Trine is the best co-op game you’ll ever play by yourself.

Or, for that fact, it’s one of the better ones you’ll play with other people. It’s clever like that.

The concept is simple, and that’s part of the appeal; three generic adventurers (wizard, thief and warrior), all happen to be in the same place at the same time, and all touch the same magical gem, that just so happens to fuse their souls together, meaning the occupy the same body. What this means in terms of playing the game is that you can switch between all three instantly, and also let your friends play as one (or both) of the others. You then must work your way through dungeons, forests, forges and evil towers to allow the three to be freed, all the while killing skeletons and manipulating your environments to advance.

The skeletons die relatively easily, and the puzzles are similarly simple when on your own, either requiring the thief’s light step and grappling hook, or the wizard creating some cleverly placed blocks. For a £20 game, it’s a little on the brief side, allowing you to breeze through it within a few hours, regardless of difficulty for the most part. The most appealing thing about it is the versatility of the puzzles, each having presumably dozens of different combinations of boxes, jumps and runs to complete, with little more than a few see-saws, an unreachable point and some spikes for you to play around with. It’s never frustrating, and the liberal placings of checkpoints means you never have to redo a puzzle too many times.

The game really comes into it’s own when you play with a friend, though. The thief’s grappling hook is no longer the win button it was before, meaning you have to actually be crafty with how you approach each puzzle. The warrior, relegated to just killing skeletons in singleplayer, suddenly has to be used as soon as someone messes up, due to the way the death system works (three lives, each one a character. So die with the wizard, and you can only use the thief and warrior.). New strategies arise though, such as using the wizards levitation to manipulate objects he’s not standing on, but the other character is, meaning you can reach previously inaccessible locations, as well as create hovering bridges without having to secure them. I can only imagine the difficulty having three players presents, as you can’t even switch out which character you are. The puzzles which have previously seemed over simple suddenly become gargantuan undertakings, and you realise this is the game as the developers intended.

The visuals, too, need to be lauded. I’ve never seen a 2d platformer so gorgeous, with each incremental detail wonderfully animated and fleshed out. Mushrooms release puffs of spores when you land on them, and lava bathes everything around it in a wonderful warm glow. The skeletons are suitably brittle, collapsing in a heap of archaeology when boxes and fat men in armour fall on them. Within the limited 2d plane, this is as vibrant a world as could be imagined. Things go on in the background and foreground, lending illusionary depth and visual fidelity as you advance from left to right. Sounds, too, work wonderfully, each thwack of the sword and thunk of an arrow adding to the overall level of polish on exhibit.

Of course, there’s a blemish, present in the obscene difficulty spike of the last level, a classically misjudged change of pace to the enjoyable platformer. It’s hardly enough to tarnish the impression the game leaves, but it’s enough to frustrate and annoy, not least just questioning it’s presence in the game. In my eyes, lava should stay at a consistent level in all games, and never get airs above its station.

There are a few RPG-lite elements, allowing you to level up each character, adding arrows to each pull and release, or permitting you a few more planks before the earlier ones fizzle into nothingness. Allowing you to choose which skill to level up seems a little impotent to begin with, each choice forced upon you, but later on you have to make mildly game-changing choices on which skills to max out, which could act as a nice incentive to play through again, at least with a friend.

Similarly, there is treasure and loot, increasing health, energy and the like, with a few breaking from convention and providing some more uncommon benefits, like last minute health replenishment and resurrection abilities. They’re hidden throughout the level in chests, a pleasant reason to explore beyond arbitrary collectibles that have no effect on the game other than to feed the obsessive compulsive within you. Finally exploration is rewarded tangibly, the muted gleam of the metal reinforcement on the chest an incentive to push your logic bridgebuilding skills a little further, allowing you to reach the unreachable ledge.

The glaring flaw in all of this is a lack of internet multiplayer. It would perhaps be frustrating to both be fixed to the same camera, and maybe the potential lack of voice chat a few gaming luddites would incur would make getting past puzzles more than difficult, but at the same time, not everyone has an extra controller for their pc, and having two seems frivilous at best. So to play with three people locally seems slightly unattainable, something an internet connection should be able to solve. It’s more annoying because of the potential for fun, rather than having any adverse effect on the game as is, but it’s still an annoyance.

