Gameplay is very, very simple.  Move to the right (and occasionally back to the left, but generally, your goal is to advance to the right).  Sometimes jump.  Sometimes use things you come across (crates, power switches, etc). Don't die.

Except die you will.  Many, many times.  There's no story in Limbo-- you don't know who you are, where you are, or why you're on a relentless march rightward.  But you quickly learn your surroundings are deadly and, mercifully, the cost of death is very low.  The game autosaves at all the right times, resulting in very little pointless replaying of the same jumps and climbs.  A click of a button puts you back at the start of the current puzzle.

That's more or less how the game is structured, as a series of puzzles.  And the game's appeal lies in the utter simplicity, logic, and elegance of the puzzle design.  Nothing is out of place.  Nothing is extraneous.  "Why is this elevator hoisted from above by chains, instead of being a single, solid piece?" you might ask.  And well you should, because it's not by accident.  The puzzles aren't convoluted.  Their solutions aren't arcane.  Everything is fair, laid out right in front of you.  Delightfully, in most cases it's easy to execute the solution once you spot it-- you don't spend a lot of time retrying the same jump over and over to get the timing just right.  This is a game that rewards thought, not reflexes.

There are some great bits of puzzle design here, but one particularly fine display of finesse involves some sequences where your character is forced to move in one direction only, either left or right, until something reverses or removes that restriction.  At these times you often pass by ledges or routes that, because of your movement restriction, are inaccessible to you.  But that's OK, because you know the game was designed that way.  You know those routes are not important to you right now, because you simply can't use them.  There's no anxiety about passing by, about wondering if you should be trying to reach them.  A short while later, the simple removal of your movement restriction is a brilliantly organic design trick, instantly suggesting that since you can now go in the other direction, maybe you should check out those things you passed.  In lesser hands, restricting an avatar's movement can frustrate a player.  Here, it's actually liberating.

As clever as Limbo is, the oppressiveness of its art and sound make it a game I can only play in short bursts.  Many will compare Limbo with Braid.  The latter had bigger, bolder ideas in both story and puzzle design.  People talked about Braid in a way I think few will talk about Limbo.  I thought Braid's puzzle design had purity and elegance, but Limbo takes it a step further.  I'm not sure, in the end, if it's a game people will love.  As a game and puzzle designer, it's a game I certainly admire, and I'm enjoying the journey.

]]> tag:staticzombie.com,2010://5.1467 2010-06-16T05:08:13Z 2010-10-05T08:12:57Z

The gaming community's response to today's announcements has been a lot of hate.  Hate that all the announced titles are aimed at the casual market rather than the hardcore gamer.  Hate that these games are "rip-offs" of titles already available on the Wii.  Hate that Microsoft is offering something to a different demographic than its traditional male, shooter-loving adolescent.

Completely predictable.

Nintendo experienced the same thing when they launched the Wii, and took that hate all the way to the bank.  As demographics go, gamers are moderate fish in a fairly small pond.  With Kinect, Microsoft is digging a channel out to sea to go after bigger fish.  And smaller fish.  And fish of different colors, shapes, and sizes.  Gamers don't like that.  They want the pond all to themselves.

The magic of Kinect is hinted at by the videos, but doesn't fully manifest until you step in front of it yourself.  Until you do, your mind grasps the idea of the technology.  It understands on an abstract level that the thing works.  You think you know what it would be like to play a Kinect-enabled game.  But like the Matrix, nobody can tell you what it is-- you have to experience it for yourself.  And when you do, the walls of indifference, intellectual detachment, and self-assured rationalization crumble beneath the force of sheer childlike delight.  Kinect reaches behind your back and flips a hidden switch you didn't even know you had.  It's simple.  It's intuitive.  It's marvelous.

And it's nothing to be afraid of.  If a traditional controller is an oven, Kinect is a stove.  They're two different ways of doing similar things, each better at some things and worse at others.  There's room in the kitchen for both.

Kinect Adventures is a great launch title.  It's great for the entire family, supports players joining at any time (what we call easy-in, easy-out gameplay), can be played in short or long bursts, is incredibly easy to play, and lends itself very well to party situations.  The photos it takes of you as you play are always crowd-pleasers, and the ability to show off and share creative rewards with friends will appeal to social players.

