I thought it was an outstanding game, in the last part I felt the urgency of rushing my Mako to the Conduit to prevent the Reaper invasion and save the galaxy, and the ending did not disappoint:

On January 2010 came Mass Effect 2 which was one of the best games I have played; Yes, it was more action-oriented and had a much simpler story than the first one (gather a team, earn their loyalty and launch a suicide mission against the Collectors, who work for the Reapers) but the characterization of your team members was brilliant, the possibility of them or you actually dying permanently on the last mission added to the thrill of the ride, and also the ending could vary wildly depending on who lived or who died. As such Mass Effect 2 has one of the greatest and most rewarding endings a game could have:

And then the last part of the saga, Mass Effect 3, was released in March 2012, in this installment the Reapers have finally arrived to the Milky Way galaxy and have started their extermination of advanced life; While the game itself had many fantastic moments (curing the Genophage, ending the Geth / Quarian war) the last ten minutes went against everything the franchise was setting up us for. A shocking swerve with a God-like figure appearing out of nowhere in the last minutes, contradicting all the established lore and canon, no big boss battle, no final triumph, no closure, and worst of all: A very bleak scenario that resulted in an Inferred Holocaust:

Truly I was half-expecting the Normandy while trying to outrun the red/green/blue explosion to be sucked into another universe...

Mass Effect 3 feels like a rushed game, it's shorter than the other two and it feels like Bioware was planning to fill the gaps with Downloadable Content (DLC); originally the official stance from Bioware was that the ending was intentionally left vague so that people could speculate about the fate of the galaxy, and some of the few people who have defended the ending have said that the audience has grown lazy and always demands exposition.

Well, in my opinion ambiguity, vagueness, little or no exposition are the resources (or shall I say Cop-Outs) of a lazy writer. Especially when the elements given to audience led them to believe a downer outcome. To defend a bad ending with the pretext of "Artistic Integrity" is also a cop-out.

And even if the Mass Effect 3 ending was "artistic", then there's also one fact about art we can't ignore: You either like it or you don't; and if you don't, you can voice your displeasure and you are entitled (oh no, I used "e" word! :b) to your opinion. That is why I think the Retake Mass Effect movement is right.

Some people have pointed to the Final Fantasy VII ending which was also controversial in the fact that it had an Inferred Holocaust, except than in this case Square Enix gave us sequels like Advent Children which showed the actual state of things after the ending.

Fallout 3 also suffered from a similar (albeit of lesser scale) debacle relative to the ending, except that Bethesda changed it with the DLC Broken Steel.

So, in March 21st, 2012, Bioware announced a free DLC which will "expand and clarify" the ending, I can only say "Good luck with that" since in my opinion the ending is so convoluted it will be a tall order to make it make sense, and if it's done poorly then it will make Bioware look worse; however if it's done right, Bioware may redeem itself in the eyes of its fans.

EDIT: It has been announced that the DLC epilogue will be released on June 26. So I will replay Mass Effect 3 with my third Shepard to see the changes and write about them.

The Mass Effect 3 Ending Debacle will always be remembered, hopefully, as a lesson for game developers to pay attention to the endings of the games they made, while it is true that most gamers don't finish the games they buy, in this case we were talking about an established franchise with fans carrying over their 5-year-old imported saves from the first game and who certainly had lined up to know how the saga ended. And to serve them poorly was a tremendous disrespect.

Game Review - Bioshock & Bioshock 2

Well, it certainly took a while :b but here I am talking about BioShock and as bonus, the sequel BioShock 2.

I played the first BioShock in 2007-2008, and without a doubt it is one of the best games I have played, BioShock is one of the few games I would think would pose as an example of "Games as Art", not only it has superb art design but also had top-of-the-line graphics (the PC version was one of the first games to use DirectX 10 effects, the Xbox 360 in contrast uses DirectX 9), and philosophical themes (rooted deeply in Ayn Rand's Objectivism). But all that is background since BioShock plays like a standard First Person Shooter, albeit a very good one.

You play as Jack, the sole survivor of a plane crash in the middle of the Atlantic who amidst the flaming wreckage finds a lighthouse and in it, a bathysphere that takes him to Rapture, an underwater city built by business tycoon and ardent objectivist Andrew Ryan (a play on Ayn Rand); this city was built as an utopia where people would be free from collectivist constrains, however the city has collapsed into rioting and a turf war between the founder Ryan and a mob boss called Fontaine. Why has Jack arrived to the city of Rapture at this precise time?

The Rapture economy's backbone is a substance called "Adam" which allows its user to re-write her genetic code to acquire super-human abilities, this substance must be harvested by especially trained little girls called "Little Sisters" who are also the only one who can produce this substance thanks to a surgical implant on them. Because of their value the Little Sisters are always escorted by a "Big Daddy" to serve as her protector. While playing the game you will encounter them roaming all over Rapture and if you are able to defeat their Big Daddy you have the option of killing them and taking all their Adam for yourself, or freeing them on which you will obtain only half of the Adam. (Ultimately you obtain the same amount of Adam in the endgame so...).