None of this does anything to ruin Trine, however. It’s a brilliant platformer that, while perhaps a little pricey right now, will no doubt be a steal when the price drops due to a sale or just over time. If you’ve got a spare controller for the PC, and a friend who’d be willing to put up with whereever your computer is kept, it’s certainly worth picking up. The single player potential is a little on the light side, but it doesn’t bore, and only ever excites and entertains, and I’m going to stop in case I use up my hyperbole quota for the month.

It's got Fantasy out the Ears, and that's just great.

Facebook is one of the most popular websites on the web, it brings together a diverse group of people, young and old, male and female, it is an ideal site for companies that want to get their name out to a massive audience. It should come as no surprise then that game developers are starting to move onto Facebook with Ubisoft being the latest company to do so. It is not just Ubisoft who are moving onto Facebook, PopCap have long had a presence on the social networking site with Bejeweled Blitz becoming a firm favourite amongst my friends. You can also find the EA/Positech mashup, SimSocial on the site.

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A very childish part of me hates it when other people succeed. That someone has fulfilled their dreams while I’m still sat in this bloody bedroom waiting for oodles of rejection letters in regards to my novel while, on the other side of the internet, some talented person is getting the praise he deserves. Over the years, this has led to me stubbornly ignoring some well-received indie title, only to curse myself later when I actually force myself to play it.

This is what happened with Time, Gentlemen, Please.

When Ben There, Dan That was released, I was still a reasonably active member of the AGS boards. I didn’t post much, but I lurked (as I believe in the phrase). I’d had a brief foray into offering my writing skills, and I was on the cusp of surrendering to the talent of the forum when Ben There, Dan That popped up in the completed games section. Needless to say, jealous-child-me decided that nothing that those people liked could be any good.

Turns out that I’m an idiot. I massive tool, really. I finally managed to ignore the childish little voice in my brain and played through Ben There, Dan That and Time, Gentlemen, Please back to back, and it was glorious.

I tell you this odd little story so you understand my mindset when I went into the game. I wanted to dislike it, so that my juvenile ignorance would somehow be justified, but after five minutes of BTDT (the acronyms are coming out now) I was hooked. But this isn’t a review of BTDT, that’s old news, this is for TGP.

It’s only fair to expect more from a game you have to pay for, even if that price is delightfully low. Zombie-Cow seem to have understood this, however, as they have indeed provided.

TGP follows on from the ending of BTDT but, thanks to a ‘previously on’ segment, you can be up to speed with the bizarre back story in about two minutes, which is nice. Then you are introduced to your British Bill and Ted, time travellers with wit and the odd bit of complete obliviousness. They are aware of their role as adventure game heroes, right down to the comments on constant burglary and item combination that are so central to the genre.

It is this genre awareness that makes TGP so good. Every step of the way, Dan and Ben are commenting on how normal it is to be collecting the severed arm of a corpse, or a snotty tissue, and they manage to make it believable. Of course I’ll need that tiny little dress, naturally the arrow from the floor counter on an elevator will come in handy down the road, obviously you’ll need a special tool to remove that one wonky nail in that board. The sneaky blighters manage to make you think outside the box in the way some of the older games never really managed.

Lucasarts, from who Zombie-Cow make no secret of drawing inspiration, have been guilty of creating some ludicrously hard puzzles with solutions that no normal human could ever have worked out. TGP is no less guilty of this sin, but cleverly avoids any real ire in this regard by practically spelling out the answer. For some of the more oblique puzzles, this is quite welcome, but there are moments where the helpful hints are going a little too far, and the characters themselves even comment on this. Still, in this case, it is much better to have the odd puzzle spoiled by overly chatty characters than the whole game spoiled by one annoyingly obtuse puzzle.

What it boils down to, really, is that TGP has some outstanding writing. One of the big problems with indie adventure games, as picked up on by Dan in-game, is that people won’t want to spend money to read text. That TGP has managed to completely smash this fear by genuinely witty and funny dialogue, characters that work and the odd smattering of independently hilarious lines, is a testament to how well Zombie-Cow know their audience.

