You might like Limbo (Xbox 360; Playdead; Microsoft; rated teen) if you enjoyed Braid, or if you’ve always wished LittleBigPlanet was a little more depressing.

You might not like Limbo if you’ve sustained a serious brain injury recently.

Yup, we’re dealing with the kind of game here that critics love, but because of its quiet, minimalist presentation and puzzle elements, may disappoint some gamers who generally play louder, faster games, but bought Limbo anyway, because of beautiful screen shots and great review scores. And you can already see the forum discussions: fans of the game will unleash contempt (or pity, since clearly, TC suffers from some measure of diminished mental capacity) upon anyone who dares dislike it. Such whipping boys will in turn, call Limbo’s fans pretentious. That’s just how these things work; ask Braid, Okami, and any other ‘art’ game.

But let’s get right down to it—this is a positive review. Limbo is among the most memorable, lovingly crafted 2D puzzle platformers I’ve ever played. Since I can only experience it for the first time once, I want to share Limbo with everyone I know, and watch them play it. And I’d wanted to thrust an Xbox controller into Roger Ebert’s hands, and make him revisit that “video games can’t be art” piece, before I discovered he’d already recanted much of it, earlier this month.

Limbo is definitely artistic, not merely in terms of its uncommon simplicity of staging (bare minimum of story conveyed entirely through pictures, no dialogue) or its visuals, which are absolutely gorgeous and give Limbo a ‘look’ all its own; but rather, with regard to the art of gameplay design.

I don’t play every game of this type (‘artsy’ XBL/PSN games with retro gameplay sensibilities, costing $10–$20, made by independent developers or small studios), not even all of the ones critics swoon over.  But I really admired 2008’s Braid for how it provided a framework for a series of clever puzzles, without ever making you think, “ok, it’s time to do a puzzle now.”

Similarly, Limbo’s puzzles are well integrated, and it’s really good at wordlessly presenting the puzzle parameters (the block, the switch, the moving platform), making it clear where you need to be, then letting you have at it, without violating any rules it has implied, or cheating to make things tougher. There’s got to be an art—or at least a craft—to accomplishing this so well.

Control-wise, there’s a floaty feel to the physics of jumping, swinging and block-dragging, reminiscent of LittleBigPlanet, which didn’t always feel all that precise. But it works fine; Limbo is about nimble platforming, than pushing forward by solving puzzles, gaining access to new areas through making the right choices.

It’s short—it took me just 4 hours or so to get to the end—but at 1200 Microsoft points (or $15), no complaints here. Besides which, there’s enough platforming variety to make subsequent runs enjoyable, even once you’ve ‘solved’ its puzzles.

9 out of 10

2K sports may have a winner on their hands with NHL2K11… this time. Time will tell if gamers at large agree; the game goes on sale August 24.

I got some hands-on with the game when the NHL 2K11 Coast-to-Coast tour rolled through Vancouver (yesterday and today) and found that it plays well, and at least in casual play modes, features wide open back-and-forth style of action found in early NHL hockey video games I loved growing up.

I brought video gear, too—below is an interview with 2k Sports Director of Marketing Chris Snyder and NHL Player Kyle Turris, of the Phoenix Coyotes, conducted by the lovely and talented Loara Holmes:

For the first time, NHL2K is a Wii-exclusive for 2011—2K sports opted to focus on squeezing more fun out of Wii Motionplus, rather than try to compete with EA Sports hockey releases on the HD consoles. 1:1 puck control allows players to flick, slap and maneuver the puck by using the Wiimote like a hockey stick, and it’s more refined and much better integrated than last year.

All in all I like what I’ve seen so far, the action was fast and fun, and the graphics were better than I expected out of the Wii.

Want to try it out yourself? The NHL2K11 RV may be rolling past your house this summer. Check Here for dates and locations for tour stops, and here’s a regional breakdown:

• July 17-18: Calgary
• July 22-23: Vancouver
• July 26-27: Edmonton
• July 30-31: Winnipeg
• August 2-3: Minneapolis
• August 7-8: Chicago
• August 10-11: Detroit
• August 14-15: Pittsburgh
• August 17-18: Toronto
• August 22-23: Ottawa
• August 27-28: Boston
• August 30-31: Philadelphia
• September 3-4: Washington, DC
• September 7-8: New York

You might like Singularity if you enjoyed BioShock but wished it had better guns and uglier enemies, and you really long for the days when Russians were evil and, for the most part, named Boris or Natasha.

You might not like Singularity if you’ve been playing a lot of Killzone 2, Crysis, Gears or War, or some other exceptionally good-looking game lately, or if you’ll gnaw off your own fingers if you’re forced to collect one more “audio diary” in this lifetime.

Read the rest of the article here.

I’m generally not one to start wringing his hands in anticipation of stuff which won’t be out for months, but I’m a nerd, and there are definitely exceptions. Here’s something to drool over:

Graphics comparisons like this one, published by Bitmob, may have helped fuel criticisms that Crackdown 2 isn't a significant improvement over Crackdown 1

The press embargo has been up for an entire 12 hours now, and the Crackdown 2 review scores have begun to hit Metacritic, and already, loads of controversy. So here’s some more:

Thus far, 35 publications have submitted review scores ranging from 90 down to 42, and resulting in a Metascore of 73 (a weighted average; some outlets have more influence than others).

