I’m more of a first person/third person slasher/shooter fan myself but Limbo is unlike any other game I’ve played. Most of the indie platform titles I’ve come across (on a Mac) have been unimaginative and forgettable. Limbo, on the other hand, is dark, ambiguous, atmospheric and surprisingly moving.

A boy wakes up at the ‘edge of hell’ and encounters bear traps, giant spiders and a girl. The player gets to control the boy’s movements and perform some basic actions like jumping, climbing and interacting with objects. As the (very short) game progresses, things get darker and creepier;  you die many times before you figure out what to do. And the deaths are gruesome – plenty of decapitating and impaling. The puzzles get progressively harder and the deaths, more horrifying.

The developers were spot-on in recreating the noir look and feel reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s M, Metropolis and other German Expressionist films. The story is weird and uncomfortable and the ending is open to interpretation (or perhaps, no interpretation at all). Sadly the game clocks in at less than 5 hours and costs 1200 points if you’re on XBox Live.

For me, this is the closest a video game gets to being a work of art.

So, I’ve been using the Apple Magic Mouse for over a week now. And yes, like everything else that Apple comes out with, the design is pure genius. Very minimalist. At first glance, it looks like it’s carved out of a slab of marble.

I love the iPod Touch’s capacitive screen and I like that the trackpad for the MacBook Pro is very configurable. The touch interface for the Magic Mouse is as good if not better but the mouse tends to move when you do the two-finger side swipe. It’s slightly irritating but not something that can’t be gotten used to. Also, no pinch zoom. It tethers quite easily too and remained connected even when I took the mouse to the toilet. Yeah, don’t ask.

The one huge caveat is the price- I had to pay AUD 99 for it. Not cool.