I started playing Trine at 2:30am in the haze of a half awake delerium, but it held my interest for a good hour or so before my body cracked the whip on me and I sauntered off to bed. I'll admit though, the intro was a great way to ease a new player like me into the game. The graphics are crisp, the controls are responsive and simple, and the overall feel is quite smooth. Basically, the story starts off with a thief entering this shrine to steal this crystal, but when she touches it, it freezes her in place. This same thing happens to a knight and a wizard (though they come to the crystal for different reasons), and once all three of them are there, they disappear. The intro lets you play as each of these characters as they get to the crystal, giving you a crash course in the character's specific abilities. The Knight can fight with the sword and block with the shield, the Thief can use a cool hookshot thing and fire a bow, and the Wizard can levitate objects, and create a block if you draw a square with your mouse (lol?). So it's like a tank, dps, and... mage, I guess, since you collect health from dead skellies.
Speaking of, I was really taken in by the graphics. The scenery is in 3D, sometimes obscuring my view but never at key times. There's a lot of nice detail to it, like little bugs flying from flower to flower, pollen reacting to being disturbed, even the sound gets more intense as a tree passes in the forefront.
Though I haven't played through the whole thing, I've played enough to know that I'll eventually want to get there. The narration overlays the gameplay, which at times makes it feel like I'm playing a extremely cool picture book. The story is admittedly simple, but I wasn't really expecting much. Besides, the amount I got out of this game for the price I paid is enough to trump any criticism. Okay, well the Knight's voice is pretty annoying. But seriously, I paid 6 bucks for some McDonalds last night and all I got from that was a depressing and greasy feeling in my stomach.
On a final note, the game has a multiplayer portion that I have yet to sample, so get on Steam and spend 5 bucks!
While you can't run a show for twenty years without repeating yourself, you can still find ways to tell the same stories with different characters and outcomes. Just as well, I really have enjoyed the writers efforts to keep the stories interesting to people by means other than storytelling--stuff like commentary on recent events, social fopas and the like. Tonight's episode, "Chief of Hearts" offers a stellar performance from unexpected characters while putting a new wardrobe on a well aged story.
The A-story is the strongest, and centers around a friendship between Chief Wiggum and Homer after our hero offers the Chief a free sandwich. I'll admit, I've made friends with people for lesser things, so I guess I can sympathize. I was hyping this episode in my mind these past few days because I've been finding a lot of the recent Chief Wiggum lines to be hilariously dumb, and I feverishly dig that backward and sideways logic that is bounding about the comedy world these days.
Bart fills the rest of the episode with a less than impressive (I've used that phrase like three times today) B-story where he gets addicted to a combination of Pokemon and Digimon. Marge gets the wrong impression from Bart's secrecy and thinks he's selling drugs. So, yeah, another "drugs aren't for selling" campaign. It wasn't really that heavy, though, and served more as a Mother/Son bonding opportunity than it did social commentary. Still, the Homer/Chief story took up most of the episode and it was strong enough to keep the episode together.
6/10
These last two weeks have been good and bad. I got a new job, which I still haven't decided whether I should put it in the good pile or the bad one. The job is the same as last time, but it has new management so things might be better than they were before. I spent the last two weeks doing basically zip, and I loved each day of it. All my TV-watching habits were expelled out of my system in a wonderful week of nothing. This is the last day of this wonderfulness, so I thought I would start to get back on track.
I started watching Dexter a few years ago, mostly because I enjoyed Michael C. Hall's narration and the overall delicate style of such a ruggedly brutal show, but the solidity of the show comes directly from the evolution of Dexter's mind. From the first season to now, it's clear that things have changed for him. He has a family, is married, and has a thousand more responsibilities than he can usually handle. It's hard to make a sociopath grow as a character, in fact it's probably one of the most difficult character traits to try to develop. The main device of being a sociopath is not being able to register emotions. Imagine having to act as a character who has literally zero emotions (okay, that's changed a little too), but also has to fake emotions to make himself seem real. That's gotta be tough.
While I stopped watching mainly because there were no new episodes at the time I finished the second season, I think a lot of it had to do with finding a way to make a better season than that one. Season two was incredible in a million different ways. Doakes and Lila were perfect foils for Dexter, and their parts in the second season will always be some of the best conflicts in the Dexter saga.
Sadly, the third season was a major disappointment for me. Jimmy Smits plays the main antagonist, and I gotta say that I just didn't like looking at this guy's face. I didn't believe him when he was angry, and had no sympathy for him when he was sad, and whatever was in between wasn't so great either. I hate watching shows where a character that you start of not liking (not because he's an antagonist, but just because the character doesn't work) becomes one of the main people in the show. I really wished they dealt with him better than they did.
It wasn't just that, though, it was the general story. For the first time, Dexter let's someone into his personal world. This surprised me in its delivery more than its content. It felt like it happened way too fast, like I didn't know Miguel Prado well enough to have him actually take part in Dexter's killings. Then by the end, it doesn't really feel like a logical resolution to everything. Anti-climactic, if anything.
Truth is, I didn't even want to watch the fourth season. I had about six days left in my amazing week of nothing before I had to start working again, and I wasn't really up for wasting another couple days on a eventual waste of time. I did it anyway because of the raving reviews I've read on the fourth season. Thankfully, they were right. The fourth season had an amazing first few episodes, setting in motion the main plotlines for the entire series in brutal and shocking ways.
John Lithgow gives an amazing performance as the Trinity killer. Like a lot of other people, I laughed when I heard he was going to play a crazy murderer, but that's because I've really only seen him on 3rd Rock from the Sun and playing his guitar for kids on the Treehouse Network. As crazy as the guy gets, the scene I remember the most is one of the first ones we see him in where he murders a woman in a bathtub. Creepy shit, and I get shocks of pain thinking about that cut he makes on the ephemeral artery. Ick.
Though I've given away a few spoilers so far in this post, I refuse to give away the ending. The last 50 seconds of 'The Getaway" are a complete twist, throwing the series into a whole new direction. They even made several different endings as to not let a leak be anywhere near reliable.
The series doesn't pick up again until next September, so we have a while yet until we get to see how Dexter deals with his new predicament. In the coming weeks, expect to see more posts. Sunday's include a talk about the new Simpsons episode, Monday's will have a review of the latest House M.D., as well as a blurb on the new Parks and Recreation episodes that start airing again on the 29th of this month.