The “big sites” have played it safe, or in any case landed in the middle, giving it scores in the range of 70-75, and I don’t really have a comment on that. What interests me is the enormous variance between the high and low scores, and more specifically, the reasons cited by journalists who gave the game a bad review.

Now I’m not going to pick on anybody here, but this is a call to action: I implore you to look the game up on Metacritic, take some names, and then go yell intelligent things at the critics who punished Crackdown 2 for ridiculous reasons.

I love to debate. I am not attacking people for putting forth views which differ from my own. But I am questioning the barometer of those who so obviously let their expectations affect their analyses. Expectation is an enemy of fair critique. Especially when your unique position (as a games writer who plays basically everything) makes it unimaginable that your readers have the same expectations.

Wtf am I talking about? Well, I can’t see the justification for praising one game and rewarding it with superb review scores, (e.g. Crackdown, score of 90) and then roundly panning its sequel (e.g. Crackdown 2, score of 45), which you’ve acknowledged to be pretty similar to the original. Both games are good, but because you expected the second to be better…

The way I see it, most of the guys ripping on Crackdown 2 fall into two camps:

First, you’ve got the guy who rips it to make a point, railing against devs who build sequels which they deem too derivative of their predecessors, and feel that awarding a shockingly bad review score is a good way to express their disdain.

This guy is bastardizing an already suspect system. He’s using the review score scale to further an agenda, rather than to put forth a fair assessment of the value of the game. He doesn’t care that he’s obscuring the meaning of the Metascore by doing so, because he knows he’s right.

Second, there’s the guy who pans it because it’s not to “his personal tastes,” after all, review scores can’t be wrong; they’re opinion. And he doesn’t see himself playing Crackdown 2, given what else is available to him, and given how much he played Crackdown 1. I mean, if it’s not new and improved…. psshaw.

This guy is just plain out of touch with the reader—the actual dude—who reads his review.

Because here’s the thing: not everyone plays video games for a living. Most people get a game or two every few months. They don’t have a stack of stuff ‘which they’ve been meaning to get to,’ and to them, except for the odd one which genuinely sucks, video games are awesome. They bring home a new game enthusiastically and joyously, forcing themselves not to drive too fast on the way back from Best Buy because they’re so excited to play it. They don’t take it from a Fedex envelope, eye it suspiciously, and then toss it into the pile. And I think it’s a games writer’s job, to at least attempt to relate to them.

Because the average gamer won’t care, and possibly won’t even be aware that Crackdown 2 is very similar to Crackdown 1.

How do I figure? Go look at console sales at VGCharz. During the week ending june 26, 225,192 people bought Xbox 360s. Two hundred thousand people got a new Xbox 360 last week. And for most of them, it’s their first Xbox 360 (normal people don’t have multiple Xbox 360s).

So I want to ask the journalists in the second camp: if Johnny is buying an Xbox and wants to buy a game or two to go with it, why the hell shouldn’t one of them be Crackdown 2? It’s fun. It’s great mix of platforming and sandbox elements, it has addictive item collection, and when you factor in online play and co-op, many owners will play it for 100 hours or more. You said so yourself…yet your review scores serve to discourage people from buying it.

Also this is only loosely related, but can we agree once and for all that putting the word ‘uninspired’ in a video game review is kind of lame? How the hell do you know how inspired the creative team felt when they were crafting the game?

Rant complete. And forgive me if that sounded harsh; I haven’t had an Agility Orb fix in several hours now, and so I’m feeling moody.

Those who played the original Sin and Punishment (released only in Asia for N64, in 2000, then ported to Virtual Console in 2007) will have an idea of what to expect from Sin and Punishment: Star Successor (to be released on June 27)—but it was all-new to me. And I’m stoked that I found it.

It’s the type of shooter I want to spend an evening with, alongside one of my hard-core gamer friends, passing the controller back and forth while someone else cues up playlists on the iTunes, another dude in the corner exhibits fucked up stuff from the YouTube, and everyone multitasks the pizza.

Read the rest of the article here.

Fanboys are a discriminating bunch.

as High Moon Studios really able to do it? Could they deliver, under the scrutiny of gamers—who demand basic fun and depth—and all Transformers fanboys great and small, who want to be properly serviced (sorry for that mental picture) but also demand hard evidence that these devs “get it?”

To begin answering this question, one must first decide which characteristics are absolutely vital to the success of a Transformers video game… and then ask, does Transformers: War for Cybertron (released yesterday, PS3 and 360; Activision; rated teen) have them?

First, it needs to adequately personify the Transformers

Transformers needs dialogue to come to life. These are robots, after all—and sometimes they’re not even robots, they’re cars and jets. You can’t exactly empathize with their longing facial expressions as they twist their wedding rings, or relate to them through their taste in clothes or DVDs; from what I can tell, all they love is justice. It’s really only through dialogue that one gets any sort of a window into their souls.

Transformers needs those on-the-nose life lessons from a ludicrously noble and sincere Optimus Prime, instances of Megatron grunting dismissively at a shrieking Starscream, and a general air of the Autobots as a motley crew of hardworking, wisecracking do-gooders.

Read the rest of the article here.