Limbo

Inception is a 2010 Hollywood movie directed by Christopher Nolan (most famous for the 2002 film Insomnia, of course) with Leonardo Dicaprio and a band of dream invaders. They’re on a mission to…and you should probably skip this one paragraph if you haven’t seen the film yet, and you should perhaps be disappointed in yourself if you haven’t. Well they enter the dreams of the rich heir (Cillian Scarecrow), and then enter the dream rich heir Cillian Scarecrow’s dream in the dream world, and then enter the dream of the dream of the dream rich heir Cillian Scarecrow…and maybe everything that’s happening is already someone else’s dream. Or maybe it’s all in the subconscious of a vegetable, or perhaps it’s a metaphor for the stylish heist fantasies of Christopher Nolan. Or maybe it’s all part of an ongoing attempt by Dicaprio to star in the manliest movies possible in his eternal struggle to make people forget about Titanic. I don’t know. It’s a very ambiguous concept of a film.

One week after the release of Inception, we have the downloadable Xbox Live Arcade game Limbo. Limbo may or may not share themes with Inception. Limbo may or may not coincidentally feature certain pacing methods and action set-pieces. They both may or may not toy with the idea of the netherealms. They both may or may not feature child actors. While typing this review, I bit my closed fist with a tight grip until several hunks of flesh dangled off my knuckles, trying my hardest to not spoil the numerous great moments of Limbo. This is a game best experienced by the individual not knowing what to expect.

The only actual plot of note in the game is that you are a boy looking for your sister. This is revealed in the Xbox Live Marketplace purchase screen; there is no form of text or exposition to be found within the context of the game. It’s a ballsy design decision, and I can respect going old school with an all gameplay, no story approach. But between this and Braid, I’m a little tired of video games using “rescue the Princess” as a metaphor for something more ominous. (Inversely, Bayonetta uses Sonic’s rings as a less significant metaphor for collected angel scalps, or something more erotic. Now there’s a review I can’t wait to write.)

So the boy will navigate across different settings, from the woods to otherwise. His abilities include running, jumping, climbing, pushing and pulling. Thus he is on par with Sackboy, capability-wise, or at least minus the ability to transform into a mariachi singer or Old Snake. In this Limbo world, you’ll soon realize that everything is out to kill you. The giant spider from the game’s beginning will no doubt be the trademark villain in future ads and internet memes, (Limbo’s Abobo, perhaps) but numerous other hazards will make your journey feel horrifically perilous. Like Demon’s Souls, Limbo works because you feel like you are alone in a universe that hates you, wants you to know it hates you, and will kill you the moment you stop to tie your laces. Expect many sudden, unplanned deaths, though a very forgiving checkpoint system will keep your young angst in check.

You’ll almost always be in the midst of an event of note during Limbo. There’s no moments of walking long stretches of empty land or elevator rides or “kill all the enemies in the room to proceed” moments that artificially pad out a lesser game’s length. You’ll either be running from the universe’s attempt to kill you, make dramatic platform jumps, or solve many, many puzzles. Most of the puzzles involve some kind of physics-oriented toying of the world’s items, with a dash of abstract thinking and a hint of animal cruelty. I only found myself resorting to internet assistance 2 or 3 times during my playthrough, and I consider my brain as adept at problem solving skills as Sackboy is capable of successfully landing floaty jumps, so Limbo definitely felt like the right kind of challenge. The Boy himself is a surprisingly scrapping lad, capable of landing daring leaps of faith and barely grabbing on to many a ledge. You’ll rarely feel like the game screwed you over from a poorly timed platform event of death. If placed in Super Mario Crossover, the Boy would do pretty well for himself I’d think. At least do better than Samus, anyways.

All of the game is presented in a greyscaled, silhouetted style where all that you see are shadows, glowing eyes and death. It gives the game a staunch, surprisingly realistic visual style that had to have been produced on a budget many times smaller than Heavy Rain or Uncharted 2’s. People will make quick comparisons to Lord of the Flies with certain shocking visual elements, though the game plays with a much different set of themes and concepts. The only part of the game world that feels cartoonish is the Boy himself, or rather, the gratuitous deaths he will face. His body will often crumble and tear, like a ragdoll filled with blood and a spinal column. Some of the death animations come off as so goofy that they pulled me out of the dreadful tone of the game’s universe. I fully expect a rowdy editor to make a Youtube compilation of Limbo death sequences, possibly concluded with keyboard cat. Really, most of my issues are rather insignificant nitpicks. Like the leech that digs into your brain and forces you to walk in one direction, while making for more unique puzzles, feels rather contrived as a premise. Just as one or two saw blades that are capable of floating in the air. But the fact that I’m even bringing up such obtuse issues should demonstrate how highly I think of the game’s thick layer of immersion.

All of which is concluded by a rather abstract ending that leaves plenty of room for interpretation. Much like the actual plot of the game, what makes the ending so profound in Limbo is ever so easy to miss. At 3 hours of length, many aggressive players will finish Limbo in a hurry and be up in arms over the game’s brevity and the strange nature of its finish. You can hunt for hidden eggs or attempt to finish the game in a single session with few deaths to collect achievements if achievements make you feel like a bigger man.