Once people get a chance to get in front of Adventures and try Kinect, I think these things are going to sell themselves.

Was everyone dead before they ever got on the plane?  Were the earliest theories true, and the island purgatory?  Or was the island real, and the flash sideways purgatory?  Why were some people-- Michael, Walt, Charlotte, Daniel, Miles, Frank, among others-- missing from the church?

If the island is purgatory and everyone on it was dead from the moment the show began, what's the deal with Jacob and the Man in Black?  Why did the lives of the Losties intersect before they got to the island / died?

If the sideways was purgatory, then what was all that business with the nuclear bomb?  It didn't create a parallel universe. Aside from jolting everyone back to the present it didn't really do anything, despite what Juliet said as she died.  That's a whole lot of running around to accomplish nothing. 

Why were the Others so interested in Walt?  Why did they terrorize the Losties in the first place?  Why did the psychic have such dire predictions about Aaron, who never appeared to be significant?

I hope someone's able to put together a Unified Field Theory for Lost, because right now it's feeling a lot like the writers crammed into a room for a weekend, got really excited about an idea, and piled more ideas on top of it without regard for all the contradictions they were creating.

I love your work.  Really, I do.  Fringe has been far more entertaining and sensible than The X-Files.  I love that at its core, Fringe is really about the lengths to which a father will go out of love for his son.

But please, it's time to retire the doppelganger from your playbook.  You've gone to that well just a few times too often.  It was bad enough when you did it with Charlie, but the switcheroo in the season finale of Fringe was a doppel too far.  Worse, it was blatantly telegraphed.  The moment Olivia dyed her hair, there was no way the episode could end other than the wrong Olivia going home with Walter and Peter.

Worst of all, to make it work, you had to make the other characters into idiots.  Are we honestly expected to believe, after their experience with Charlie's double, that our heroes never put even the simplest safeguards, such as a passphrase, into place?  And when Olivia shows up with a different hair color, none of them think that maybe they should make sure she's the right Olivia?

Tell you what, I'll make you a deal.  I'll cut you a free pass on this one if you give us Charlie back.  He's feeling obsolete?  Great.  Bring him to our universe and have him join our side.  Not as good as having Olivia's original trusted confidante back, but still a welcome addition to the ensemble.

But no more mistaken identity, trading places plotlines, okay?

With her final vote, Candice confirmed that she had no business being on this season.  Taking her speech at face value, she based her decision not on gameplay but on personality and values.  She has every right to vote however she wants, just as I have every right to not respect her for it.  It's Heroes vs. Villains.  Respect the game you're playing.  Though, as NPR columnist Linda Holmes wrote, people just don't hand over a million dollars to someone they dislike.

Even so, I'm very surprised at the way the final vote went.  Parvati played, by far, the strongest game of the three finalists.  She made brilliant moves, she kicked butt in challenges, and she never lost her cool.  Yet she only got three votes.  Parvati was robbed.  Sandra played a fine game, but Parvati played a great one.  Unfortunately, her game was indelibly linked to Russell's, and she suffered toxic repulsion by association.

The audience got their vote wrong, too.  JT's play was far from the stupidest Survivor move of all time.  It turned out to be one of the worst, but as Jeff pointed out had things really been as they seemed on the Villains tribe and Russell was the last man standing against an all-women alliance, it would have been abso-freaking brilliant.  No, by far the dumbest move was Colby's season two decision to take Tina to the end instead of Keith.  The other players got eliminated as a result of their moves, but they might have gotten knocked out anyway.  Colby's move directly cost him nine hundred thousand dollars.

And hey, how about that final immunity challenge?  For the first time in a long while, the game finished with a challenge that presented an absolutely level playing field.  It was anyone's game, and those final few seconds as three players blindly groped for the necklace mere inches apart from each other was quite possibly the most dramatic conclusion to any challenge in the history of the game.  A great conclusion to a spectacular season.

Last night's episode had no real surprises.  Colby continues to be a complete zero.  It's incredibly hard to believe, even accounting for the passage of time, that this is the same man we saw in season 2.  He's got no game.  At anything.  And he was an utter douche, transfering all his frustrations at his season of inefficacy onto his brother in the span of one challenge.  I think it's safe to say that with this season, we've seen the last of Colby on Survivor.

