SuperMeat Boy and RSI

Super Meat Boy is going to give me RSI if I don't buy a USB controller by next week.

It's totally retarded but I can't stop playing it. There's this sadistic satisfaction I get from jumping chunks of meat into spinning sawblades. It doesn't even matter if it takes me a million tries to finish a level. Watching the replay afterwards is awesome. You get to see the rat race of all the little balls of meat dying horrible deaths.

I like simple games like this in the downtime between Guild Wars 2 Beta Events. It really does a great job of getting my mind off of things and allowing me to chill out for a bit, but stupid Super Meat Boy is this addiction that's going to end up killing my hands. Oh well. At least I'm having fun.

Humble Indie Bundle V gets bigger

For those of you who are still on the fence about this whole Humble Indie Bundle V deal, it's worth considering that they just added Braid, Super Meat Boy, and Lone Survivor to the bunch. That brings the grand total to 8 games and you only need to spend $8 to get everything. That's $1 a game! What a deal!

If you've already bought the bundle don't worry! You can use your old purchase link to go and activate the new additions at no extra cost! It just got crazy up in here!

LIMBO?

So I finished LIMBO today and it got me to thinking about story, and how some games approach it in unique ways.

See here's LIMBO, a brilliantly artistic game with a definite sense of moody atmosphere, but the story is essentially whatever you want to make of it. Is the kid running from something? Is he trying to get somewhere? Is he trapped in some eternal death machine? Any one of these could be correct, or none of them.

There's nothing in the game that gives you a sense of what's going on, and really maybe it doesn't really matter. As a challenging, and sometimes rewarding, moody platform puzzler LIMBO succeeds. Even without dialogue, or context, it kept me playing. Maybe I just wanted to see the next new and unique way the developers had devised to kill that kid. God knows I had to have killed that kid hundreds of times. Electrocuted, stabbed by giant spiders, torn to bits by saw blades, and jumped to his death, again, again, and again. Maybe that's part of the fun in LIMBO, maybe the whole point of it is to die, get back up, and try again.

Was I satisfied? I thought the game did a great job artistically, and there were some moments where it made a wry smile creep up onto my face. LIMBO definitely pleased me, but it left me wondering.

What exactly did I just play for the last 3 hours?