I saw Inception with a friend, and she was outright enraged over how the events unfolded. Without (poorly) spoiling anymore than I already had, she assumed that she had this open-ended film interpreted in the most short-sighted, abrupt manner possible. She would probably hate Limbo too. People who need measure their experiences in quantity or need straightforward stories where the hero stops the villain and gets the girl will probably dislike Limbo. Those people can screw off and get back to Uncharted. For people that want something a little more substantial, an experience where every moment in a game feels thought out as something more significant than time-filler, or even just people that can appreciate a solid platformer, Limbo is a haunting diversion that should be supported.

4 stars

Flower

Braid was a 2008 release starring a self-loathing British stalker capable of using the powers of Shame and Regret to manipulate time in unsavory fashions. All of this may or may not have been a metaphor for the atomic bomb, or the destructive nature of human obsession, or something completely unrelated. It had the right kind of ambition of boosting the games-as-art argument, but the problem was that the developer (all one of them?) knew this. So they (he?) took every chance possible to preach and shove different waves of text and imagery down the player’s eye sockets in an attempt to create the snobbiest game of all time. Perhaps he believed he can get away with anything and get away with it, being that the game was released during a Gears of War year. (And I believe it is no coincidence that the PS3 port was released on an Uncharted year.)

Anyways, the reason I like Flower so much is because it is everything that Braid is not.

Instead of providing one paragraph after another of obtuse text who’s relation to the story is questionable at best (and a crock of time-aged scat at worst), Flower never provides a sentence more complex than “Press Any Button.” Where Braid tried to confound the player by insinuating hidden contexts for every block, enemy and stage-logo, Flower sticks to a consistent theme (in this case, nature. Because nature is the hip thing in Hollywood right now.) And in sticking with that theme, Flower is able to evoke dozens of different ideas, feelings and interpretations. How the Blackberry-strapped businesswoman climbing the ladder of a male-dominated NY corporation views Flower will be different from the labour-driven farmer from Delaware who thinks business should be a male-dominated world. But both will feel something profound, something special.

In Flower, you control wind. Or the Hand of God. Or fate. Or the spirit of Michael Jackson. Who knows. Your playground is this open field where assorted glowing flowers go to be admired. And by breezing through them, the flowers feel so aroused by the wind that they blossom and ejaculate pedals. So your breeze of orgasmic wind becomes a spiral of hot messy flower pedals. Flying over certain groups of flowers will cause flashy effects resulting in segments of the area to come alive with colour and vegetation. And you keep flowing from section to section until the power of Love liberates the entire field. Since the game has the simplest control scheme possible (press any button to move yo!) and the wind has a pretty decent view of the world below, this is a game that even the most video game-inept human can pick up and feel proud of themselves.

The first few levels of Flower feel like the combination of a tech demo and a car commercial without the car. Colourless areas suddenly spring to life at the presence of your speedy invisible vehicle, while subtle musical cues and a soft-hearted soundtrack pluck at the strings above your aorta. All that’s missing is the kid whispering Zoom Zoom.

Then Flower takes a surprisingly dark turn, and suddenly the game shifts into an oppressive mood. What causes this oppression? You’ll have to find out for yourself. But in a game about flowers, you can probably guess what the antithesis of nature is. This shocking shift is handled surprisingly well, and Flower manages to set off a feeling of grit and horror without ever bludgeoning another man and dropping a quart of blood. Something most games can’t fathom.

The biggest surprise about Flower is actually the last level. I shan’t give away what happens, but there is an incredible feeling of empowerment. Moreso than driving the giant mech or gun turret with unlimited ammo at the end of a sequence of any given futuristic shooter, you feel like the most macho son of a bitch alive for unleashing a flowery wrath on the aforementioned enemy. Never before has flowers pumped so much testosterone into my system in what is perhaps the best open-for-interpretation ending to a game since…Braid?

You can make numerous arguments for what it all means. The first gut reaction any person will have is that Flower is about hippie environmentalism; burn down the city, be one with nature, run around naked and smoke weed all day. But that final moment in the game does not suggest any kind of pro-Gaia, anti-urbanism nonsense to me. Rather, there are a number of other, more welcoming messages that I walked away with. The power of imagination, the battle with a 9-to-5 existence, the struggle with drudgery, the value of nourishing your mind. Perhaps all cliché themes in books or Hollywood. But Flower makes full use of its interactive medium to make an impact on the person holding the controller.

I would say that a few small bit and pieces keep Flower from being an all perfect game experience. You accelerate the wind by holding any button on the controller, and steer with the broken Sixaxis motion controls. It’s not that you need absolute precision to manipulate breeze, but I had the occasional moment where my Hand of God was fumbling by, trying to make sacred u-turns to activate a single flower. Also, by design, it’s not a very replayable game. You could hunt down every stray blossom and cabbage patch if you so desired, but once you’ve had your flower fill, you’ll probably let the game stew on your PS3 hard drive for all time. Now keep in mind, I would say the same about Portal and Bioshock, two alleged all-time greats. Even if you never want to play either again, you’ll hang on to the memories of the experience for a long time.

