Limbo, by PlayDead Studios, was released for the Xbox Live Arcade a few days ago. Quite simply put, it is astounding in that it is both a loving call-back to games of the past while also pushing the envelope, so to speak. The story is so simple that it almost isn't even there. You play as a young boy who wakes up in a decidedly deep, dark forest. This is not your normal scary forest. It is, as the game's title points out, Limbo. You're apparently searching for your little sister. I say apparently because the only reason you would know this is by reading the description of the game before you download it. This is possibly the first of many call-backs to old side-scrollers, in which story was often an afterthought. I mean, what the hell was really going on in Mario?

This game is unique in a number of ways, the first being that it is entirely black, white and grey. The dark silhouette of the player is broken up only by the stark contrast of his bright, white eyes. You might find it a little creepy, which is interesting considering he's the one you're supposed to be identifying with.  Limbo is a puzzle platformer in the same vein as the recent Braid. Though not nearly as difficult, it is still innovative in its problem solving. Often, the way to overcoming an obstacle is death. You will die the first time you play Limbo. You will die frequently.

And let me tell you, these deaths are gruesome and oftentimes unavoidable. Sometimes the game requires you to take a leap of faith, and sometimes that leap of faith will put you in a pit of spikes if your reflexes aren't quick enough (thankfully my two decades of gaming have provided me with suitable enough instincts). Oftentimes the only way to best a trap is by letting it kill you and then coming at it from another angle once you discover how it works. And there are plenty of traps. Giant spiders, bear traps, spikes, buzz saws gone array, and just plain old pits of death. And even though the game is in black and white, the deaths are still gruesome. Particularly because of the way your rag-doll body gets torn apart, but especially because you're a kid. The lingering regret over your many deaths does not diminish over the course of the game.

Limbo also has an interesting lack of a soundtrack. There are ambient noises in the background, but the only sound comes from in-game actions. Leaves rustling, flies buzzing, blow-darts hitting your body. The lack of a score draws even more attention to the game play, which as I've said is fantastic, even though your only actions are jumping, grabbing and climbing. As many reviewers have noted, and as I agree, the latter half of the game is challenging but not as awe-inspiring. Gone are the creepy forests and menacing spiders in favor of a more traditional industrial yard, although the abandoned hotel signs are eerily poignant.

My only criticism of this game is that it is priced too highly. It's a short game that offers great replay value and a unique experience, but the 1200 Microsoft Points is a bit much for those of us who decided that we couldn't wait for a price drop. All in all, I highly recommend Limbo.

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

Aside from pop-up books and Dr. Seuss, Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park is one of the first books I remember reading. Though I've since replaced it on my shelf, somewhere at home I still have the yellowed, wonderful-smelling dog-earred copy that my grandfather gave me to read. I can't begin to speculate how much I actually understood of the novel as a seven or eight year-old, but I'm proud of my younger self for having powered through it. There was something about this novel that drew me to it when I was younger. I mean, I was naturally one of those nerdy kids who is obsessed with dinosaurs. I can't remember if that was in direct response to the film adaptation by Steven Spielberg or whether it was simply amplified by it. Either way, this book will always have a special place in my heart simply because it jump-started my life-long obsession with fiction. I used to do my own illustrated adaptations of the film (or novel - let's face it - I was seven and even I probably didn't know which one was which). I even used to run around on recess pretending to be a dinosaur.

So it's natural that I was a bit nervous reading this book again after so many years. My tastes have changed and I've gotten about a decade-plus of reading and education in between now and then, so I was wondering how it would hold up. After all, Crichton's work isn't exactly Pulitzer Prize-winning, but it certainly isn't what I like to call "grocery store magazine aisle" material. Not surprisingly, I still enjoyed the book thoroughly. Partly because reading about dinosaurs is still sadly appealing to the large part of me that hasn't grown up, but also because Crichton's writing style contains much to be admired even as an adult educated in film and literature.

As I discussed in my review of the Stand, it bothers me when science fiction/fantasy makes absolutely no effort to explain itself. Crichton goes to great lengths to make sure that the fantastical elements in his novels, while not technically or scientifically feasible, are at least plausible within the confines of both the story and the mind of a reader not educated in complex scientific theory. He's also a fan of the "false document" literary technique, so there are lots of fabricated but still interesting scientific theories going on in the story, though this particular technique gets used much more in Eaters of the Dead, a novel by Crichton that I read earlier this year (and will review later).

