My Games Design

First off, I need to say thanks to my mate Paul for sharing his PS3 with me over the last couple of weeks - I promise I will get one myself but it's going to have to wait till after Christmas... So first, we played Trine (from Finnish developers Frozenbyte and you can also get it on PC ) And it was good. A physics based action/platformer/puzzle game? That you can play with up to two other players?! Awesome!!! It looked pretty too (see video above). I have to admit not really caring about the storyline so much, but I did love the gameplay. Especially when we had to stop and think about what we needed to do next. I seemed to gravitate towards the thief most - I liked the fact she used arrows (so I didn't have to get too close to enemies) and I guess I just like jumping! I kind of left the wizardy stuff to the more experienced player as he seemed to have a good handle on when to do what but we would sometimes switch depending on what was going on. All in all, Trine did a brillian

Go and play Machinarium . It not only looks good - it's set in a sort of rusty cute looking robot world - but manages to engage without a single word of dialogue being spoken (at least not as far I've played it). It's an independent point-and-click puzzle solving adventure without the tedious dialogue. Don't get me wrong, I love the narrative and humour of the Monkey Island games and I've even been playing the new episodic ones but it's the pretty much the same formula,though it is done well. But you can also get that wrong - like with A Vampyre Story . Czech designers Amanita Design have done something different here and have managed to communicate a storyline through the use of thought bubbles and (pretty cool) drawings alone. Not only that but they've included a really clever little mechanism for getting help within the game. I think I've mentioned this before, but I do use walkthroughs when I get stuck. There are just points where I don't h