And it doesn’t have Batman in it.

But Flower is a game that every Playstation 3 owner should experience. Even if you elect to not experience it for yourself. After telling my former girlfriend from the Final Fantasy 13 review about it, she was considerably impressed and had a higher opinion about this shameful video game hobby that I waste way too much time in. It’s only ten dollars, with memories that will last a long time. Flower is, arguably, the best game of 2009 to not have Batman in it.

4 ½ stars

Shatter

Being that the calendar for July comprises of such hotly anticipated storewide releases as “Starcraft 2” and “jack all else”, I figure that now is a good time to redirect my attention to the downloadable market. I had originally felt like I was missing out on some unique experiences and concepts, but aside from some business involving flowers and cats shooting yetis, not really. The same kind of marketing one-upmanship that Sony and Microsoft continually engages in happens on the online realm too. “You’ve got your Gears, we’ll raise you an Uncharted. We’ll combat your Gran Turismo with a Forza, suckahs! You’ve got a subscription-based network, well so can we!” (That last one confuses me on so many levels.) And now we have Shatter to counteract the existence of Geometry Wars. I used to say that it was only a matter of time before all major games were released on a single, universal gaming console. The time may be now.

Shatter takes all the themes and concepts of Geometry Wars (and it’s many, many, too many clones) and translates them into the context of Arkanoid/Breakout/That Blackberry game. Upbeat techno music will blare in the background, fancy techno geometry will spiral in the background, the blocks and balls have techno-motives rife with flashy neon glows, even the logo screams future-techno-vibe. I guess what I’m trying to get at is that there is some futuristic theme prevalent within the game. And I think there is a storyline about a paddle breaking out of the prison of an evil empire and trying to liberate a civilization of paddles everywhere. But don’t quote me.

So you’ll move a paddle across a specific plane of space blanketing a presumed bottomless-pit. And your weapon of choice is a bouncing ball thing used to SHATTER the blocks that lay above you. To say this race of paddles would be screwed in a war against America would be an understatement. Now, Shatter being a game made in this modern era where video game physics are the hip trend, all of the blocks and balls operate with unique Shatterverse physics. Some blocks fall, some don’t, some rocket around, some pass gas. The physics reacts accordingly (well, whatever constitutes as “accordingly” in the technofuture paddle-land) based on how you destroy adjacent blocks and use your powers of wind. Your paddle has the ability to either suck, blow or be the victim of sucking and blowing jokes, which will affect the trajectory of your ball and the movements of blocks and powerups around you.

Speaking of, you also have a readily available shield, screen-smashing death laser and the option of sacrificing extra lives to let loose multiple balls on the table. I know these are, give or take, abilities obtained from making the reach for the special pill items in Arkanoid. But I kind of missed the spontaneity of those prescription drugs appearing at random over the control given to the player in Shatter. Like a drug addict that wants to be surprised with what needle is inserted in his vein. Now, I get why Shatter takes a more tactical approach, as this is a pure score-driven challenge. People are expected to develop the best block-breaking strategies and rub it against their pals in the online leaderboards.

But I feel like Shatter isn’t as exhilarating as its premise or even its title let on. You’ll see all the different kinds of blocks and abilities early, and the later levels become variations of “the sky is falling…on you!” Some levels have your paddle moving horizontally at the bottom of the screen, some vertically on the left side, and some of the bottom end of a circle. But I couldn’t help but feel like the game would benefit from letting you move across a larger variety of stranger surfaces and angles. And finally, I learned that the quickest road of success is to merely let the falling blocks enter your bottomless pit and vanish. Worst case scenario is they hit and stun your paddle anyways. (Do paddles get concussions?) Sure it doesn’t do any favors to your high score, but the guy on my friends list has such a superhuman high score that I can’t be made to bother addressing it.

Though I should probably mention that there are some redeeming qualities. As far as techno soundtracks in techno-fused retro revivals go, Shatter’s has a pretty great selection of beats. Songs that’ll probably trap themselves in the far corners of your mind as you sweep the floor in your house, clean your windows or dance to a club’s selection of songs that are inferior to Shatter’s. There are also some pretty clever takes on bosses, with such great names as “Bad Bat” and “Over Reactor” that remind me that actual people with actual souls were behind actual desks programming this game.

Shatter is another of those specific games catered to a specific audience, that audience being the gamer who thrives on topping leaderboards. The way this game is designed, I’ll be enough of a man to admit that it takes a peculiar skillset to rule the paddles, a skillset I do not possess. But it doesn’t make for the most exciting straightforward game experience. As the kind of person who lacks the skills or patience to make any serious go at any online leaderboard in any game, I am not Shatter’s target audience.

