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Vice Blog

SHEPPARD’S VIDEO-GAME PIE

LIMBO
Platform: Xbox Live Arcade
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios

Limbo is a weird, short, atmospheric side-scrolling platformer. Entirely in black and white, by which I mean mostly black and grey, you play as a boy trapped in, well, limbo, or at the very least some creepy wrong world full of bear traps, giant spiders, brainworms, and other little kids straight out of Lord of the Flies. The controls are simple—use the stick to move left and right or climb ladders, A is for jumping and B is for grabbing things or pulling levers.

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The level design however is varied and imaginative, and I found the narrative really satisfying in its minimalism. According to promotional materials, the story is: A boy descends into limbo out of concern for his sister. This is not communicated in the game proper—you're just a kid, and you're in this weird Edward Gorey world where everything is trying to kill you. Despite this minimalism I was always intrigued and desired to press forward; the game presents the tone of an enigma waiting to be unraveled and not just a bunch of video game level design without story behind it, and I'm a sucker for hard work done to establish a tone.

Great gameplay, great atmosphere. Check it out.

MONSTER HUNTER TRI
Platform: Wii
Publisher: Capcom

The Monster Hunter franchise is huge in Japan but hasn't really made the transition to North American popularity yet, for understandable reasons. It started out on the PS2, made the switch to the PSP, and was going to head to PS3 when Capcom looked at how much it'd cost to make it for a high-definition system and said "Screw that, do it on the Wii; it's got a bigger customer base anyway."

The latest installment is interesting. The thing you have to understand about it is it's basically a monster-hunting simulator, and not a game with a story where you just happen to be a dude who hunts monsters. The gameplay is built around hunts—either you have to kill a bunch of monsters within a time limit, or you have to kill one big monster. Each monster exists in an environment and has certain attack patterns, and a lot of the game is "Pick the right weapon for the monster's movements, pick the right supplies for the environment it's in." The rest of the game is "Go kill the monster." When you're done, you get loot, which you can use to go after bigger monsters. There's really nothing to the game except the hunt. In single-player, you're protecting a village. In multiplayer, you're working out of a city. There are a lot of quests only available in multiplayer.

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It's also crazy-hard and unforgiving—monster hunting is work, and you will need to learn those attack patterns and choose the right weapons and supplies to get the job done.

Speaking personally, I'm glad I tried it, but it's not for me. It's not that it's bad, it's just I prefer solid-plotting over MMO-style extermination-for-loot-for-extermination treadmills. I dunno, maybe you'll like it better than I do. As I said, it's huge in Japan and it's the sort of thing we don't import much, so it's probably worth checking just for novelty.

TRANSFORMERS: WAR FOR CYBERTRON
Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher:Activision

I am a fan of Cybertronian lifeforms. When I was five, all the toys I liked were Transformers or Lego. I had Transformers: The Movie and the cartoon episodes "The Five Faces of Darkness" and "The Return of Optimus Prime" on a VHS tape and I watched them endlessly. I liked Beast Wars (Beasties up here in Canada because we have rules against putting the word "war" in kids' cartoon show names) and Beast Machines and Transformers: Animated and even the first Michael Bay live-action movie.

Transformers: The War for Cybertron is the Transformers video game I've been waiting for. There is not a damn thing wrong with it, and no reason not to play with it. It's visually rich, controls well, has an online three-player co-op enabled single-player campaign of decent length, and has a multiplayer mode I actually like.
Most of the time, it is a decent third-person shooter. You control stompy robots using the "L-trigger to bring up your gun, R-trigger to fire it" control scheme I love so much. A click of the left stick transformers you to vehicle form, in which L-trigger is a speed boost and R-trigger fires vehicle guns. The transformation animations are dynamic in the sense that you can transform on the move, so you don't have to stand there like an idiot and get shot while converting. In robot mode you have an excellent melee attack mapped to the right stick. All of this together means you will be doing a lot of the following: Shoot guys from a distance for a while, then transform into a vehicle and drive up to them, then transform back to a robot and sword them in the face. This is awesome when you're playing as a jet because you don't so much "drive up" as "swoop down."

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The campaign is ten levels divided in half. For the first half you play as the Decepticons and come to the brink of conquering Cybertron, and then the game switches over to the Autobots and you turn the tide of the war. The Decepticon campaign is, unfortunately, the weaker of the two, with less impressive scenery or memorable level design, although it does have what's probably the best level in the game—the second one, where you play as one of the Seeker jets Starscream, Skywarp, or Thundercracker. The Autobot campaign is better overall and has what I think are the second and third best levels.

They just went crazy here with the level design; Cybertron is a hell of a fully-realized setting. There are whole sections of the first Autobot level where you're just driving quickly past lushly-modeled metal cityscapes that are getting bombed and ruined around you--huge amounts of detail for shit you only see for half a second on your way from Point A to Point B. It's a feast.

Multiplayer: I do not usually comment on multiplayer because I do not usually like it, but War for Cybertron's multiplayer is cool by me. You play as one of four classes of character—Leaders, who transform into trucks, do decent damage, and buff allies; Scouts, who transform into cars, cloak and otherwise zip around, Soldiers, who transform into tanks and do huge damage, and Scientists, who transform into jets, heal allies, and debuff enemies. Each character class has a variety of different skills you unlock as you level it up; I love playing as a Scout with the "extra-long cloaking" and "extra damage after coming out of cloak" skills. In addition to this, you can choose your character's chassie and color scheme, to a limited extent, and can eventually unlock three character slots for each class. Every slot you fill, you can choose an Autobot appearance and a Decepticon appearance. My one complaint here is it lets you name your character slots, but the people you play with don't get to see that name, so I ended up naming them by function ("Hunter," "Sneak,") instead of using Transformersy names.

There's one batch of downloadable content out, which adds some multiplayer stuff—extra maps and five character models. It's basically the only thing about the game I'm not satisfied with. If you really, really want to play multiplayer using a Jazz or Shockwave lookalike, go for it, but otherwise it's skippable. The multiplayer community for the game is small enough and few enough people have the DLC that the new maps won't show up much on rotation. Oh, well. Otherwise, can't recommend this one enough.

STEPHEN LEA SHEPPARD