I have few negative criticisms of the book. There are times when it gets a little preachy, particularly when Ian Malcolm (try not to picture Jeff Goldblum while you're reading) serves as the moral mouthpiece of the author, going on page-long rants about the dangers of unchecked science. While that is an admirable and understandable viewpoint to have, it just comes off as a little ham-fisted when coming from the mouth of character who is in a state of delirium. The "unchecked science" theme really gets pounded in hard and could have been a bit more subtle. The novel, at 399 pages, reads rather quickly - though as a person with a stack of books to read, this is actually a plus.

I'll be reviewing some of his novels later, but this one is still one of my favorites. I plan to have my children read it someday in the hopes that they'll be as inspired as I was to delve into reading.

The Stand, Part III, by Stephen King

In the end, I think I was kind of disappointed by the Stand. Now, here's where I stand on supernatural elements in fiction. I completely understand why writers or filmmakers choose to leave certain things unstated. It adds to the mystery. I haven't read Stephen King's the Shining yet, but I'm told he leaves a lot less to the imagination than Stanley Kubrick does in his film adaptation of the work. But the thing is, I'm sure after I've read the book I'll end up loving both. I love that in Jaws that you never see the shark. Or that in LOST we don't ever specifically find out what that damn island was for. I think the introduction of midichlorians was a terrible idea for the Star Wars universe.

But I also love when things get explained. And in the Stand, they really don't. You never find out what the bad guy is, or why he needs a son, or why the good guys need to stop him. You never find out what's going on in the rest of the world with all of the other people that have survived. I mean, the climax features an atomic bomb going off. The good guys did not need to go marching out to Las Vegas to die needlessly. Trashcan man blew half the state to hell. So, at the end, I guess the moral of the story is to not make fun of the mentally handicapped. I just wish that after spending 1,141 pages with this story, King could have given me a little bit more to work with. I also could have done without the fifty pages of Stu and Tom Cullen walking home. Talk about a buzz kill.

In the end, though, I liked the book. The pacing was great for a novel so large, though I would have tinkered with the structure a little bit. Character development was spectacular though. Enough lingering, though. It's on to the next book.

The Stand, Parts I and II, by Stephen King

I've been reading this novel for what seems like forever. When your list of "to read" books turns into a pile (it stands at 36 as of now), it becomes difficult to read just one novel for so long. Though, I have made rather quick work of it. I decided to read this book for two reasons: (1) because everyone I know who has read it (even my mom) says that it's amazing and (2) as a writer I'm interested in how someone could spin one story out for so long in a way that would keep the reader interested. The only other thing I've read by Stephen King is the first book in the Dark Tower series (with the other six soon to follow) and I have to say that I'm actually impressed. Usually books that get sold in the magazine aisles at Walgreen's are there because those are the only places they will sell, or because they're so unanimously acclaimed that it's no shame to find them next to copies of Twilight and Nora Roberts novels.

I'm impressed by his writing style so far. His prose has a way of exuding intelligence while not coming off as arrogant in that "I actually studied literature" sort of way. And when he wants to be, he can sound pretty damn epic (though not as epic as a Matt Stover, I'm sorry to say). I've decided to break up my entry about the Stand into two parts, simply because it's so goddamn long. I've just finished Book II, and I have to say I wasn't as impressed with it as I was Book I. Book I surprised me in that it introduced what felt like dozens of characters, most of whom I was not bored with after a few pages. Generally when I read a novel that switched perspectives, there's always one or two story-lines that I'm less interested in. Not the case in the first half of the Stand. Characters are all introduced and given interesting backgrounds, and then the plague hits.

I loved all of the disturbing descriptions of an abandoned world where everyone has died. Larry Underwood walking the dead streets of New York City and Nick Andros watching the city of Shoyo die a slow death are of particular note. And of course anything involving the Walkin' Dude Randall Flagg was great to read. I'm always more interested in spending time with the villains than the heroes. Heroes are all fine and dandy but it's the villains that interest me. It's difficult to write an antagonist that doesn't come off as one-dimensional in their "evil". And while Randall Flagg is a, well, personification of evil without a speck of good in him, King manages to make him mysterious enough as to warrant interest. Everyone loves heroes - but I think they can be rather boring. How hard is it to make the decision to be a good guy? I'm more interested in what reasons the bad guys have for turning to the dark side.