3 stars

Though I was Top 100 in the Weekly Rankings for Guilty Gear X2 on the Xbox a long time ago. For a week. With the new week’s scoring starting on the Monday that I checked my ranking.

Deathspank

Deathspank flows through the system like a combination of mixed drugs. It’s a video game speedball; the mixture of coke and heroine that killed your favorite actors and musicians. In my case, the injection of Deathspank caused heart failure to my social life, diet and exercise routine. Or at least it did for all of 12 hours between first downloading the game and now. I am kind of astonished that I finished it at such a quick pace, survived and was eager to write the review so soon. If anything, the game being about 8-10 hours long (completed with almost every side quest) is actually fortunate. I dread the weight-gain that an RPG four times the length could bring forth to my abdominal region.

The first half of that lethal combination is Diablo-driven loot. Your medieval trooper loves to equip armour and weapons, and the desire for higher levels and better gear is strong. Maybe it’s because this is such a small-scale game as opposed to an MMORPG who’s monthly fee is double the price of all of Deathspank, that makes the game appealing. There isn’t the sense of commitment needed to make any kind of significant progress like the life oath World of Warcraft demands of its players. (And World of Warcraft does get name-dropped at one point in the game.) I feel like I can obtain the Level 20 level cap without making any sacrifices to my Saturday nights.

The game is constantly throwing new weapons and gear with colourful names and powers to entice thee. Swords, axes, hammers, crossbows, poles with metal fists at the end and more. Armour with ice or death-based motifs. You can go through the menus and read all kinds of comedic descriptions for everything you acquire in the world. Deathspank’s unique life views (which are kind of like Batman’s, but with more hyperbole and less grammar) are prevalent in every quest log, tutorial and menu screen. Your Deathspank will go through a variety of unique and wonderful wardrobe changes, which adds to the game’s sprinkles-filled flavour.

I should probably talk about the titular hero. Deathspank is the medieval Tick. He loves righteousness, heroism, violence and himself. His quest involves seeking a Macguffin that pretends to be nothing more than a Macguffin. His journey ultimately leads into a battle with a crazy blonde emperor and a search for missing orphans. What follows is a series of astonishing orphan jokes that were as funny as they were painful to my conscience. (I’m entering the field of child services. Given the chance, I would probably place a restraining order on Deathspank, SWAT teams and everything.)

The other half of that proverbial injection into the arm is adventure game humour. Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island fame (that also gets name-dropped) lends the game a mix of wit, charm and black humour to the ‘deathspankings. I’m at the position where I have to bite my knuckles in hesitation and try not to spoil anymore of the great jokes and moments. But the game has many great moments, between character conversations, cartoon-cutscenes and other things starting with C. The only time I was indifferent to the game’s liners are when they break the fourth wall; there is one character too many telling me to check the quest log for quest information and calling me a buffoon.

If you tried to speed-run the game and lunge straight for the orphans, you’ll probably get yourself thrashed. And I’d have to call Children’s Aid Society immediately. Enemies level up at a faster pace than you, thus bringing up the importance of engaging in side-quests to earn that precious XP and loot. Most of these are of the MMO-variety. Get ten pelts, go to that location, fetch that toy. There are a few brief moments that ask for adventure-game logic, in particular of the item-mixing variety. (Ron Gilbert represent?) But otherwise, many of the quests are of the “fetch” variety. And some of them are outright shameless about it. There are two quests that consist entirely of you walking back and forth on the same road repeatedly, collecting some new item that magically appears after you bring back the last magic item. The only reason this becomes tolerable is because of the dialogue Deathspank has with the quest-giver. You at least feel that the game also knows these are annoying game-lengtheners and makes no pretense to pretend they aren’t. Being able to scroll through the inventory and see what Mr Spank thinks of the doohickey he just obtained barely justifies the elbow grease you put into fetching it.

I would say that the action is as rudimentary as video games get. You attack the enemy, then block their attack, then take a swig of your weapon attack again. Deathspank, manly individual he is, can quad-wield four different weapons in what is kind of a welcome instance of overpowering might. You’ll pick up a bevy of potions and special items with various area-of-effect attacks or buffs, but I merely stuck with the healing foods and tonics. Doing so resulted in the often hilarious situation where I’d be running circles from a legion of skeletons while trying to munch on a chicken leg for its slow-healing effects. Combat is less about being tactical than it is about your willpower to smash, slaughter, rape and pillage the orc hometown with your newly-obtained spiky sword. Which is as good a motivator as any.

There are a few minor flaws that should perhaps be brought to the attention, so people don’t believe I come from the EA marketing firm. The inventory system can be a bit sluggish to deal with, given the Xbox’s mouse-free nature. Each item must be dragged individually to Deathspank’s personal grinder to be ground into money. I found myself running into the late-game problem where my inventory was filled with items I was too low-level to utilize and quest-specific tools that I didn’t need anymore. A treasure chest or Deathcloset in which Deathspank could tuck the things he’s too embarrassed to hang on to would have came in handy. Finally, the ending is a cheap cliffhanger. I can renege and admit that cheap cliffhangers may have helped the sales of major franchises like Assassin’s Creed, games so well-advertised as to be popular before the first game was ever released. But smaller, internet-only games whose success comes heavily from word of mouth can ill-afford any kind of negative gossip about a cheap cliffhanger. So forget I said those last three sentences.

