I usually don't like listening to outside music while I play games, and certainly not while I play atmospheric games like Limbo. And yet if I had to choose an alternate soundtrack for Playdead's dark little game, I could think of worse albums than Radiohead's Amnesiac.

The Gameological Society has combined the two, creating this video of the game to demonstrate just how well the album's tunes line up with various parts of Limbo.

In the accompanying article, Derrick Sanskrit points out how the lyrics match with the game's ambiguous themes of death and purgatory:

"If you'd been a dog," Thom Yorke sings in "Knives Out," "they would have drowned you at birth." This, among many other statements throughout the LP, paints the picture of rejection from a family. Likewise, the boy in Limbo searches for people like himself, only to find fear, hatred, and unmitigated destruction every time he encounters another human being.
There's a lot of imagery to suggest that the world of Limbo is a damned place where only the vile and wicked remain to suffer, but there are oddly serene moments that suggest this may simply be the waiting room before the boy's life begins anew. In "Pyramid Song," Yorke sings, "And we all went to heaven in a little rowboat. There was nothing to fear, nothing to doubt."

Man, I'd love it if Radiohead, or even a member of Radiohead, made the soundtrack to a game. We all saw how well Jonny Greenwood's soundtrack for There Will Be Blood turned out, after all…

Shades Of Gray: Limbo & Radiohead's Amnesiac [Gameological Society]

I liked Limbo a lot. I love Bill Watteron's timeless comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. And so I would do things, ungodly things, for this T-shirt from Nowhere Bad, which combines the two things in a manner so fantastic that I can't believe no one's done it before.

Fortunately, I don't have to do ungodly things—I just have to part with $12. Sold.

(Thanks for the heads-up, Tim.)

Limbo/Calvin and Hobbes T-Shirt [Nowhere Bad]

Limbo was one of my favorite games of 2010—a game that combined atmospherics, smart puzzle design and a wicked sense of humor into something dark, harrowing and distinctive.

It was a breakout hit for its developer, Playdead, who have recently been able to buy themselves back from their investors and become fully independent. To celebrate, Playdead has released a special limited boxed edition of Limbo that, while probably only for hardcore collectors, is still a very nice package.

Because I really like making videos of me holding stuff at my desk, I made this video to show what you'll get if you drop the $25 on the boxed edition. Yes, that is seriously what it looks like about 40% of the time out my window. (The other 60%, it's quite lovely!) The special edition comes with a DRM-free copy of the game for both Mac and PC, the soundtrack, some neat art cards, an extra steam key, a sticker, and 3D-glasses to use with its 3D mode. The presentation is a big part of the appeal—it's austere and simple, much like the game—no big plastic spider miniatures or anything.

This is definitely only a purchase for hardcore collectors—there's nothing essential here, and most people have already played the game digitally, which you can get for $15 cheaper. All the same, this is a cool package, and it's great to hear that Playdead rode Limbo's success to financial independence. More info on the limbo Special Edition can be found at the Limbo site.

Did you ever wonder what would have happened if the boy from Limbo had reunited with his sister? And say, gone on a safari in Africa?

The new video for deadmau5's "The Veldt" takes some serious inspiration from Playdead's 2010 Xbox hit, showing two little Limbo-style silhouetted kids going on a magical, mysterious adventure through a red-tinged savannah. They even mimic the limbs-akimbo leap from Limbo.

Fortunately, neither of the kids meets a violent end. Very cool.

(Thanks, Ferris McFly!)

I live out in the western part of San Francisco, and some mornings we get a lot of fog. "A lot" of fog to a San Franciscan is more fog than most people would even know what to do with.

In the summer, there's often a sort of "burn-off" in the morning hours, when the sun starts frying its way through the morning fog. The results can be… eerie, to say the least.

I took this picture out my window this morning, and more than one person remarked as to how much it looks like Limbo. Believe it or not, it's a color photo. And there are kind of a lot of spiders in my apartment…

Here's hoping I don't lose my sister out in that fog.