The levels are beautifully detailed with a lot of Art Deco / Art Noveau influence, and the gameplay is very good, always finding new ways to combine powers to survive in Rapture.

BioShock was critically acclaimed and became a staple of classic gaming, as such a sequel was released in 2010.

BioShock 2 plays very similarly to BioShock 1, in this game you play as "Subject Delta", the prototype Big Daddy, the action takes place 8 years after the first game, and in this part since you are a Big Daddy you can experience firsthand what it is to adopt a Little Sister and protect her from attackers. The story lets you explore another facet of Rapture in which a collectivist called Sophia Lamb opposed Ryan and eventually took control of Rapture after the events of Bioshock 1.

In addition to the mutated dwellers of Rapture, the Big Daddies and Little Sisters, BioShock 2 introduces the "Big Sisters" to the equation, which are grown-up Little Sisters, in this case after dealing with all Little Sisters of a level a Big Sister will appear and attack you, acting as a boss encounter.

Although it is not a bad game BioShock 2 lacked a little of the impact the first one had, on the other hand the sequel does include some underwater sequences, something that was conspicuously absent from the first game.

BioShock and BioShock 2 are very good games, and the first one is definitely a classic which you must play.

There is a third game to be released in February 2013, BioShock Infinite, developed by Ken Levine, the main developer of the first game. This game will probably not have any connections to the other two.

Music and EWJ

Returning from the GDC, over there I got the soundtrack of the first 2 games for the Earthworm Jim franchise in a collection called Earthworm Jim Anthology. I already owned the soundtrack of the first game since I bought the PC CD-ROM version that had a remastered soundtrack on the CD for the BGM of the game. But this one contains probably the remastered soundtrack of the second game as well.
I have always liked the EWJ franchise, somehow games with wacky humor have always appealed to me; games like Psychonauts, MDK2 (the MDK franchise is in my opinion the spiritual succesor of EWJ), and of course EWJ.
EWJ games stood on their own not just because of the quality of the animation or the memorable and lovable characters but also because of their unique approach on the level design.
Not just every level played differently but also differed on it's theme, the second game's level themes where so bizzarre one can only think they were part of a twisted dream. So diverse settings also meant little connection between themselves and as such the story suffered.
But wait... what story? The only thing that connected the worlds was that you were supposedly traveling from planet to planet to rescue the princess Whats-Her-Name, right?
Probably this approach helped design and program diverse settings and free the designer's imagination, but IMHO if a game has a story you should at least make some clear connections otherwise the story will be broken and you will have a broken element on your game.
I bought the soundtrack because listening the first one's while I was drawing late at night helped me inspire on the world I was creating, I thank Tommy Tallarico for that.
The music has some clear Italian inspirations, as one could expect, I hope they take in consideration on playing EWJ music on a Videogame Live Concert.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

A little late but its because I have been busy lately, because Im planning on attending the GDC in two weeks and I need to prepare for it.

Browsing over Gamasutra I have found that in Europe at least video games are officially art. That is at least in France, as such as the article at the end says:

(...)video game has the official stature of a "cultural activity" -- a cultural expression where art and artists are attached to video games as they are to music and movies.

Those are excellent news, lately in the US there have been many attempts to regulate the industry because games were seen as mere toys or "second class entertainment", but I have always said that video games are just another media like books, movies or music so why don't they enjoy of the same recognition?

Also the industry will benefit with support from the govement, this will mean good news for small studios since mostly they are the ones who innovate more.

Been playing Bioshock, what a great game! Latter I'll speak of it.

Game review - Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit

Fahrenheit is the original title of this game, the title was changed to Indigo Prophecy for the North American release.

Fahrenheit was released in September 2005 for the PC, XBox, and PS2, developed in France by studio Quantic Dream and designed by David Cage.

This was a very good game, it is essentially an adventure game, set in New York city in January 2009, the game opens in a street cafe on a cold winter night; there, in the bathroom a man named Lucas Kane enters in an altered state of trance and with a knife stabs to death an unsuspecting patron that just happened to be there, after doing this Lucas regains control of himself and realizes what he has done, at this point the player assumes control of Lucas, giving him control to either run away quickly, slipping past noticing or avoiding suspicion.

What is original in all this is that the game opens up putting you on the shoes of someone who has just committed murder on a common place, and has to avoid getting caught. Later the game introduces 2 cops: Carla Valenti and Tyler Milles who are assigned in the investigation of the murder, and gives the player control over them to obtain the clues the player left earlier with Lucas Kane, so in another twist you are controlling both sides of the case: the murderer and his persecutors.

The story has the player switching between those characters, helping Lucas to solve the mystery of why he committed that crime and why he has recurring visions of a strange child, and both Carla and Tyler in collecting clues to capture him.