Deathspank is a ten hour game that you’ll probably finish in a day. Not because the game is brief but because certain additives creep into your brain and compel you to play onward. I never cared for the psychological urge players have to watch a level number incrementally increase from grinding, or obtaining fake equipment with names you’ll forget about once the game is finished. But the grim humour and colourful worlds seem to throw me off my guard, encouraging me to play this over more artful games. (I postponed reviewing Flower to play Deathspank. Sorry thatgamecompany.) My last endorsement of Deathspank; this will be the first game I ever make a conscious attempt to obtain all of the Xbox Achievements.

4 stars

Noby Noby Boy

There’s a great irony about the idea behind the sandbox genre. The whole term “sandbox game” originates from the idea that games are a synonym for a sandbox filled with sand and toys and things that a child can fiddle with to suit their imagination. The term “sandbox game” is incredibly ironic because most every sandbox game involves playing with things a little kid shouldn’t be playing with; in particular the lives of others. The “toys” in most sandbox game includes guns to murder people with, cars to murder people with, helicopters to murder people with and maybe sexual objects to murder people with. Last year’s Prototype was built on the concept of creating as many blunt or phallic-shaped instruments as possible, that can murder as many people as possible, as quickly and as gratuitously as possible.

So it’s at least nice to see a sandbox game that little kids who enjoy real sandboxes can actually play and not have their innocent minds corrupted. In Noby Noby Boy, you are a worm-dog-creature thing capable of running, stretching, eating, jumping to the heavens and being adorable. The extent of the game’s violence is that the protagonist, BOY, can eat anyone and anything. Though these people will no sooner be crapped out of his rectum, either unharmed or fused with other eaten objects, in what might be the most heartwarming digestive system in the history of man. The two analog sticks each control BOY’s front and rear ends, and BOY begins to stretch into a serpentine figure of colour and charm if pulled apart. Each area comprises of a square flat of land with randomly-generated objects for you to eat and flub-up with your stretchy mass of affection.

The game is quick to remind you that there is no goal, objective or time limit to adhere by. The player is allowed to just grow and fudge up the world at their leisure, and then upload their footage straight to Youtube if so inclined. The one semi-goal to playing Noby Noby Boy is that you are to periodically visit a supernatural deity known only as GIRL and keep her up to date on the length you have grown. In impressing GIRL with your size, the hormones flowing through her body enable her to grow longer and reach the farthest reaches of space.

This is some kind of bizarro-international goal. Every Noby Noby Boy player is reporting their lengths to the same GIRL with the hopes of exploring new worlds. Like most internet community goals, it’s a large number of people contributing to something really useless. You can visit the worlds that GIRL has reached so far (the moon, Mars and Jupiter as of this writing) and consume slight variations of the people and objects you were eating.

If you felt inclined, you can eat the in-game instruction manual, or the speakers producing the background music. That should give you a sense of the game’s lighthearted attitude of itself.

Noby Noby Boy is more of a toy than a game, and it makes no pretenses of pretending otherwise. It’s not something you play for hours on end. Like any toy, odds are your kids will get bored of it before moving back to their action figures (or Modern Warfare 2.) But, five dollars is a reasonable asking price. And you’ll probably get your money’s worth in simply being able to say you played Noby Noby Boy. It’s one of those…experiences.

3 stars

Earthworm Jim HD

Earthworm Jim was definitely one of those concepts that you had to be around at the time to appreciate. Back in 1994, all you needed to dazzle people was a fluid animation of a character climbing a ledge for people to think your production was the real deal. Who cares if there’s a lack of cohesion within the universe’s design; look at the way light shimmers off your gun! And maybe Earthworm Jim was a token case of graphics over gameplay. I loved this franchise as a youngin. The cartoon was vastly underrated in my eyes; a successful blend of Animaniacs with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. What rare Youtube clips exist are well worth perusing through.

My heart was kind of broken when I played the Genesis version of Earthworm Jim on the Wii Virtual Console, and had to contend with all of that game’s flaws. The levels were difficult, there was no battery save, the Tommy Tallarico soundtrack was muffled, and the game wasn’t the brilliant glory of random insanity that I remembered. So the people at Gameloft went and created this HD-update for people like me who’s selective memory transformed the original Earthworm Jim game into something better than it really was. The cleaner visuals amplify the smooth, mostly-organic animations. The audio soundtrack is as brilliant as it was the first two-hundred times people heard it on Electric Playground. You can conserve Plasma Bullets and save them for tricky moments instead of being forced to use them on the next victim because the Sega Genesis controller was ill-equipped to have a weapon-switching button. Game progress is now saved and you can revisit levels at your leisure. There’s a minor annoyance but you have to revoke your game progress should you opt to play on a new difficulty. And I don’t think the cheat codes work anymore, but you shouldn’t really need them anymore now that the game (FINALLY) has a level save. And best I can tell, the “Who Turned Out The Lights” bonus level has vanished, not that too many people knew it existed in the first place. And it perhaps lent little to the overall game experience besides providing a possible visual appearance by a Grue. But aside from that, this HD-polishing succeeds in making Earthworm Jim fun again.