Today, Super Meat Boy, Braid and Lone Survivor were added to the fifth installment of the Humble Indie Bundle. Just when you think things couldn't get more awesome. [HumbleBundle.com]

Even by Humble Bundle standards, the Humble Bundle V contains some fantastic-ass games. Lookit that! Wow. They're all so great, in fact, that I'd be surprised if you haven't played pretty much all of them.

But still: Pay whatever you want for the terrifying and amazing Amnesia: Dark Descent, the hilarious and wildly creative Psychonauts, the dark and clever Limbo, and the lovely and incredibly soundtracked Sworcery, with freakin' Bastion thrown in as a bonus if you beat the average bid.

If you don't own even two of those games, this is a bargain… this is like, a great games all-star jam or something. The trailer above does a pretty good job of summing it up.

Perhaps best of all, all of the games come with their soundtracks, each of which is fantastic and two of which made last year's Best Game Music of 2011.

So: You probably have these games. Heck, you may play them regularly. But on the off chance that you don't, here's your chance go catch 'em all.

The Humble Indie Bundle V [Official Page]

Is there anything worse than killing a child? It's one of the most reprehensible things a person can do. Not just in real life: Along with Golden Retrievericide, child-murder is one of the most double-secret-ultrabad things a character can do in a movie, book or video game.

The murder of a child can be an incredibly potent moment in a story. But it can also be a hacky, cringe-inducing grasp at unearned maturity.

I played a good chunk of Prototype 2 over the weekend. It's a fun game—it's basically as though Crackdown met Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, and it's a lot more balanced and enjoyable than its predecessor. I like it, despite its rough edges and dumb writing.

But man, that dumb writing can be really dumb. The game takes place in "New York Zero," a quarantined city that has been infected with a horrible super-virus that turns people into all sorts of murderous monsters. The government bad guys are represented by a seemingly endless army of hilariously amoral Blackwatch soldiers and Gentek scientists. They're all so vile that they can't even stand each other—they're designed that way expressly so that you won't feel bad about ripping a thousand of them in half.

Early on, I picked up an audio collectible that let me listen to a recorded sound-byte that seemed designed to flesh out the world and share some of what had happened in this city. On the recording, a soldier at a checkpoint yells at a terrified civilian woman who's trying to pass.

"Why isn't he talking? Why isn't your kid talking?" the soldier barks.

"He's not infected!" his mother cries, panicked. "He has autism! That's why he can't respond!"

Cue sounds of the soldiers opening fire, and a woman screaming.

Look, I get it: New York Zero is a really shitty place to live. All the same, this was just… come on, guys. This was needless. It was basely manipulative, a grasp at relevance and maturity that serves only to make the game feel more crass and less mature.

The story starts out with some child-murder, as well—protagonist James Heller's wife and daughter getting brutally murdered, so, you know, we've already got one child-murder in the game. But okay, whatever—many a comic book origin story has done this, and while the whole "woman in fridge" thing is worn and hacky, in a game like this I don't really care.

The audio diary, however, was unnecessary. I'm not all pearl-clutching about it or anything; it was just... gross. We as a culture have got all sorts of things going on with autism at the moment as it is, but just blandly throwing a murdered autistic kid onto an audio diary seems like a pretty tasteless way of enhancing a game's fiction.

[Mass Effect 3 spoilers follow.]

I was reminded of how I felt when I saw BioWare's Mass Effect 3 presentation at E3—they showed the opening level of the game, leading up to the appearance and subsequent laser-blasting of the Only Child in the Universe.

I scoffed at the time, since my god did this feel manipulative—"Okay, time to get invested! See this kid? You like him. Yeah, you do. You think he's cute. Well now… watch him die."

The full game, of course, did more with the child than simply use him as a first-act motivation for Shepard. He became a (ham-fisted but still roughly effective) symbol of all that Shepard had lost on Earth, turning up in dream sequences and eventually making a return as the form that the Deus Ex Machina celestial presence took, Contact-style, to tell Shepard about the grand plan and give him or her that controversial final choice. Call it Chekov's little kid.

