Review | Xbox 360 Triple Pack (Limbo, Trials HD and Splosion Man)

We’re nearing the last handful of months of 2011 and we know what that means. Exams. You come for a game review, and instead I’ll enrich you with some intermediate arithmetic. How’s that for social conscientiousness?

33/2000 = 0.0165

The first sum on our way to realising the value of the Xbox 360 Triple Pack converts between Microsoft Points and NZ dollars. It’s an arcane, deceptive system. But with the power of NCEA level 1 Number even I can nut it out. And you thought you’d never use anything you learned in school? How naïve you must be. Perhaps you should cut down on the old digital entertainment.

1200 + 1200 + 800 = 3200

In the second line of working we add together the current cost, in Microsoft points, of the three Live Arcade titles in the recently released Xbox 360 Triple Pack. Maths. How empowering. Liberating, even.

Both Limbo, a puzzle game with a strikingly dark style, and Trials HD a physics based stunt motorbike game, retail in the Xbox Live Marketplace at 1200 points each. While ‘Splosion Man, a cheerful puzzle-platformer starring an escaped experiment who explodes scientists into meat-piñatas, comes in at a measly 800 points it is by no means two-thirds the title of its brethren.

3200×0.0165 = 52.8

Next we calculate the monetary cost of purchasing all three games separately. It comes to $52.8.

Steep, don’t you think?

52.8 – 35.99 = 16.81

And finally, we reach a difference of $16.81 between that price and the bronze smelted kiwis you would drop purchasing the games together in their disk based envelope.

Of course, this cost differential isn’t the only aspect of the different delivery methods to factor in. Do you value hard drive or physical space more? That depends, I suppose, on the breadth of your living room or the size of your digital console’s memory bank. Also, it’s worth noting that the disk does not include extra downloadable add-ons for any of the three games. Now, you wouldn’t get that if you downloaded each title individually online, but in this sort of “definitive” packaging of titles it’s always nice to have every piece of content in one place. Better to have it all on the disk than have lonely motorcycle tracks floating around on the HD. Surely they could have included the free “Prologue to Ms. Splosion Man” which would have served well as marketing for the sequel.

It’s way cheaper though.

Do you own one of the three? Now it becomes a much harder sell. But remember, a physical version can be transported around. Shared with friends and family. Surreptitiously traded for a copy of Timesplitters 2 (For PS2) on the playground. A digital copy is stuck fast.

What’s great about this triple pack is that there isn’t a weak link. If, for example, the disk received after handing over your hard earned Hillarys burst forth with two wonderful XBLA games, followed by one dud that meekly limped out afterwards, it would be more worth your money to buy the two good games online and forsake the weaker one completely. In this case however, all the games are good. Really good. And pretty different from one another.

Limbo

Limbo’s protagonist is immediately established as being fragile. Clearly a child, from the size of his head in proportion to his body, he blinks once before standing in empty dark woods. Black-and-white, in this case, is a misnomer. There’s plenty of black. But the rest of the world is painted in streaky shades of grey. The only true “white” is in the child’s pin-prick eyes that bob slowly as he trudges from left to right.

And he is just that. A child. His skill set includes the manipulation of simple switches and the pushing of medium-sized crates. Clambering up ropes rounds out his options, and is his greatest talent. This isn’t Portal which can be sold in one sentence based on its core puzzle solving mechanic. Or The Legend of Zelda, where you gradually accumulate tools to solve complex problems. In Limbo the puzzles, which are as elegant as they can be based on their simplistic foundations, are all built upon simple manipulations of the dark environment.

The art design is remarkable. It trades the woods for an equally lonely, rain slicked industrial environment part way through. And the puzzles are great too. But best of all? They work together.

See, Limbo is mature. You will march the boy to his death often, in ways that are made almost more shocking by the shadows that mask their full horror. Bear traps are a regular occurrence, as are circular saw blades. Expect to be drowned, in a way that’s shockingly understated, and be electrocuted quite regularly on the way to finding the appropriate solution.

You know that feeling you get when you solve a really difficult puzzle?  Not just any head-scratcher either, but a really fairly designed one that you solve well – without stumbling on answer by hours of trial and error? Limbo reaches its chilling best when it subverts that feeling, that rush of excitement when you know you’ve got it right even before you try it, by throwing it out completely and substituting it with something horrifying. Here the gameplay and the visual design are melded perfectly, in total synergy. As what you’ve actually got to do dawns on you and you think “No way. Surely not! Surely the designers wouldn’t make something like that the solution?” a sense of doom and awe takes hold.