It’s not all good of course, there are issues. I can’t remember what they were, but there definitely were some. Like all good games, mainstream or indie, the pros outweigh the cons so well that when you look back you can only see the good bits. In all seriousness, the only real problems come from the Lucasarts-inspired formula, and that’s only a flaw to people who don’t like adventure games, and they won’t be interested in this game anyway.

Ultimately, it’s all an issue of price. The Zombie-Cow website makes a fine point that, had they received a single pound from everyone who downloaded BTDT, they would be pretty wealthy about now, so charging for TGP seems natural. They want to make this into their livelihood, and I can’t blame them, but they can’t do that without some cash.

If TGP were your usual AGS production, the things that litter the forum, it would be hard to justify a price. BTDT was good, but I’m not entirely sure I could have recommended it had you been required to purchase it first. TGP is such an improvement on its predecessor however, and so much more professional in its presentation, that I feel fully justified in recommending it. The music is good, the writing is good, the art is good, the animation – well, isn’t, but it does the job amicably and is certainly no slouch.

What TGP is, is a game where Zombie-Cow have played to their strength, veiled their weaknesses and, above all, made a professional product worth a lot more than the £2.99 they are charging.

Guys, if there’s any justice in the world, you’re going to make a killing.

Go here and buy it now!

A must buy for any adventure gamer

Manhattan is burning. The streets are filled with crushed cars, dead men and the virus. There are outcroppings of resistance and control, both exercising their share of both. Neither side is worth fighting for, but then, neither is the side I’m on, if there even is one. I was forced under the delusion that I might be able to stop it, slow the spreading, but I’m just as useless as the military, and just as deadly as the virus they fight. I’m not sure who I am any more, or if I ever was anyone at all. It’s all gone to hell, and I’m the one that sent it there.

Prototype is Apocalypse in action. There’s no wasteland, no survivors desperately eking out their existence in a world that’s forgotten them. This is ground zero, where it all begins. It’s refreshing to finally be there when it happens, rather than the dozen or so recent games where you’re around years afterward. Refreshing isn’t apt, though. It’s more horrifying than anything, and that’s mainly because it seems as though it may just be all my fault.

Guilt in games isn’t a new concept. It’s not usually a scripted event, but whenever your men die in an RTS because you did something stupid, or your party members in an RPG die because you didn’t really assess the situation properly, it’s there, eating away at you. You can just reload, and often that’s the best thing to do, but Prototype doesn’t allow you such an easy out. Every time you fight, in the calm after the storm you’re presented with an ‘Operational Report’, a quick run down of four things; how much money in military assets you just destroyed, how many military personal were killed, how many infected were killed, and chillingly, how many civilians were killed. To begin with I thought all this was my doing, directly, that I had killed thousands upon thousands of civilians during my fights. Then I realised it wasn’t quite as horrendous as that, these were people the infected, military and I had killed, during out scuffle.

At first it didn’t bother me. The numbers were low, and the civilians tended to be pretty stupid anyway. They ran out in front of my tank. They were running screaming in the infected areas, even though there was safety just a few blocks away. Then, the numbers began to escalate, even though the infection rates were rising. 50% of the population were infected, and while the numbers of infected killed each fight were going up, the number of civilians killed were going right up with them. At least a thousand dead each time I had a major battle, and even though I hadn’t taken each life myself, if I hadn’t intervened they would presumably still be standing.

Prototype is an interesting game, in that it should be just about the pure, unadulterated fun of it. You’re a man who can turn his body into a living weapon, and consume the memories of anyone he killed, meaning flying helicopters, driving tanks, and firing guns are all easy to do. The problem is it takes this overly serious tone that’s utterly at odds with the violence on display. This should almost be a comedy, or at the very least a tongue-in-cheek look at the overly security conscious nation across the Atlantic. But instead you’re pushed into the body of a man who has no qualms killing anyone he thinks may have something to do with his predicament, even if it means killing harmless civilians who are just wandering down the street. By the end of Prototype I was feeling harrowed, and not just because the final boss is a crime against gaming.

If you want to get metaphysical about it, it’s a commentary on the increasingly frivolous attitude games, and more specifically gaming protagonists, have towards human life in games. It’s there, allowing you to be this obscenely powerful being, and then it’s slapping a sticker on your back telling you what a horrible person you are for playing the game the way it wants you to play. It’s the devil on your shoulder in cahoots with the angel, giving you a wonderful time, then telling you why you’re such a horrible person afterwards. It’s like a personal trainer giving the fat kid a cake, then forcing him to go weigh himself and realise what a horrific person he is.