The flaw in my analysis from last week was in expecting Sandra and Parvati to let their emotions rule their actions and vote Russell out.  It's now clear there's no chance of that happening.  Everyone believes that Russell can't win, that he's so disliked by everyone (for the second season in a row!) that nobody on the jury will vote for him, making him the perfect person to take with you to the finals.  Nobody wants to vote him out.

Finals on Sunday. Parvati has won (or diplomatically stepped down from) every single endurance challenge this season.  The vast majority of final challenges are endurance-based (in fact, since they're revisiting classic challenges this season, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the hand-on-the-stump challenge from season 1).  I wouldn't want to go up against Parvati in an endurance challenge, and if she makes it to the finals, she wins. Will the other Villains be smart enough to vote Parvati out at the next tribal council if she doesn't win immunity?  Or will they just hand her another million dollars?

Candice had it coming.  Her decision to flip last week made absolutely no sense.  With Sandra on their side, the Heroes had the numbers.  If they'd just voted out Parvati, the Heroes would have been tied 4-4, and since Sandra still wanted to get rid of Russell, they'd effectively be 5-3.  By flipping, she proved herself untrustworthy and burned her Heroes bridges.  I'm not sure how she expected to win once she got to the jury-- if all the Heroes got voted off, none would have voted for her.  The Heroes were the underdogs.  Their resolve to stick together was everything they had.  When Candice turned her back on that, she walked away from a million dollars.

Sandra, on the other hand, can flip with impunity.  First, it's what she does.  She won Pearl Islands by being a mercenary, joining no alliances but selling her vote each Tribal Council to whichever faction pledged to write anyone's name but hers.  Second, she's a Villain, and the lowest one on the totem pole (though she seems to have convinced the rest of the Villains, who didn't trust her before the merge, that she's loyal).  Nobody would fault her for flipping.  "I'm a scorpion.  It's what I do."

Rupert's stroke of luck the second time was lasting long enough to benefit from Russell's paranoia.  I feel a little bad for Danielle.  She didn't really make any wrong moves or mistakes before that Tribal Council.  Getting voted out like that must have been devastating.  But the crazy thing is, Russell wasn't wrong.  She had a tighter alliance with Parvati than he did.  Sooner or later-- unless they believed nobody on the jury would vote for him-- they may well have cut him loose.  It amazes me that people don't split up tight pairs-- clear and present dangers-- more often.

But the most shocking thing about the second Tribal Council wasn't that Danielle went home.  It's who voted for her.  If you watched the credits you saw that Jerri, obviously swayed by the Tribal discussion, voted for Danielle, while Sandra voted for Rupert!  On the one hand, that's perfectly in line with Sandra's strategy-- keep her head low, don't do anything to get other people mad at her, she doesn't care who goes home as long as it isn't her.  But I'm surprised she didn't throw in with Russell after learning how the vote might split.  Had Jerri not been swayed, Rupert would have gone home and Sandra would really have no other port in the eventual storm.  With Danielle gone, Sandra could flip to the Heroes and make it 3-3, and use her idol to oust Russell.

So Sandra also got lucky, because the way things worked out couldn't be better for her.  Parvati and Jerri believe her to be loyal.  Rupert and Colby will still accept her vote if they need it.  Russell isn't gunning for her.  And best of all, nobody knows she has the idol.

I've never been a big fan of Parvati, but let me say this-- she has played a very, very smart game this season.  Take tonight, for example.  She saw right through Russell's ploy without a second thought.  She's no Amanda, wishy-washing herself through the game.  Parvati is confident.  She trusts her instincts, and her instincts have been serving her well.  She also knows when to shut the hell up.  She made herself as small and invisible as possible during Tribal Council, pulling her arms close to her side and clasping her hands in her lap, legs pointing away from Danielle.  When the fur started to fly, she saw how Danielle was digging her own grave and she was very careful not to stumble into it too.  She knew that coming to Danielle's defense would only have hurt Danielle, and the best way to save her was to remain aloof and stay out of it.  It was the right play, but the damage was done.