In other words, Limbo is at its best when a twisted outcome is the answer, not a fail state to be avoided.

If I were to throw one criticism at Limbo it would be directed squarely towards the pacing of these moments. There aren’t as many as I would have hoped for, and the two best ones occur within the first fifth of the game’s running time. Even when the boy gets off scot-free (Which is by far the more common solution, one which runs against the thematic point of the game – whether you take it as a metaphor for growing up, or anything else.) it’s still a good puzzle game with a great art style, but it feels like it never quite lives up to what happens during its incredible opening.  [8]

Trials HD

Trials HD complements Limbo’s binary puzzle structure, in which there is only ever one concrete solution, by having you deal to every aspect of a motorbike’s physics in 2 dimensions. The right and left triggers break and accelerate while the left trigger deals to the rider’s stance on the bike. You’ll need to lean forwards and back to stay upright when you break quickly, and not fall from a steep slope.

For a game that’s about a helmeted ride in a 2d plane over a loose collection of scrap tubing and tyres it’s clear that effort has been put into making the game look great. Lighting effects, especially, are lovely. But you will see loads of unique objects and there’s a sense of weight and momentum to the bike in motion as well. What’s great about this is that none of it is necessary. At all. It could just have easily looked like an above average internet flash game and it wouldn’t have impacted one bit upon the gameplay.

Success will come. In time. But Trials HD shamelessly wedges you into a frustrating, stifling box of failure for hours, before releasing you into the fresh air. Constant fine tuning is required. Take your fingers off the sticks. Shake out your muscles a few times. You don’t want to practice the wrong method too many times and get stuck in the failspace.

Of course, you can take unlimited numbers of attempts in each level. They even contain checkpoints, which threaten to render every challenge completely miniscule. But you weren’t seriously going to leave a level merely concluded were you? You can get through the fifty without too much trouble that way. But 50 shining gold medals? That’s a different matter.

The best thing about Trials HD might be the juxtaposition of painstakingly slow, and ludicrously fast pacing. In subsequent moments you might be careening through the air, and then micromanaging your progress over a tiny hill. Each type of challenge requires lightning fast reflexes, whether it’s to deal with an oncoming obstacle or to make sure the position of your front wheel is absolutely perfect.

There’s a lot of content in the game. Even if 50 levels wasn’t already enormously satisfying enough the game includes a track editor that allows you to edit bike courses and share them over Xbox live. It’s exactly the kind of game that lends itself to this kind of feature. The 2d plane isn’t overly complex and placing objects into is intuitive.   [8]

‘Splosion Man

My favourite part of ‘Splosion Man might be the way the magma-bodied creature that you play us runs. The games seems to pick randomly from a handful of potential perambulations, such as the arms outstretched “Brrrrrm i’m-a-plane!” one, to the monstrous leering forwards as scientists get chased down. It’s clear that the escaped experiment is having fun in ‘Splosion Man. And it’s pretty infectious.

‘Splosion Man sits between Limbo and Trials HD in that there is definitive solution to each puzzle. But it also requires skill to pull off the platforming needed to make it. You play as the product of an experiment gone horribly wrong – a humanoid monster than can detonate three times before recharging. The ethics ignoring scientists that attempt to contain you are given their just deserts whenever you ‘splode in their vicinity, rupturing into a pile of tasty looking hams and steaks.

As great as the character models look, from the swollen cartoony researchers to their retro robots, the charming visual design doesn’t quite extend into the environments. Platforms tread on the side of generic, all seeming to be simple riveted metal panels. Similarly, there’s never any reason given for why there might conveniently placed tubes all about the place to propel ‘Splosion Man through the air so violently.

You have a triple jump, effectively, thanks to your trilogy of explosions (triggered by all of the face buttons) occurring each moment. Also, you can explode from wall to wall allowing you to gain elevation. Oddly out of place cannons will lift it of the ground in response to your presence and many puzzles rely on your ability to time it such that you end up inside one, and can be propelled to an advantageous position within the level.

‘Splosion Man oozes personality, and the gameplay is constantly evolving.   [8]

Maybe it’s a stretch. But I’d say the three games in the Xbox 360 Triple Pack complement each other. One is entirely about fine-tuning your skills and honing your reflexes, and another is about finding that single shocking solution to a puzzle in a lonely, grizzled context. And one is about exploding scientists into meat. (In all seriousness, ‘Splosion Man combines the reflex based gameplay of one with the puzzle solving of the other.) More importantly, each of the three games are really good and by purchasing them together on a real life piece of burnt polymer you will save yourself the price of a movie ticket.

Enjoy your $17. (to 2sf).