The First Hour

It should be little surprise for anyone who knows me that my most exciting development from E3 was the unveiling of Child of Eden. Kept hidden for two years in development, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, Q? Entertainment and Ubisoft (with a little help from Joel McHale) announced the title to the world to start off the Ubi conference.  Mizuguchi took the lead, presenting a demo level paired with the 360's Kinect motion capture system. While most detailed information on the title is still sparse and hard to find, bits and pieces of information are beginning to sift around, most of which sound quite promising. Here is what we know so far...

Today's first hour review is for Trine, a unique sidescroller brought to us by Frozenbyte. Having known nothing about the company before now, Wikipedia tells us that they are a Finnish developer, founded in 2001 and consisting of around 20. They previously made two games for PC, Shadowgrounds and Shadowgrounds Survivor (apparently FPS with RPG hybrid elements).

Their latest game, Trine, was released in 2009 for PC and later PS3 (with 360 version seemingly cancelled). I became drawn to the game by a cheap price on Steam along with pretty screenshots and a bit of positive word-of-mouth.

People generally sit down and play games for fun and entertaining experiences. In contrast, they generally only learn math out of necessity or for financial desires. Rarely does "math" and "fun and entertainment" interact to any significant degree, as shown by the vast amount of the population who despises the various forms of math, if not outright sucking at them. Certainly we can find math in some gameplay, given say a choice between various equippable items, but modern games readily simplify the process, giving clear comparisons if not outright displaying the superior choice. Games are certainly rooted in math, down to the programming, but players are absolved of such things, witnessing only the shiny results. However, a time and place exists for such contradictions as math and fun, and Number Munchers is just that contradiction.

This Psychonauts Audio-Visual (half) Experience contains and displays some of the vibrant, shiny, brilliant, and clever content that exists throughout the game.  Unfortunately, due to a variety of bugs that caused me crashes, missing graphical layers, strange periodic muted dialogue, control irregularities, memory leaks, and crippling fps drops, I did not have the heart to continue or even play the game for significant time each session.  But there is no question that the game itself has heart and some clever, varied visual design, thus here we are...