I think Russell's gone next.  After what just happened, Parvati and Jerri won't trust him.  Sandra wants him gone.  Rupert doesn't trust him despite what the previews want us to believe.  If he doesn't win immunity, his game is over.  That leaves Jerri and Parvati, Rupert and Colby, and little old Sandra in the middle able to do what she does best-- sell her vote to the highest bidder.  If we assume a final three, who would you go with in her shoes?  The jury would have Coach, Courtney, Danielle, and Russell from the Villains; J.T., Amanda, and Candice from the Heroes.  Do you add 2 more Villains to the jury and hope they all vote for you as the last Villain standing?  Do you add two more Heroes and hope they pick you as the least objectionable Villain?

Sandra could beat Jerri but I think if Parvati makes it to the finals, Parvati wins another million (and this time, deservedly so).  Rupert and Colby have done so little in the game, it's hard to see how any of the Villains vote for them.  J.T. and Amanda probably stay true to the Heroes, but Candice has already shown she has no loyalty there.  If it does play out this way-- with Russell going home next, and Sandra having to pick a side-- I think her best odds come by siding with the Heroes.

From this week's vantage point, then, I'm picking Sandra as the Sole Survivor.

Two people did incredibly stupid things tonight.  Spoilers safely voted out behind the jump.

Colby has completely checked out.  He was in his own little world watching the movie, seemingly never having thought of the possibility of a clue to the idol.  And even if he had, I don't think he would have cared.  He just sounded tired.  "It's your clue, you found it"?  What the hell?  That room should have been two Heroes vs. one Villain.  He should have backed Amanda, who while not exactly in the right, was certainly not in the wrong.  The fact was that at that moment, Amanda had the clue.  It was hers.

But she gave it up because Colby didn't rally to her side.  Just like that.  I don't get it.  If that was me, I'd have run off into the night with the damn thing.  Danielle was already an enemy, so Amanda had nothing to lose by sticking to her guns.  And caving in cost her the game.

Because someone else made the other huge mistake of the night.  Why, why, why would Candace flip?  It makes absolutely no sense.  The Heroes had banded together tightly.  If they got the numbers on their side, they'd have picked off the Villains one by one and Candace would be in the final five at a minimum, and likely even farther.  On the Villains' side, her prospects seem much weaker.  Didn't she see how duplicitous Russell is?  What in the world possessed her to think she could trust him?

Moreover, knowing that Russell had the idol, she was in the ideal position to manipulate events so that the idol got played (which, as it turned out, would have required nothing on her part).  Had she just stuck with her teammates, Parvati would be gone, the idol would be gone, and her side would be up 5-4.

If things truly fall apart in the Villains alliance as the previews suggest, perhaps things will work out for her after all.  But even if she gets to the final, does she think the people she flipped on will give her their vote?  I think her position would have been far more secure had she stayed with the devils she knew.

But that's what's great about this game.  The least interesting seasons are the ones where everyone plays the good little soldier.  This has been, by far, the most exciting, topsy-turvy season ever.  Nobody's a good little soldier here, and anything can happen.

I think the devil got rooked, because Burnett keeps squeezing more juice out of their deal with every season.

That doesn't change the fact that this is, by far, the worst decision ever made by a tribe.  What's really amazing is that, at least as far as we saw, there was little to no discussion of how bad this could turn out for them.  If they played it safe and kept their idol, then after winning the immunity challenge they'd go into the merge even with the Villains.  If they're wrong in their assessment of the other tribe, they're digging their own grave.

Once Colby spilled the beans to Russell on the platform, there was no way in hell Russell was going to finish that race quickly.  He was much better off losing, thereby getting the idol AND voting off a potential flipper on his tribe.

I don't understand why the Villains voted out Courtney instead of Sandra.  Did they not watch Sandra's season?  Her strategy is to sell her vote to whoever isn't voting for her.  And they already believe she likes to plant ideas in people's heads.  Courtney, meanwhile, has been completely ineffective at EVERYTHING in BOTH her seasons.  She's no threat at all, and much easier to control.

Sandra, of course, has to flip.  She's lowest in her tribe's pecking order, so she has to shake things up.  The question is whether or not Rupert and the other Heroes will believe her when she tells them that Russell's running the show.  Because Russell will be swearing up, down, and sideways that he's on their side.  And even if they do believe her, they can't tip their hand that they've changed their minds, or Russell will play the idol.

This episode is going to be PAINFUL for J.T. and the other Heroes come reunion night.