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.