Trine to Make Some Headway

The game I'm trying to polish off most actively at the moment is Trine. I have to mention up front that it's a real bummer you can't walk away from the game at a checkpoint mid-level and have it save your progress. You have to begin again at the beginning of a level every time you play. I don't quite get why this is the case. It's not that the levels are too long, it's just a bit of an oversight.

Aside from that little business, Trine is a great game. It's got nice and inventive platform levels based around a solid physics engine and the various abilities of your three-fold player character. The graphics are beautiful, and the art is colorful and attractive, if full of unimaginative stock fantasy trappings. The platforming is more in the realm of action-based than puzzle-based, and largely dependent on your gaming the physics system--which can be a little fiddly--but that is part of the fun. I'm given to understand that people have been able to play all the way through the game with each of the three player character aspects and only that aspect (wizard, thief, knight), but for me half of the fun is rotating between the three to find the most efficient or feels-like-cheating way to advance. I'm just to the start of the 14th of 15 levels, so I'm pretty near the end. I've heard that the last level is nightmarishly hard, but then I've also heard that it was patched at a later date to be more reasonable. I'll cross that chasm when I come to it. Maybe it will involve swapping to the wizard to place a floating platform in the air, and then swapping to the thief to grapple onto the platform and swing over to the other side.

I have to admit that I almost picked up Trine 2 when it was on sale for $7.50 this past weekend on Steam, but I'm trying to stick to a policy of not buying a game unless I am ready to play it right then and there. As you can see, my backlog needs trimming. Great trimming. Plus, after I finish Trine, there is a bonus DLC level I'll need to play through before I can even contemplate playing the sequel, which will without a doubt be available for $5 or less before I run out of other games to play.

I guess my second-place focus game of the recent days has been Freespace 2, though I haven't played it in a week or so. I'm up to the 6th or 7th mission, about half way through the first of three acts to the game. It's cool, so far. I do kind of miss the open and independent nature of an X series game, but this is a completely different animal. It's Ace Combat in space. Space Combat. It's got a pretty involved storyline, too, so I should probably pay more attention and focus a little more on it at some point.

For the rest of the time I've been gaming lately, it's been all multiplayer stuff: TF2 just for shits and giggles (what a great game), Tribes: Ascend to continue to see what it's all about (I'm kind of into it, kind of lukewarm on it, thus far), and a whole hell of a lot of Dota 2.

I'm at 42 hours of Dota played now, according to Steam. I've been trying to learn to play Bounty Hunter, who works much better as a ganker than a lane pusher/farmer, as I've been discovering. I had one of the most demoralizing games I've ever had 2 nights ago, but I checked out a couple of video guides to the hero and turned in a pretty decent performance in a game last night, though we still lost to a team with a well-fed Lycanthrope. It's still a lot of fun, even losing, as long as you feel like you have a handle on the action and strategy. I think that, like anything worth doing, playing Dota is worth learning properly, though it takes effort and perseverance, and a willingness to accept defeat and learn from it.

Falling Behind

Man, it's like I haven't played anything over the last couple of weeks. Well, that's not exactly true. I did manage to get through the Portal 2 co-op mode with a friend. That was pretty fun. I tooled around in Portal 1 some, also. I guess Valve wasn't doing Steam Cloud back when I played through it on PC the first time, because I didn't have any saves or anything for it when I loaded it back up. That was well over two years ago, though. I'm not sure when they began the cloud thing. I need to finish up a playthrough to unlock all the challenge rooms and such. I'll bet my playthrough of Half-Life: Source is lost, too. Steam shows me having played 5 hours of that game, but I finished it, so something is off, there. Maybe they started tracking times when I was midway through.

So the resolution games for the last couple of weeks have been Sniper Elite, which I played about an hour of--pretty cool so far, very deliberate--and Trine, which I played about 45 minutes of just last night--also pretty cool, but no saving mid level? WTF? I'll need to replay almost all of that level, now.

I've been sick and otherwise indisposed lately, so I haven't played anything else but some Team Fortress 2. It's the perfect game to mess around in and kill off a couple of podcasts. Plus, I've been meaning to put more time into it forever to try out all the classes really well and to get a bunch of items. I found my second Gunslinger arm for the Engineer yesterday. I already have a vintage one though, so someone hit me up if you want a trade!