While the tutorial can be confusing for some, once you enter to the game you will find the controls to be very intuitive, many actions require to be performed by mimicking the motion on your control, dialog has you choosing several answers for the conversation before a time bar expires, depending of the situation this will be quick or slow, failing to answer a question will result sometimes in increasing the questioner's suspicion level.

Instead of a life bar, the game uses a mood indicator, that lowers everytime the character gets a setback or something doesn't go as planned, and goes up whenever he/she does something good for him/her, if the mood bar empties the character will commit suicide.

The game makes extensive use of split cameras, making use in them by alerting the player of an important event or for narrative purposes, the animation quality is very good also, it's obvious that it makes extensive use of motion capture technology.

Action scenes require to perform a certain sequences of pressing buttons to do the scene successfully, the player will get an advice to get ready before entering those sequences, what is good about those is that it uses peripheral vision to guide through them, that is you don't have to miss the action to watch the correct sequence to perform, this helps in maintaining the tension and sharing part of the adrenaline your character probably feels.

Gameplay has the atmosphere of a scifi flick, with a lot of suspense, tension and intrigue, although the plot is engaging and there is great deal of immersion, a little before the end the game starts to feel a little hasty, many characters that you would think would be important to the story disappear completely, and the ending feels a little rushed with a Deus Ex machina and The End legend, and that is something that kind of breaks all the mystery and intrigue that prevailed in the first half of the game.

At any case I would recommend this game since it has a very engaging story and will give you a very good experience, the game can be completed in less than 12 hours meaning you can finish it on a weekend.

Fahrenheit is available in America as Indigo Prophecy, this version has some scenes of sexually explicit content removed, a Director's Cut is said to be available but I have not yet seen it anywhere, and I got the european version. It is available for the PC, Xbox and PS2.

Screenshots:

Merchant Ivory - Gamasutra's Article

I read this Gamasutra article more than a year ago:

The title makes reference to Merchant Ivory films, it's status as high culture films, and how video games don't have yet the same status as "high culture" and thus are vulnerable to slander.

Video games are an easy target because, unlike the movies, games have no powerful friends and no beautiful film stars to argue for them. But there are many other reasons for our lack of cultural credibility as well. Some of them aren’t our fault, but a surprising number are, and recently I’ve thought of another one: We don’t have any highbrow games.

This provocative article sparkled a series of letters to the editor, some considering classic games as an example of merchant Ivory, games like Pac-man, Frogger, Galaxian, surely have transcended through generations, it is said that if an artist's work manages to break the generational barrier and stay in the taste of new generations, then it can be considered as art and culture, yet not a single game can be labeled as culture.

Now I know from long experience that a certain percentage of you are making derisive snorts of contempt because you personally care nothing for high culture and see no reason why anyone else would either. But even if you don’t like it, you still need it. And before yet another idiot pipes up with Standard Asinine Comment #1 (“but FUN is the only thing that matters!”), let me just say: No, it's not. Shut up and grow up. Our overemphasis on fun—kiddie-style, wheeee-type fun—is part of the reason we’re in this mess in the first place. To merely be fun is to be unimportant, irrelevant, and therefore vulnerable.

Actually I would be the one to differ with the above statement, nobody wants to play a game that is boring, likewise watching a film that is.

The real question would be: What is fun? I think fun can come from just more than slapstick comedy or blowing stuff up, like the article later says:

Whoever thought that city planning could be fun? Or knowing the progression of social, technological and political developments that lead to different forms of civilization?

There are many examples of the above, but I think that the core issue is that we are confusing the term fun with entertainment. Entertainment can come from many ways: When we enter to a spook-house, we go there to fell frightened not to amuse ourselves, likewise how many times we have seen people crying over a soap opera or a film? Does that make them masochists? No, they are there to experience entertainment.

One can define entertainment as experiencing a wide range of emotions to distract ourselves from the problems of the real world, the saying says: "Art is entertainment." I couldn't agree more with that.

In describing what would a Merchant Ivory Game would look like the article specifies:

a) Top notch art and design.
b) Very, very user-friendly interface.
c) Lot's of politics, human nature and social issues.

All this combined to create a living world in which we can interact and entertain ourselves. The article also speculates a little about why there are no Merchant Ivory Games, citing economical interests and that sometimes it "sacrifices it's principles to appeal a wider audience", I would add another one: As video games are fully technology dependent, the landscape is constantly changing, faster than other media like books, films or music.

Everyone remembers the revolution of film's visual FX with the advent of GC, and before that there was the revolution of technicolor and sound, but those where changes that came far between them. Video games on the other hand are undergoing massive changes: From the standard 8 color palette to physics in FPS, everything new became another tool to develop the work. And older games without them where simply "demoted" or in the case with blockbuster hits become susceptible to "enhanced remakes".

Who knows what's next for video games? Maybe speech recognition so that you can directly speak through you avatar with the NPC in a game, and respond accordingly even allowing you to have conversations. All those would help to make a real Merchant Ivory Game at least until a new technology comes.