By now, you’ll realise that I’m not going to be discussing the pros and cons of Prototype’s control system and side quests. The game has been out long enough for there to be any number of conventional reviews out there. Yup, everything that makes a game is there, and yeah, it all works to a certain extent. Some of the side quests are boring, and unnecessary, but hey, they’re there if you want them. The story makes little sense, and the graphics are a little shoddy. More importantly though, is that this game is fun, just not if you pay too much attention to what it’s perhaps trying to say.

The facts of how Prototype gets a message across make it all the more ambiguous. Radical have placed this game in the serious overtones of a conspiracy drama, along with the hyper violence and B movie climax. Mixed up in all that are various different themes and undertones that can be read into any which way, and may be entirely incidental, meant only for a cool number up on screen, or just filler between missions. My English teachers always used to ask me what the poet intended when writing the poem, but that was only to try to put us in a certain frame of mind; once the poem is out there, it only means what you take it to. Games are the same way, albeit oversaturated with developer coverage and hype telling you how to receive a game. That I’m taking Prototype to be an exercise to illicit player guilt is merely because that’s the reaction it got from me. Prototype made me feel guilty, and any emotion is better than none.

I have always loved the Russian language, I can’t speak or understand a word of it mind, I just find it a nice language to hear. That is helpful when playing this preview build of Paradox Interactive’s Majesty 2 because the majority of the voice overs are in Russian. I won’t dwell on this little occurrence apart from to say that not being able to understand what is going on all the time adds a certain sense of adventure to the game, and there is nothing wrong with that.

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In what might come as disappointing to news to Remedy fans, upcoming horror game Alan Wake may now not be emerging from the darkness on the PC at all. In a statement released today, the former Max Payne developers commented that they were working ‘exclusively’ on the 360 version of the title and that any simultaneous release with the 360 would not happen at this stage. Not wishing to leave their PC fanbase completely in the dark, Remedy said that they had a “deep heritage in PC gaming and would love to see a PC version available to its PC followers” but maintained that any decision on the fate of the PC version of the game would lie in the hands of publisher Microsoft Studios. This is all a slightly bitter pill to swallow for many PC gamers, especially for a game that was touted as a major posterboy for quad core processors back in 2006.

Looks like we may have to wait a while to get our being-chased-by-an-evil-JCB fix.

Oh God, I’m such a pervert.

Everyone who has read a Harry Potter book will naturally gravitate towards a specific character. Unfortunately, I started with the films before I read the books, which solidified the characters into the film versions. This has made Emma Watson/Hermione rather appealing. Or she was until I played this game.

For as long as the films have been going on, EA has been churning out Harry Potter games to varying degrees of success. It was quite easy at the start, the intended audience being of the age where the merits of the game aren’t too important so long as their favourite characters are present. As the audience matured so did the source material, however, and likewise the games have been forced to keep up.

Half-Blood Prince takes an unusual road into Harry Potter this time. The old games, to the best of my recollection, were centred around Harry wandering around Hogwarts and throwing magic at magical creatures while collecting cards and frogs and things, with the odd bit of Quidditch chucked in for good measure. Half-Blood Prince takes the essence of this and fragments it into three repeating minigames and an exploration section.

The first minigame is duelling. With wizard-on-wizard action (NO, bad me!) being rather central to this entry in the series, the game has attempted to emulate this by introducing an interesting take on combat. Doing away with the magical creatures, fights are now locked into a sort of face-off situation. It’s one-on-one and face-to-face like you would expect of a duel, and you’re tasked with dodging or deflecting your opponent’s spells, all while battering them into submission with ones of your own. It’s remarkably entertaining for something so fundamentally simple, and reasonably well animated. I was actually pleased, for instance, to find that the dodge move looks hilariously clumsy rather than a heroic dive, and knocking an opponent on their rear has the same realistic quality to the animation.