Whether or not you’ll find Earthworm Jim fun in the first place will depend on a few variables. Like if you were a fan of Earthworm Jim to begin with. Or perhaps if you had a flair for the absurd. The only in-game plot comprises of a new-for-2010 comic strip explaining Jim’s origin story and the message “rescue the princess like every hero in the 80s-90s does so get to it boy.” The game has a decided lack of story or even context. Why Earthworm Jim is visiting a junkyard planet or underwater base or giant intestines is never explained other than because people in the 90s did not care for these details. The game’s sense of humor is something of a mixed bag. There are plenty of bodily fluids, as kids in the 90s loved their creepy crawlies and Nickelodeon wackiness. There are also moments of sly charm, like the boss fight with a goldfish or the Hell level’s soundtrack flip-flopping from Night on Bald Mountain to elevator music. And there’s a more-relevant-than-ever-before battle with an armed and dangerous Robot Chicken.

The lynchpin to your enjoyment is your ability to handle Earthworm Jim is your ability to handle the gameplay. You will need to convince yourself that you are not playing Contra, or Doom, or Halo, or Gears or whatever health-regenerating mega action game you are used to. Jim stands perfectly still while firing his mega machine gun of excessive death, striking the most dramatic action hero pose an Earthworm can strike. Players will have to undergo a slightly uncomfortable learning curve of figuring out what platforms can be climbed, walked, jumped on and/or are capable of retaliating with electric shock.

The game does make a few modifications to tone down the difficulty. On the standard difficulty settings, bosses now have a health bar. “A logical addition”, I thought. Less logical is the window that pops up explaining outright how to defeat the foe you are about to face. “An insulting addition”, I thought. While having easier difficulty settings below the “Original” difficulty will make certain segments more humane, they do little to curb the extreme frustration of the underwater tube race sprint in a submarine made of glass. Or protecting your bromate Peter Puppy from aliens and meteor storms, lest he transform into angry puppy mode and devour your torso. The hardest parts of Earthworm Jim 1 have not relented much in their cruelty.

The game has some new content, but they aren’t particularly noteworthy. Three new levels with a computer-chip theme culminate in three different bosses. None of these areas are particularly interesting, but the game loses many, many bonus points for pitting the player against… a keyboard-playing cat. There needs be a ban on internet memes appearing in commercial video game product. There’s also an online four player co-op mode that also leans on underwhelming. The levels merely reuse all assets from the campaign and throws in a bunch of contrived “players must help each other to hit these switches” moments. Plus, hardly anyone is playing online. The game’s most noteworthy feature is a sweet supersuit wardrobe that you can unlock for your Xbox avatar. As far as I’m concerned, I got my money’s worth on that.

Admittedly, Earthworm Jim is something of an acquired taste. An acquired taste rife with boogers, farts and stomach acid, but it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing people visiting this site has seen eaten. Longstanding fans would do well to pick up what may as well be the definitive version of this weird-smelling-but-still-seminal classic. And I would like to see this game succeed, if just to see Earthworm Jim 2 get an HD makeover. And Earthworm Jim 3 get an extreme makeover.

3 ½ stars

Risk: Factions

I guess if you were going to update any board game for the console market, it may as well be Risk. It’s not that online renditions of Kerplunk or Hungry Hungry Hippos couldn’t work (actually, they probably wouldn’t), it’s just that Risk is already a game about war and console gamers love games about war many times more than the soldiers actually fighting wars. Thus, the changes that turned Risk into Risk: Factions at least feels like a logical progression. Inversely, a video game adaptation of Mouse Trap would involve a post-apocalyptic setting where gun-toting survivors must destroy the virus-infected zombie-mouse-monsters with vile death trap devices. And your character progressively levels up with better traps. And it’s in a sandbox. And it has mega-textures. So I guess this game is already in development.

So, Risk: Factions. Someone decided that Risk needed a plot, and that someone is a smart man. I look forward to his concept of revamping the Monopoly Man as a binge drinking sex-addict with the brain of Michael Douglas from Wall Street. Factions contains a quick campaign that details the beginning of a proverbial internet meme battle royale between humans, cats, robots, zombies and yetis. I should clarify that these are army humans, army cats, army robots, army zombies and army yetis. The “campaign” is more of a five mission tutorial showcasing each new faction and gameplay concept, with each of the Flash-based cutscenes detailing the conflict getting more and more escalated. There isn’t even a resolution; once you finish the five missions (which takes an hour or two), it’s presumed that the conflict will rage on through Xbox Live or something. I don’t know what you would add for a Risk Factions sequel – an army of epic beard men?

