Last night I was on the prowl to try something new. All my buddies were out of town or playing old games (like Heroes of Might and Magic 5 – wtf?), so I was prowling Steam to find something worth playing. I wanted something fun and cheap just to amuse me for the evening. I didn’t want to pay for a full-featured expensive game.

After surfing the categories on the Steam store for awhile, I happened across the demo for Trine. It looked pretty and I couldn’t argue with the price: free.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXILzS03HCo&hl=en&fs=1&]

Trine is a side-scrolling physics puzzle game that incorporates combat and item collection. The player solves physics puzzles to advance through the level, collecting items, experience, and equipables along the way. The puzzles (at least in the demo) involved stacking blocks, seesaw manipulation, and grappling hook movement. The combat is hack and slash ala the original Prince of Persia.

The story of Trine is pretty simple – three fantasy different characters, a wizard, a rogue, and a knight, all place their hands on the same magical artifact (the Trine) at once. The artifact melds all three together into the same body and they take off on an adventure to figure out how to undo the meld. Of course, all three have separate motivations and its fun to hear them argue from inside the same body. The story is told through voiced dialogue and a voiced narrator. It all feels being like told a fairytale, which is charmingly effective.

The player is able to switch between the three characters at will, using their individual strengths to navigate the puzzles. The wizard is able to summon crates and levitate objects. The rogue is able to attack with her bow and use her grappling hook to swing from most overhead surfaces. The knight is able to attack with his sword and defend himself with his shield. Because some of the functionality seems to overlap, the puzzles can often be navigated in multiple ways, with multiple solutions. The player can choose to weight down one end of a seesaw with a crate summoned by the wizard, or pull one end down with the rogue’s grappling hook, or bash it with the knight sword to set it spinning. And so on.

Trine is lushly detailed, with beautiful graphics. Although the levels are 2D sidescrollers, the illusion of 3D is provided by 3D background graphics. Ruins, forests, and other environments look wonderful, and encourage the fairytale concept. The animations for the characters are solid and characters react well to their environment. I only saw skeleton enemies in the demo, but I hope to see more enemies in the full version.

Sound is decent and all the expected sound effects are there. But the best part of the sound, by far, is the voice acting, particularly the voice of the narrator. It gives the feeling of playing through a fairytale, which seems the exact thing the creators were trying to achieve. Of course, the pacing of the sound is broken if the player takes awhile to transverse some of the more difficult puzzles, leaving a player a bit surprised when the narration kicks back on after reaching a checkpoint.

The difficulty of the demo wasn’t that high, even on its highest setting, though I expect this to ramp up as the game goes on – that’s what good platformers do.
The difficulty, if any, was related to the controls, which took a little playing to get used to. Trine is going to be offered on both the PC and the PS3, and it’s obvious that Trine was built more for the console crowd than the PC gamer in mind. The game does offer gamepad mapping, but I didn’t try it – my gamepad is buried in the closet somewhere. As a PC gamer I expect to be able to play with my keyboard and mouse. The player uses WASD to move, the mouse buttons to trigger the two functions of each character, and the mouse pointer to aim things like the grappling hook. 1,2, and 3 switch between the three characters. Sometimes the controls are a little clunky, especially for the rogue’s grappling hook.

The best thing about Trine is figuring out interesting ways to play with the physics and navigate the puzzles in multiple ways. Trying each puzzle in a variety of ways awards the player with access to hidden areas – the knight might be able to get past one puzzle with some difficulty, but the rogue might be better suited, using the physics momentum gained to rocket up to a hidden area. Or the wizard could place a crate to brace a seesaw and the knight could run up it, ready to attack the skeletons waiting up top. Overall, the game rewards rapid character changes and playing to each characters strengths.

The joys of Trine are threefold: the graphics, the physics, and the delightful manner the story is told. The drawbacks stem from the awkward controls, at least with a standard keyboard and mouse setup, and a worry that the puzzles won’t be as interesting as they could be. Because many of the puzzles are created to be circumvented by more than one character, I’m afraid some of them might end up repetitive and watered down. Only the full version will tell.

