Three reviews and a beggar

Well, I'm going to make this a short set of reviews, m'kay? On one, I'm kinda lat to the party, but on a couple others, I'm relatively on time.

But first, a reminder that The Life and Death of a Sex Doll is now available in print from the publisher's site, or from Amazon, and the ebooks are live on Smashwords and Amazon. Smashwords has DRM-free files for those of you with Sony ereaders, Nooks, Or some other e-ink ereaders like those from CyBook and Asus.

Okay, I'm coming to the party late on Limbo, an Xbox Live Arcade game that came out last Summer. It's about a lost soul, a boy traveling through a booby-trapped afterlife meant to torment him with unlimited "deaths." If you have not played this game, look it up and give it a chance. The black and white shadow format is gorgeous, and the ambient soundtrack builds tension in all the right places. The puzzles are challenging, but not impossible. Some do require delicate timing, but dying a few times to get the timing right is its own reward in this game.

Every trap, you may even be tempted to off the li'l guy, just to see what happens. One of the mechanical floors rises to squish the hero, ejecting black "gore." Which looks like little bubbles. Harmless, really BUT, then the wall lowers and your hero "peels" from the ceiling and drips at the same time. And the sound effects are just right to make this just a little squicky even if it's just a black and white outline. This is like a Mario platform game for the horror fans, or a more graphic version of the original Prince of Persia PC platform game.

And, something you don't hear me say often in ANY video game: I didn't mind dying. In fact, often I jumped into traps just to see what happened. Even accidental deaths resulted in much morbid chuckling, and multiple death weren't aggravating. It was really fun, even dying. I can't say that about many games.

Another accomplishment worth pointing out is how the story unfolds without dialogue, and even without text bubbles. It's a silent "film" with every character and prop cast as a harsh black outline. They walk or run against an alternating background which at times evokes the sense of a haunted forest, and other times resembles a cavern, a factory, a sewer and an abandoned sawmill where you're inside the mill machinery on a mouse's scale.

I've played the game through twice, but only found one of the Easter eggs. I do plan to play again to look for all of them, because even if I die a few times, it never stops tickling my beady black heart. So I give Limbo 5 stars. Great game for fans of platform games.

My next review is for Arcade Fire's album The Suburbs. Musically their style strikes me as falling somewhere between MGMT and Ra Ra Riot. Despite three listens, I can't really say any track stands out. The songs are all good, but there's nothing to give me goosebumps like MGMT's 4th Dimensional Transition or Ra Ra Riot's Dying is Fine. If I had my mp3 player on shuffle, I wouldn't skip any of their songs. But there's nothing on the album that I think, man, I need to hear that again! For this reason, I'm giving the album 3.5 stars. There's nothing here that memorable for me, unfortunately.

And finally, I was able to get a copy of the pilot for the new Teen Wolf series. I'm sure it premiered here in Italy at the same time as everyone else, but I need an English language version, so I had to resort to grabbing a torrent. It took me a while to sort out the codec and get a converter so I could play the movie on my Xbox, and part of the time I was having trouble with bad files, I was thinking, I sure hope this is worth it.

In my opinion, it really is. If the series is as good as the pilot, MTV can count me down for one box set of season one in BluRay format.

This version of Teen Wolf is a reboot in every sense, so forget the teen comedy and think more like a WB Supernatural/Charmed amalgam. I've seen some sneering comparisons to Twilight, and I can see that in the romantic moments. But the show has a lot of tension and action, even managing to make lacrosse look exciting. (I kid!)

The CGI for the werewolf is kinda meh in comparison to the rest of the show, but in my opinion it's a slight step above Doctor Who CGI baddies. So it's passable enough that I can forgive the fakeness.

I like the new Scott, and I like his best friend, Stiles. The romantic interest, Allison, is cute, and her back story is probably going to be interesting. I pegged Derek's character right as soon as I saw him, and YES, there is a very strong Edward Cullen vibe going on with him. Some people will consider that a bad thing. I kinda like it. But, if you're worried, no one sparkled. In the pilot. There's still a chance for future sparkling. (Fingers crossed! No, I kid. But sparkles would be cool. I kid again! (Not really kidding))

I love the dialogue, and the acting is decent. There's a good balance of tension, mush and humor to keep my interest from beginning to end, and the end of the pilot is the perfect place to cut to credits and whet my appetite for more. So I give the pilot episode for Teen Wolf an enthusiastic 4.5 stars, and I hope the series can impress me as much as the pilot did.

And that's it for the weekend update. I'm off to make a lighter version of Agent Orange with San Bitter soda and see if I can tame so less dedicate boozers can try it too.