For someone expecting Baby’s First Company of Heroes, they’ll be in for a dice roll-slap to the face. Risk: Factions abides by the core rules of a Risk game- you still control numbers of…errr, numbers (I guess resembling your army troops) across various countries. The concept of “warfare” is still determined by dice rolls. Up to three dice are rolled on each side, and the result determines who lives or dies. In this version, combat is represented by a troop of cartoon soldiers that are fully aware that dice rolls determine whether or not they come home to their families. And the winning side of a roll gets the right to point-blank slaughter the other side with guns, grenades, mouse-grenades, vomit or otherwise. This is easily the most violent E-rated video game to date, with its upfront and yet so funny depiction of death and destruction. I don’t think a wise parent would rationally let their kids play this game… but yet thousands of parents willingly let their kids drop racial slurs at online Call of Duty sessions, so perhaps this isn’t the worst parenting mistake one can make.

There are some logical changes to the formula for people whom are tired of the hours-long Risk sessions contested over Australia. Total World domination is no longer necessary to achieve victory, but rather being the first to accomplish three objectives out of a sizable list. It would’ve been nice to be able to, you know, view this list at any given time and not be asked to memorize some 8-12 possible ways to win, but the player can assume all of the objectives involve either conquering countries fast or conquering areas of interest. This at least ensures that you won’t have an hours-long session of trying to take over a single plot of land controlled by a player that just happens to roll 6’s at every attack. On the new maps, you can also compete for specific landmasses with super abilities. Controlling both sides of a dam lets you flood a continent and wipe out anyone foolish enough to leave large numbers of spare armies in the area of question, for example. (And amazingly, there are a few fools online that have not learned this lesson.) Or controlling three areas around a missile silo grants the player an extra thrown die for future attacks in the area. You know, because nuclear missile strikes become nullified if the nuke-dice rolls a one.

And therein is a very important point to note about Risk: Factions. Luck is very much a fact of life, moreso than in dice-ruled Bioware games. Sure, there are elements of strategy in the hows and wheres you use your troops. Sure, there are things to not do, like send a single soldier in a country occupied by fifteen legions of gun-toting yetis. But at the end of the day, dice rolls are Lord and Savior of your destiny. The attacked nation still has more than a 1 in 6 chance of a guaranteed successful defense. You will have those moments of watching your army of 12 fall to a single robot, a robot that’ll earn himself a Purple Heart. (Purple Emotion Engine?) Whomever tops the Risk: Factions online leaderboards has many, many horseshoes positioned up his or her rectum. So you have to quickly learn to treat Factions as the social board game it is inspired from and not as a definitive test of wits. Swearing on your Xbox headset because your zombie insurrection failed does not reflect kindly on you as a person, after all.

By the by, you can play original Risk. But I think the game hates you for doing so. Can’t confirm this, but new Risk is so much better than old Risk anyways.

And this is definitely a game best played with friends, either locally or over the internet. You can play online with strangers; and there are good, sane people out there that understand the spirit of Risk-dom. There are also nimrods that’ll drop out of a game if things aren’t going their way, or people that’ll take minutes at a time deciding a single move. This is especially annoying if you play on the traditional world map and each player takes turns selecting countries to own. Because of the considerable time commitment, Risk is a fun game to multitask with. At some point or another, I’ve played Risk online while I was: cleaning the home, flossing, consoling my ex, watching television, playing a Nintendo DS game, managing finances, eating ribs and writing the review for Risk: Factions. I’ll probably play Risk: Factions online while doing the Earthworm Jim HD review too.

There are two definite target audiences that should look into Risk: Factions. People who love board games, and people who love cartoon violence. I tend to think those two markets intersect often and that a lot of people will totally dig the cat-on-commodore 64 action. So Risk: Factions is a fun game for people that don’t like to take their gaming warfare seriously.

4 stars

Alan Wake

I don’t know what to make of Alan Wake as a novelist. His writings, while fairly manageable to comprehend, seem indescript, ridden with clichés. I have a feeling that my former Creative Writing teacher would probably rip the pretentious drunk to shreds if he ever took a glance at his works. However, the game does make allusions to a series of “Alex Casey” books starring a presumably dashing male lead hero. This suggests that Alan Wake is intended to be a straight-to-drugstore novelist, the Dan Brown of video games. And then again, I’ve never read an Alan Wake book, I can only evaluate his typing prowess based on the loose pages scattered around his self-titled video game.

Alan Wake is indeed a video game about a successful book writer. He attempts to live the life of a book writer by way of sewing patches onto his elbows and balancing alcoholism with Vicodins, but the whole “success” and “loving wife” business interfere with his starving artist roots. So he and the missus take a trip to a suspicious and haunted town in the woods. The kind of town where everyone knows everyone’s name, and shotguns and pitchforks keep away outsiders with crazy ideas like “internet” and “Starbucks.”