Trine is set to launch in July on Steam, priced at $30, which could be steep or cheap depending on how long the full game is. The gameplay is fun, and as long as there is enough content to justify a full 30 bucks, I’ll be buying it on the day it’s released.

Since I started working fulltime, my pockets are fuller, but the pace of my writing has vastly slowed. Primarily it’s due to time constraints. The six hours I used to spend each day sitting at my keyboard typing and staring out the window have dwindled to a mere one or none. Sometimes I am able to catch a few minutes at work, in between projects, to tap out a few minutes worth of words, but all in all I’ve dwindled from 10k words a week to a meager 2k.

It’s unfortunate, but I like being able to pay my bills. The jury’s still out on whether I’ll be able to keep pace without writing as much as I’d like to (need to?) for long. Every day I feel like the other shoe is going to drop. And it’s a long way down.

But it’s not just time that’s constricted me lately. I’m not stuck in my current project – I know where I am and where I’m going, but the words just come out wrong. My brain feels thick and empty.

At least, until tonight. And I know why. I just always forget.

I’ve barely read anything lately. I’m about to move (Tuesday) and so I’ve been putting off going to the library. But a buddy of mine recently convinced me to borrow one of his books, the first in a series he’s been trying to get me to read for months, The Dresden Files – Storm Front by Jim Butcher.

I put it off because, as I mentioned in a previous post, I have an intense distaste for series and universes, especially for those that tend toward the episodic. You won’t hear me change my tune here – I’m only halfway through the book, and though I always force myself to continue through to the end once I’ve started a book, it’s just as bad as I thought it was going to be.

Aside from occasional bits of punnery and humor which have made me chuckle, the book is poor, for the simple reason it’s written with words and not with imagination. There are certain stock phrases that writers tend to use when they are attempting to describe a scene or a character, phrases that work in language but not as visual descriptions. These phrases have become shorthand, shortcuts, for writers, and they betray that the writer is not visualizing the scene while composing it. Rather, the writer is shortcutting straight to words.

The line that gave this realization to me was Butcher’s description of a character named Morgan, a man with “boyish good looks.” A stock phrase, “boyish good looks” doesn’t convey any fresh image in the reader’s mind. It tells me that Butcher wrote the words but did not picture the scene. What exactly are boyish good looks? Yes, if you focus on them, try to dig into the words, you can realize a crude image in your mind’s eye, but more likely you’re trying hard to play devil’s advocate to my assertions, rather than actually being able to claim that “boyish good looks” conveys to you a descriptive and interesting character portrait.

I admit, Storm Front is Butcher’s debut and must be taken as such. But this type of thing conveys to me the type of writer he is, one who begins with a story and dry words, rather than beginning with visualizations of the scenes and images. He doesn’t find “the hole in the paper” as Stephen King’s character Paul Sheldon in his book Misery would say.

However, the critique aside, Butcher has afforded me another reminder of what I’ve known and been told for a long time, that one cannot expect to constantly write without constantly reading. As much as I dislike Butcher’s first novel, after only reading half of the short tome, already the words flow much easier through my fingertips.

Reading is brain fuel for the writer, as if by typing out words on the page, a gastank in the mind is drained with each keystroke. And even by reading words that don’t particularly ignite my interests, the tank in my mind is fuller than it was before I started.

It’s bookfuel. I always forget that. And always remember it again after I get stuck somewhere and remember to just read for awhile before returning to the keyboard.

Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say. Bookfuel. Remember it. As for me, I’m returning to Butcher’s cheap newsprint pages. It’s saccharine schlock, but maybe a sugar rush was just what I needed.

-m.

When left home to go to college I fit everything inside my old ‘95 green Ford Contour.

Now, seven years later, I’m moving again. Sure, I’ve moved four other times between leaving for college and now, but this time seems different. It’s the first time I’m moving into a place that I’m actually excited about: a loft in downtown Des Moines – it’s a beautiful place, polished concrete floors, granite counters, old brick walls, soaring windows, vaulted ceilings, a nice view. I’m excited.

But, good god: moving. My girlfriend and I have so much stuff. I know that two people will always have more stuff than just one, but we’ve rented a fourteen-foot truck and I’m a little worried it’s not going to be enough.