Book II, sadly, I found rather tedious. It was well-written, and incredibly interesting to see how the plague survivors all find each other and reestablish society. All of the problems they faced seemed realistic and I have no problem with this chunk of the book in itself. What I did have a problem with is that there were no character shifts whatsoever for about three hundred pages. I last saw someone on the evil side (Trashcan Man, I believe) on page 615. I'm on page 915 and I think it's just about ready to give me what I want. Spending that much time with the good guys as they have meetings and get the power turned back on and take the trash out was causing me to start losing my interest. How much of this was cut out of the first edition of this novel I'm not sure, and I have no desire to find out.

I'm hoping that things really start to pick up with Book III. I've only got two hundred and twenty-something pages left, and I feel like in a novel of this length, that might not be enough time to pull of the climax I'm hoping for.

Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell

Part of what makes me nervous about analyzing my reactions to a text is that more often than not, I have about three settings: hated it, loved it, or "meh". I feel that the more I review things, the better I'll get it at it - after all, I have a liberal arts degree. If that means one thing, I hope that it means I'm able to think critically about something.

That being said, I loved this book. I loved it. I wish I had written it. It was a completely random coincidence that I came across this book. Or, maybe not. I ran across an interview with the author on IGN.com (which I check daily for gaming news), was interested in what Tom had to say about video games and immediately ordered his book on Amazon.com. Part of what interested me is that I'm just starting to becoming aware of the growing body of criticism on gaming - this was brought on by my Video Art graduate seminar, in which I wrote a research paper on the context of gaming in the art world.

It was a pretty basic paper - it could have been a lot longer, were it not for time, motivation and professor-set limits. My basic thesis was that any backlash that video games receive when their analyzed as art (from people such as Roger Ebert, though he has since recanted his poorly-thought out accusations) is simply part of the normal critical process that new mediums go through. I compared it to the initial critical backlash against photography and cinema (which were similarly derided as lacking any artistic merit) and then applied different methods for analyzing other forms of art (literature, film) to video games, as well as made examples of games that are currently pushing the boundaries of the medium. Basically, the point of my paper was blunt - games are art, and you can't argue against that.

The attitude towards games that Bissell's book takes is similar, though he is a little more willing to question/consider the artistic merit of games than I was. Even from the perspective of a non-liberal arts-educated gamer, I would have found this work entertaining at the least. There are numerous anecdotes about Bissell's gaming experiences, many of which I was able to sympathize with. These ranged from losing hours upon hours of time, to the point of missing out on important real-life events while playing Bethesda Softworks' RPG's such as Fallout 3 or Oblivion - especially the hazards of neglecting to save early and often. There was also the highly entertaining recounting of a versus match in Left 4 Dead, in which I felt just as proud of his achievement reading about it as I would have been playing it. Even when I hadn't played a game, Bissell's writing made me feel like I had - or that I wanted to, as evidenced by my new desire to play Far Cry 2.

However, I am aware of critical theory, which made this book that much more enjoyable. I was able to find reasons to justify the hundreds of hours I've spent gaming throughout my life, and the claims that I made in my paper were also reinforced. In all actuality, I wished there had been more critical discussion - I would have loved for this book to have been 5o0 pages. Alas, the target audience for this book - ostensibly in some part gamers, probably would not have enjoyed that much critical discussion. At any rate, reading a work about someone so impassioned about something - something that I also share a passion for, has inspired me to restart this blog. So I owe this author gratitude, and I'll send him an e-mail when I have the time.

I'm not going to grade this book, but if you're intelligent and a gamer it's an obligatory read.

The Third First Post

I need to write. This blog will help me do that. I'm reworking it for the third time - the last two formats apparently proved too restrictive for me. Now, I'll use the blog for whatever I feel appropriate. I plan to review everything I read, watch, play or write. I'll start with my 2009 and 2010 reading lists, though my memories of a book I read in January 2009 might be a bit scant. Oh, well. Obligatory first post now concludes - for the third time.