Alan’s wife goes missing, and he must unravel the mystery to rescue his princess from the castle that was his cabin…or something. Or is it even something at all? Maybe all of the dark and spooky events of the game are happening in Alan Wake’s hallucinogenic head. Sadly, the pretentious “everything is a metaphor for something else” ending I was hoping for didn’t happen, though we may have to wait until Braid is a few years older before that concept is fresh again. But I did enjoy the story in its own way. The game is smart in throwing some kind of crazy cliffhanger at the end of each “episode” to entice in into continuing. And the end payoff for your troubles is mostly satisfying, with a slight dash of the pretentiousness I was gunning for.

The game does abide by its own unlikely conventions. Scattered throughout the worlds are pages of a manuscript for the very game you are playing, spoiling events that are yet to come. I get that including so many spoilers is meant to give these pages a haunted quality, but this is a game that already spoils itself too much. Before each “episode” is a recap of the prior events, a “previously on Alan Wake” package akin to a typical television drama. Like a typical television drama, you can pick out a handful of spoilers of what’s to come based on what is highlighted in these video reels. I get the whole homage business, but I’d rather not pick up crucial plot points before they happen. On a brighter note, I did appreciate the moments where a television flickers on, showing footage of Alan himself soliloquizing about “how books have a life of their own and the writing controls you and” blah blah blah. I laughed so hard watching these because THAT is what so many novelists and poets think of their work. Egotistical writers eat self-directed hyperbole for breakfast and wash it down with a glass of pride and Jack Daniels. So Alan Wake definitely lives up to the role.

Though the fact that he just so happens to be proficient with firearms could be a stretch, despite his coming from NYC. This, by the way, is an action game of sorts with horror-based intentions. Reminiscent of another famous action game of sorts with horror-based intentions. Lets call Alan Wake “Rural Evil 4.” During the day, Alan walks around in search of the specific spot to stand in to trigger the next cutscene, preferably a cutscene that’ll activate night time. During late hours, the dark forces of darkness appear with intent to darkly consume Alan Wake into darkness. Then the game becomes a third person gunfest, although Alan is a third of the man Leon Kennedy was. (For one, Leon doesn’t drop all of his weapons and ammunition every other cutscene.)

The whole gimmick hook behind fighting the dark darkness is that you must first shine a light onto your enemies long enough to annoy them, then you riddle their peeved body with bullets. The game does kind of rewire your thinking to accommodate this pro-light stance. You’ll hunt down spotlights and exploding gas canisters as alternate means to defeat enemies, and suddenly a flare gun strike becomes the most visually spectacular video game explosion since the Modern Warfare nuke.

So Alan Wake works as an action game. An action game with a distinct setting, to be sure. The foggy forests of yore make for a decidedly more enthralling setting than your typical abandoned warehouses and fire temples of other games. But I should also profess that the game strikes me as a complete failure when it comes to the “horror” bit of the experience. I can’t quite put my finger as to why. Maybe it’s the complete lack of gore for this T-rated thriller. Maybe it’s because I was never short on ammo, or because a man with self-regenerating health has nothing to fear in the dark. Perhaps playing a harder difficulty would raise the proverbial stakes. Or perhaps it is because the forces of darkness only know of three methods of attack.

-Evil lumberjacks. (Numbering in the thousands. Bright Falls is very much a one-industry town. If environmentalists had their way with the logging industry, this town is toast.)
-Evil possessed objects. (Which Mr Wake quickly points out is a homage to Stephen King.)
-Evil possessed birds. (Which Mr Wake does not point out is a homage to Alfred Hitchcock.)

Except for perhaps a few moments near the end of the game, these three elements are spread out just far enough to never feel redundant. But that the evil force has no other means to surprise you yanks out some of the fear of the unknown that a horror game should have. Oh, and every time a force of evil ambushes you, the game is quick to slow down time and direct the camera towards their dramatic stage entrance. That’s a bit of a fear-killer too.

But at the same time, I was quick to welcome back these bullet-time sequences. And the game does not skimp out on the use of Bullet Time. I shouldn’t have expected anything less from the same development team that conjured up Max Payne. So I found myself readjusting my standards, deciding to anticipate less of a psychological horror and more stylish hard action, but with a properly-clothed protagonist. And I found myself appreciating the experience more for it.

And there are several other staples that you would anticipate seeing from a Remedy game. Like televisions airing a direct spoof of the show that influenced the very game you are playing. And great original music. And an idol worship for Norse mythology.

It took me about 9 hours to finish the game. Keep in mind that this was a very dedicated 9 hours, with few breaks in between. So this is a game that knows how to sink its hooks into you. (To quote a cliché my teacher would hate me for using.) Alan Wake is that Bioshock-kind of good. It’s the kind of game you are going to want to play once, and savour the experience for a long time. The catch being that in playing it once, you will get your fill and never yearn to touch it again. There are two downloadable packs coming, including one that sounds like an arena challenge mode (which is kind of what some of the final level is anyways) so I have my reservations on the chances of interesting DLC. Nonetheless, this is a moody-fun morself of action non-horror.

4 stars