We aren’t people who collect things, either, but stuff tends to accumulate somehow. I can count the number of DVDs we have on my fingers. We don’t own any CDs anymore – all our music is digital. So are most of our movies. I try to keep my video game media as digital as I can, but sometimes I can’t bring myself to throw out all those pretty boxes.

But as I was packing my seventh box of books last night, I took a break to look into the Amazon Kindle and Sony E-Reader. I’ve looked at them before, but I couldn’t help but wish for digital books while taking a break from packing my physical ones. I’m not ready to take the plunge yet, but I’ll probably be there soon, once the Digital Rights Management gets a little more lax. After reading recently about the hidden number of downloads some Kindle books have, I’m not at all eager to spend money in that arena.

But, ebooks are a big enough topic that I could devote an entire post to them, and I don’t want to get too sidetracked. This post is about stuff and the digital movement and ebooks are only one aspect of the whole thing.

I have to admit, I don’t understand physical collectors, no matter what they collect – DVDs, books, CDs, angel-shaped ceramics, pets or anything else. I’m not talking about stuff in general – I have stuff that I use everyday, but collections, that’s what I don’t quite get.

Going paperless has been a business goal for a number of years and many people have almost gotten there. But I advocate taking the paperless movement even further for all types of media – movies, music, books, and any other information that can be displayed on a screen or played through a speaker.

Ideally, I’d like to get rid of all my books, my last few DVDs, my video game boxes, and everything else. All I want is a desktop, a laptop, a phone, a television, a ebook device, a mobile gaming device, and maybe a console system. I don’t want to own any of the media for those devices. I want to download it all, or have it available online. I’m sick of stacks of books, movies in various formats, game boxes, and all the rest. I want everything digital. I’m sick of stuff.

Of course, this isn’t my idea – it’s already happening. Steam, iTunes, and other digital distributors are taking off. I just want it to happen faster. But when it comes to changing culture, it always comes down to cold card cash.

As a dirty example: there’s a reason that organic farming and other pro-environment causes haven’t taken off (a digital lifestyle could be looked at as a pro-environment cause), and it’s simply about money. You can talk the advantages (for the land, the consumer, and the farmer) of organic farming until you’re blue in the face and the customer will nod her head and go along with you, until she gets to the cash register and notices all her organic veggies cost a dollar or two more.

Instead, people try to change cultural expectations with awareness drives and guilt-mongering articles and all that other touchy-feely crap that doesn’t do a goddamn thing. Change the money, friends. Give organic farmers a tax break. Raise the taxes of non-organic farms. Lower the price at the cash register. Do that and everyone will be organic within a few short years.

The same thing needs to happen to encourage a digital lifestyle. Change the money. The average consumer isn’t stuff-phobic like me – the average consumer likes to own and collect stuff. Talking up the cultural advantages of a digital lifestyle aren’t enough. Change the cash.

Ebooks, digital movies, and digital music should be half the price of a physical copy. At least. Cheaper is better. In fact, the cheaper the price point, the more people will buy it. If nothing else, the iPhone App Store is teaching us that. Put up a game up at five bucks and twenty people will buy it. Drop the price to 99 cents and a hundred people will buy it. In the end, you make more by moving more units. And it’s not like digital sales cost you a dime. The old laws of supply are demand are thrown on their heads when supply is digitally infinite.

Of course, there are disadvantages to the digital movement – DRM is a problem, especially if a company goes out of business. Internet access is also an issue – if you don’t have it, you’re stuck. But those problems are being worked out. DRM seems to be losing – music can be bought DRM free and so can some video games. Web access is becoming more and more widespread – people are getting connected everywhere.

It’s an exciting time, but I wish it would speed up so I could purge as much stuff as possible. Cash incentives would help with this. So would offering consumers more value instead of more packaging, discs, paper, and other stuff.

I want to get rid of the rest of my stuff. In the meantime, you’ll find me cramming it into a truck, sighing, and dreaming of a digital lifestyle.

-m. out

p.s. come help me move. I’ll give you some stuff.