I'm one of those people who didn't hate the Mass Effect 3 ending, but I don't love the inclusion of the kid—it just felt so out-of-step with the rest of the trilogy. Couldn't we have had one of Shepard's dead allies be the one to haunt her dreams, and the one to turn up at the end and talk her through the master plan? Why did they have to write this kid into the third act?

For all its faults, Heavy Rain was one of the first games I've seen really go the distance in attempting to realistically portray the pain of losing a child. The fact that David Cage and company felt the need to use the game's shattering opening events to get us invested before ripping the other child away is perhaps less elegant. But still, points for effort.

Bioshock used child-murder as a central gameplay mechanic, and got away with it, largely because the entire game was built around that father-child/big daddy-little sister relationship. That relationship was further explored in Bioshock 2, and taken in an (I thought) even more interesting direction.

It's even possible to—gasp!—make the death of a kid a little bit funny. Limbo embraced sick thrills by making its little boy protagonist die over and over again in horribly violent (but silhouetted and vague) ways. The "Childkiller Perk" (shown at the top of this article) in Fallout is another example of kid-murder pushed to a ridiculous, offensive, and blackly funny place. (It probably wouldn't fly today, however: In the modern Fallout games, you can't kill kids at all.)

As Stephen pointed out a couple of years ago, we are in the midst of "The Daddening of Video Games." That feels truer now than it did in 2010. More and more developers are fathers, and it makes sense that they'd begin to write more stories of parenthood into their games. Think about the big-budget games you've played that are in some way or another about fatherhood. They are legion. (And while yes, plenty of women make games too, the "Mommening" of video games has yet to manifest itself to the same degree.)

It's a good thing that games are looking at our relationships to our kids, twisting and turning them to make statements that are worth making. Our fear for our kids, our desire to protect them, and even the awfulness of a child's death are all worthy topics for a game (or anything else) to discuss. That now-infamous Dead Island trailer promised us a level of emotional catharsis that it turns out we want very much. Its popularity and lasting cultural impact demonstrate that this subject matter is both potent and relevant. But it's live ammunition, particularly when a kid is actually being killed, and it's easy to handle it classlessly.

One of my favorite things about the new Walking Dead video game is the paternal, cautious relationship between protagonist Lee and his ward, a girl named Clementine.

I don't know how Lee and Clementine's story will play out, but if there comes a moment where she gets bitten and I have to decide what to do, I don't know how I'll handle it. That will be a mature, dark, and intense decision; Bioshock's harvest/save choice made devastatingly specific. It's just the kind of thing that I'd love to see a game do, as much as I'm dreading it actually happening. It would feel truly mature in a way that the hastily barked, recorded murder of an autistic kid never could.

I applaud games willing to take chances, who'll risk dealing with difficult material like the death of a child. But you've got to earn it, and keep it in a context that feels appropriate to the kind of game you're making.

Prototype 2 is good in plenty of ways. But a game that's at its best when I'm dive-bombing from a skyscraper and blasting tentacle-shockwaves into military compounds... probably doesn't need to start killing kids in an effort to get me to take it seriously.

It's amazing what you discover when you turn the lights up a bit, isn't it?

For more sick and twisted video game comedy, follow the link to Dorkly.com.

Call him a sell-out. Call him a suit. Call him too mainstream. It doesn't change the fact that Mario was jumping and saving imperiled females before it was cool.

Ah yes, those young, hip fellows at the bar, sitting together exuding an aura of inapproachability. No one can get close enough to point out that all of their lofty achievements have been achieved before, and even if someone manages to slip past their defenses they simply rewind time so the transgression never occured.

This makes me glad to be the sort of gamer that will joyfully sit next to anyone at the video game bar and start chattering away. It's not about who jumped first. It's that they jumped at all.