Unfortunately, the clever will soon realise that duelling is far too easy. Putting aside the fact that you will invariably have a lot more health than your opponent (if you’ve been doing the exploration sections like a good little fanboy/girl) there is a certain spell in your arsenal that will cock up everything. Expelliarmus is your knock-down spell and, while perfectly dodgeable, will send your opponent into a splayed heap on the ground, from which they will take a good while to extricate themselves. All the while you can continue to pound them with Stupefy, or charge it up for massive damage, and the fight will probably be over before they find their feet again. You don’t have to do it, but why wouldn’t you?

Minigame two is potions, and I hate it. I don’t hate it because it’s a bad minigame, it is in fact probably the best one. You follow instructions on the screen, adding various wizardly ingredients to your broth, heating it, stirring it and whatnot until it goes the right colour. It’s a nice little balance of accuracy and speed. The reason I hate it, however, is because of the lack of perspective. Until I played this game I never realised how hard it must be to have one eye. The depth perception in the game is preposterous, and I was constantly missing the pot over and over again, which led to many explosive failures and utterances of ‘I swear this has never happened to me before’ (stop it!). The only flaw in that specific minigame, and it more or less killed it for me.

Thirdly, we have Quidditch. This is a very simple obstacle course really, flying through star-shaped gates that pop up as the game ushers you around the pitch. Occasionally you will have to dodge the grandstands or smash into some young upstart who’s tickling your snitch, but it’s mostly about accuracy. It works well enough, decent enough controls, but it does sometimes feel as if the sections are a little too long.

And, really, that’s the whole game. You follow the story of the film, I suppose, but you always manage to stumble into these three games, sometimes even taking up the optional challenges scattered around the castle. They are all stuck together back the aforementioned exploration bit, which rewards you with upgrades for scouring the castle in search of shields. It would be a nice distraction from the main quest if the castle weren’t so hard to navigate. Thankfully, Nearly-headless Nick is always on hand to direct you back to your story node at a simple key press, a node that will always be too far away for my liking.

There is, however, a rather large issue that underlies the game and, while not actually game breaking, is really rather annoying. Half-Blood prince is just a Wii game with a higher resolution. This is immediately apparent, for example, in the controls. With the exception of walking, everything is done with the mouse. That’s not too bad for the most part, it works well with the Quidditch for instance, but there are moments where it is very obviously designed for a pointy-wand-thing with an accelerometer. Potions is the main offender, but duelling gets a smattering too. Pouring various ingredients into the pot is done via the WASD keys, whereas in the Wii this is done by making a pouring motion with the remote. This allows for a more precise way of adding ingredients that you just don’t get with the PC controls.

The graphics are noticeably Wii-ish too. Although I dare say they would be good on Nintendo’s little white plinth, on the PC the characters look like strange plastic sex dolls (oh now, honestly!) brought to life by some magic darker than even Voldemort possesses. The eyes are lifeless, the hair strangely cemented and the whole school seems to be staffed by pubescent robots in wax skin. The characters look like their real-world counterparts in the same way the exhibits at Madam Tussauds do: technically identical but utterly lifeless.

If you’re a Potter fan, however, you won’t care. If you can identify which character is which, that will probably be all that matters. The minigames, while repetitive and a little frustrating at times, are genuinely fun at first, although the more hardcore gamers will get bored quick. However, ultimately, this game cannot be held to the same level as more polished titles like The Sims or Call of Duty or anything remotely along those lines. What this is, plain and simple, is a cash-in.

Does it work? Yes, actually. For a Harry Potter game it is well put together and fun, just don’t expect that fun to last forever. Of course, you’ll only buy the game if you’re a big fan of the series anyway, so you won’t care. It doesn’t break the characters, it doesn’t fly in the face of established canon, it’ll fill the hole it has been designed to fill. It’s not going to win over fence-sitters, but the die-hard fan will find something to keep them occupied.

Good enough for fans.

(Screenshots have had to be borrowed, my bloody sister thieved the game disc before I could take my own.  Sorry!)

Just a quick one here; Windows 7 is now available for pre-order for the wonderfully reasonable price of £44.97 for the Home Edition, or £89.97 for the Professional Edition, rather than paying £149.99 and £219.99 respectively after August 9th. At those prices, you might as well buy now even if you don’t intend to install yet until more patches and updates are released for it. Read the full story